Mediate a standoff between two people and find the one deal that satisfies both, a win for only one side loses the level.
Each dispute names two parties, what each wants, and a list of possible solutions. Pick a solution and the meters show how satisfied each side would be. Only a true compromise that lifts both above the threshold counts as a win, and a fairer balance earns more stars.
Two flatmates clash over the thermostat all winter. Priya wants the flat warm and cosy; Marco wants the bills low and the air cool. Every dispute uses the same line: a deal must leave both sides above 50 to count.
Five offers are on the table. Cranking the heat to 24°C all day pleases Priya (95) but leaves Marco at 20, and turning the heating off is the same mistake the other way round (15 and 92). Flipping a coin each morning feels fair, but it leaves both of them just under the line (45 and 44), so it fails too. Two offers clear it. A cool flat plus a budget for warm blankets scores 60 for Priya and 74 for Marco, and setting 20°C and splitting the bill fairly scores 68 and 66.
Both are win-wins, but the game rates a deal by its least happy party. The blanket deal's floor is 60; the 20°C deal's floor is 66, the best on offer, so it earns all three stars, and the blanket deal earns two. Both deals add up to the same 134 points; what separates them is how evenly the points are shared.
Bridge It is a negotiation puzzle about finding mutual-gain compromises.
Choosing a solution and watching two satisfaction meters, where only a true compromise clears, is conflict resolution as a search for joint gains.
The mathematics came first. As a Princeton graduate student, John Nash framed the bargaining problem: two parties can share a gain they create together, so which split should they settle on? His answer and its rivals are studied as cooperative bargaining. Bridge It scores with one of those rivals, the egalitarian bargaining solution introduced by Ehud Kalai, which ranks a deal by the satisfaction of whichever side is worse off. Kalai noted how close it sits to the ideas of John Rawls, who argued that people choosing principles from the original position would adopt this same maximin rule.
The practical side came from the Harvard Negotiation Project. In Getting to Yes (1981), Roger Fisher and William Ury argued that negotiators should focus on interests, not positions: what each side actually needs rather than what it first demands. That is the skill each dispute here rewards. Most standoffs have an obvious answer that satisfies one side completely, and the better option usually hides in what the two sides need rather than what they asked for.
Requiring both parties to be satisfied is the game's own constraint. It rules out the easy answers that hand one side everything.
Bridge It is an original, free browser game made for PlayPendium: ten everyday standoffs dealt five to a round, from a thermostat war to a shared garden strip, each with one fairest deal to find. It is not to be confused with Bridg-It, David Gale's late-1950s pencil-and-paper connection game, a version of the Shannon switching game in which two players race to link opposite sides of a grid.