schedule1-3 minutes per round, ideal for repeated quick sessions.
Learning curve
trending_upEasy to pick up with intuitive swipe controls, but increasingly challenging as tickets launch faster, arrive in tighter clusters, and demand precise stamp-only slicing.
Built for
groupsCasual arcade fans who love swipe-to-slash games, anyone interested in Taiwanese culture and current events, and players looking for a quick reflex challenge with a unique civic twist.
A Public-Sector Game for Governments and Cities
A 60-second slicer that turned Taiwan's amusement-tax abolition into something citizens actually share.
Taiwan abolished its 60-year amusement tax on movies, concerts, theater, circus, and sports tickets on April 24, 2026. Three days later we shipped Tax Slicer, a 60-second Fruit-Ninja-style game where players slice real ticket categories at their actual former tax rates. A playable case study for governments, ministries, and city offices that want to land a policy in the public memory instead of a press release nobody opens.
Government communications teams write press releases nobody opens and PSAs nobody finishes. This day is a counter-example: when Taiwan's legislature abolished the 60-year amusement tax on movies, concerts, theater, circus, and sports tickets on 2026-04-24, the policy moment had a 72-hour window of attention before it disappeared into the news cycle. We shipped Tax Slicer inside that window. It is a Fruit-Ninja-style sprint where every sliced ticket carries the real former tax rate, and the score is the cumulative NT$ a citizen has just stopped paying.
The deeper point: any agency whose work is currently invisible (tax breaks, transit improvements, recycling milestones, public-health rollouts, infrastructure projects, cultural funding) has a moment when citizens are momentarily curious. A playable explainer captures that curiosity in a way a 12-page PDF and a banner ad cannot. Same engine, same workflow, ships in days, lives at a permanent URL the ministry can keep returning to.
What it does
01Real policy data inside the mechanic (Taipei City Revenue Service rates per ticket category)
02Real-world titles in the spawn pool (Mayday, Jay Chou, Oppenheimer, KANO, CTBC Brothers) for cultural specificity
03Localizable to any language. UI strings swap without an engine rebuild
0460-second sprint format fits a transit-screen ad, a press-conference QR, or a TikTok loop
05No app install, no signup gate. Citizens shouldn't have to opt in to read the news
Why have a game
Governments and public-service agencies spend the bulk of their communications budget on assets nobody finishes: press releases, 12-page PDFs, 30-second TV PSAs that are skipped on every device that has a skip button. The structural problem is not budget, it is form. A citizen who already feels skeptical of bureaucracy will not give a press release the benefit of the doubt, and the agency cannot retarget the people who bounced.
A playable asset reverses both constraints. Citizens give a 60-second game the benefit of the doubt because they expect entertainment, not propaganda. And a game that uses real policy data as its mechanic (real tax rates, real ticket prices, real impact figures) earns trust by being checkable in the play itself. Crucially, the format is now cheap enough to deploy on the cadence policy actually moves. A new transit line opens, a recycling milestone hits, an education reform passes, a tax is repealed. Agencies need an asset live within 72 hours, not a quarter later, and CraftMyGame compresses the build window into days.
For cities and tourism boards specifically, the same engine doubles as a destination marketer (see Day 5: Save Alex Honnold and Day 9: Mazu Run). For ministries and authorities, it is a policy explainer that travels in a citizen's phone instead of sitting on a government website nobody bookmarks.
Where to deploy this
Ministry press-conference QR code and post-event press kitPrint the QR on the slide deck and the embargo packet so the policy lands with a playable explainer journalists can embed in a story instead of paraphrasing a wall of text.
Transit-screen and metro-platform display loopRun a 15-second gameplay clip with a corner QR on Taipei MRT, Singapore MRT, NYC subway, or London Tube screens. Commuters scan, play on the train, share the score before they reach the next station.
Government social channel (Threads, X, Instagram, Line, TikTok, Facebook)A single share-card asset replaces three weeks of policy-explainer carousel posts. Built-in score-share drives organic reach by citizens who normally ignore .gov accounts.
