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CLACTON DECIDES!
The by-election gameshow. You are Count Binface. Your opponent is N. Porrage: a man with a pint, a blazer and a plan for the tide. Twelve questions from the good people of Clacton, four answers each, one crowd to win over. Land the bingo answer and the hall erupts. Get it wrong and they will let you know.
Click the game first so it can hear your keyboard · · On a phone, turn it sideways
HOW IT WORKS
Each question comes from a journalist, a local, or occasionally a seagull. Both candidates get a hand of four possible answers, and you choose which one comes out of your mouth. The crowd decides everything. One answer in every hand is the bingo answer: the thing this particular room has been waiting all night to hear. Find it and the acclaim meter jumps, the bingo caller shouts, and confetti comes down on a leisure centre floor that has seen better decades.
| Reaction | What it means | Acclaim |
|---|---|---|
| HOUSE! | The bingo answer. The room is yours. | +18 |
| Cheers | A solid, sensible, popular answer. | +10 |
| Murmurs | They are not sure. Neither are you. | +2 |
| Boos | You have said the quiet part loudly. | -10 |
Three rounds: Local Matters, The Big Issues, then a quickfire finale worth double points where the clock is halved. After the last closing statement the returning officer reads out the result, complete with vote shares and a rank that runs from a humiliating recount all the way up to a total binslide.
Two ways to play
Against the Porrage bot at one of three difficulties, from a man who has clearly had a few, up to a version who smells blood and finds the bingo answer far too often. Or hand the keyboard back and forth in two player hot seat, which is the recommended way to fall out with a friend or relative. There is also a Daily Hustings: the same set of questions for everybody on a given day, so you can compare your margin with someone else's.
WHY THIS GAME EXISTS
Because a real by-election was called in Clacton, and the field ended up with a record number of candidates after the main parties decided to sit it out. Among them stood Count Binface, a satirical space warrior with a bin on his head and a manifesto that includes capping the price of a 99 Flake at 99p and building at least one affordable house. When the actual news is already that shape, you do not need to invent much. You just need to add a crowd, a scoreboard and some organ music.
The game leans into a very specific British feeling: the faded seaside town, the leisure centre with the sticky floor, the gameshow set built in 1994 and never redecorated, the bunting that has been rained on. It is affectionate, mostly. Clacton is the setting for the joke, never the target of it. The targets are the men in blazers who turn up once a campaign, say something inflammatory about the sea, and leave.
Parody notice. N. Porrage and every other character in this game are fictional caricatures written for comedy. Count Binface is a real satirical candidate created by Jon Harvey, referenced here in the tradition of political cartooning. This game is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any real person, party or candidate.
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