City museum, ministry lobby, and visitor-center kioskA tablet stand at city hall, the Ministry of Finance lobby, or a national history museum runs the playable in idle-attract mode for walk-in citizens, school groups, and tourists.
School-curriculum and civics-class companionTeachers embed the game in a 5-minute Chromebook activity tied to lessons on tax policy, civic engagement, public finance, or local government. It works on locked-down school devices because it is a plain web page.
Embassy and consulate cultural programmingDiaspora outreach events deploy the game to soft-launch policy changes (visa updates, tax treaties, cultural funding, repatriation programs) in markets where the home government has limited paid reach.
Tourism-board co-marketing tile and national portalA national tourism site (e.g., Taiwan Tourism Administration, VisitBritain, Tourism Australia) features the game as proof the country is "fun", adjacent to the booking funnel rather than buried in a policy PDF.
Make it yours
01Swap tickets for vaccination doses, census forms, or vote-by-mail envelopes for public-health, demographic, or election outreach
02Replace the slice mechanic with sort-the-recycling, stamp-the-passport, or board-the-train for sustainability, immigration, or transit campaigns
03Tie the win-state total to a real-world figure: kg of CO₂ saved, voters registered, hours of transit gained, NT$ refunded
Why would a government or ministry choose a game over a press release or PSA?
Press releases and PSAs were written for the journalists and broadcasters who used to be the gatekeepers, and they perform poorly when citizens get policy news directly through phones. A 60-second playable explainer puts the policy data inside the mechanic itself, so a citizen who plays for a minute leaves having actually understood what changed. The same asset travels organically on social, embeds on the ministry site, prints onto a QR code, and lives on a transit screen: one production, one URL, every channel.
How fast can a public-sector agency get a version of this live?
Tax Slicer was conceived, scripted, art-generated, and shipped to production in three days from a news headline. For agencies with a procurement process, a typical engagement is 1-2 weeks end-to-end, well inside the 72-hour-to-2-week window most policy moments stay newsworthy. Email [email protected] with the policy or campaign and the launch date.
Does this work for languages other than English?
Yes. UI strings swap without an engine rebuild, so localization to any language is a copy task, not a development cycle. Public-sector teams running multilingual campaigns (Spanish + English in the US, French + Arabic in France, Bahasa + English in Singapore, Hindi + English in India, zh-TW + English in Taiwan) get the same build with localized text.
Where does the asset live, and can it be hosted on a .gov domain?
The default hosting is a CraftMyGame URL with permanent uptime. For agencies that require a .gov, .gov.tw, .gov.uk, or .europa.eu domain, the build is a static bundle. The same files run on the agency's own infrastructure, behind their CDN, and inside their privacy and accessibility review.
What kinds of public-sector campaigns is this format actually good for?
Anything where citizens currently see a press release and bounce. Tax changes (this game), transit-line openings, recycling and sustainability milestones, public-health rollouts (vaccination, screenings, mental-health awareness), census participation drives, voter registration, infrastructure project explainers, cultural-funding announcements, immigration and visa policy updates, and tourism-board destination launches. The mechanic should reinforce the policy story: slice tickets to feel the savings, sort the recycling to feel the volume, stamp the passport to feel the visa change.
How do agencies measure the impact of a public-sector game?
Standard browser metrics (sessions, completions, share clicks) plus optional analytics tags route into the agency's existing measurement stack: Google Analytics, an internal data warehouse, or a privacy-first alternative like Plausible or Matomo. Score data, leaderboard activity, and shared-card counts give a citizen-engagement number that PSA viewership and press-release impressions historically could not produce.
Is this format compliant with accessibility requirements like Section 508, WCAG 2.1, or the EU Accessibility Act?
Browser games are HTML, CSS, and JS, so the same accessibility primitives apply. Tax Slicer ships with keyboard controls, color-contrast targets, and screen-reader-friendly copy in the start and end screens. For agencies with strict 508 or WCAG 2.1 AA review, a custom build includes the accessibility audit as part of the engagement.