Category Archive: GameIdeas

Ideas for games that I have thorugh about,

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January 11, 2008

Election Game

(long, but I hope good).

Four years ago I was listening to some political strategist talk about strategy using phrases like "repositioning the opponent", "moving voters towards your position" and the like and the core of an idea for a game started to gel. While there are a fair number of games out there that deal with US presidential elections, all of them try to simulate the actual election process. My sense however is that political strategists play the game at a different level – one which is somewhat obscured by focusing too much on states and primaries, so I started to build a game that worked how I heard people actually talk about politics.

I started out with a fairly simple board game with a hexagonal grid in the shape of a hexagon so there are 6 sides, each of which had a color (so I could talk about moving a piece in the direction of the blue side). There were two kinds of playing pieces – large pieces that represent the candidates and smaller pieces that represented the voters. The voters were initially distributed over the board (several per space), and the players (candidates) could pick their initial positions.

In the first version, the game was played in a series of rounds where players could take three actions each round from the list: raise funds, try to move your candidate (change/clarify your candidates "position"), try to move another candidate towards an edge (portray them as too "liberal" or whatever), or try to move voters either towards yourself or towards and edge (the latter was easier). All of the actions other than "raise funds" required you to spend money and the more money you spent the more effective it was. When a fixed number of rounds were done, players would grab the voters who were closer to their candidate than any other candidate (with ties split), and the one with the most voters won.

The result was interesting and even a bit fun (although overwhelmingly so). I found it interesting that the "polarize the electorate" strategy turned out to be how to win and that players who tried to use a "moderate" strategy tended to loose since everyone else tended to work to move voters toward one edge or another. The two biggest weaknesses were the final election process – I use too simple of a mechanism (easy to play; but it gave odd results) – and that I had removed too much of the "color" of elections (issues, constituencies, etc.) so the strategy turned out to be too simple to be fun.

I attacked the final election process first. For each voter you determined who they voted for by counting the distance to each candidate and adding a die roll. Whoever got the low total won. That way you tended to get the people who were closer to you but could still attract some people who were technically closer to another candidate. In the original model, if you had three candidates who were next to each other on the board, the middle one would get almost no votes. Now they would tend to split the votes evenly. The cost of these changes was that the final vote process was tedious.

To combat that (and reflect reality better), I also added the concept of voters committing to specific candidates in earlier rounds (so that only uncommitted voters needed to be tallied at the end). To do this I added more actions that the player could take in their round: try to get voters to commit to you (by ads, speeches, etc.) where success was determined in part by their distance from you, and try to get voters to un-commit to another candidate (negative ads, etc). I used markers on the board to show what voters had committed to what candidates.

At this point I played a couple games and liked the results so far (although it still lacked color); but started to get concerned that the number of playing pieces and the work on the final vote might make this impractical as a board game. So while I continued to design it so that it could be implemented as a board game, I began to suspect that it would do better as a computer game and started to think about that too.

Next I tackled "color".

First I added the concept of constituencies. Voters now came in several types (designated by shapes – circle, square, X, triangle), and most actions now came in two flavors – general or constituency. So you could do a general fund raiser or try to raise funds from a specific constituency. You could try to get anyone to commit to you or focus on a specific constituency. Constituencies were defined by the number of voters they had, the likelihood of them voting, their wealth, and how important the various "issues" (see below) were to them. There were variable settings maintained on a side-display so you could have different "political terrain" when you played it different times.

Next I added the concept of "issues" (which I identified by letters - "A", "B", "C", etc.). Constituencies were rated by how much they cared about each issue, from -5 (they strongly oppose it) to +5 (they strongly supported it). Candidates were also rated for their stance on specific issues. Along with this there were additional actions player could take in their rounds to try to change how constituencies cared about issues and to influence them to commit to you based on your stance on an issue. Some issues were color (board edge) related, so it was easier/harder to influence people based on those issues depending on where they (or the candidate was) on the board).

Finally I added cards to represent both actions and significant events in the campaign. Every player could keep at least 4 cards in their hand; but could buy additional cards. Any card could be played in one of four ways: 1) as a fund raiser (although some cards raised more money than others), 2) as a subset of the speech/advertisement actions (each card allowed a different set), 3) as an event (which tended to mix things up a bit – suddenly making a given issue more important to some constituency or moving voters on the board) or 4) as a response. Responses were actions that allowed you to react to other players. So when a player tried to get voters to commit to them on some issue, certain cards would allow you to respond to that by attracting people who took the opposite view. Certain cards would advance the turn track no matter how they were played.

Players would go around the table playing one card as a fund raiser, a speech/ad, or an event. As they played their card and resolved the event, the other player could each play one response card to respond. The player whose round it was would then draw one card to replace the one they had played, or draw their hand up to 4 cards if it was less. What this means is that response cards are not automatically or immediately replaced. If you paid for 4 extra cards (a hand of 8) but played 5 responses plus a 6th card for your round, you'd get to draw back up 4, not 8 unless you purchased more extra cards.

And that's essentially where I left the design – I was working on a list of cards to use before my next play through when I got distracted with whatever drew my attention next.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 10, 2008

Game Design and I

Game design has always been an important part of my life. I designed my first game when I was about 9 years old, and by the time I was 12 (often in collaboration with my friend Peter) I had developed a dozen or so games of different styles – including one “sport”. As a professional, I worked for several years as a video game developer and later consulted with a couple of other development companies on their projects (look for “additional programming by” credits), and I’ve been a regular beta tester for several companies through the years.

While it has been quite a while since I have done any game work professionally, I have always kept alive the idea that I might eventually get back into the business. As part of that I have maintained a file of various game ideas I have thought about over the years. Some of these are board games, others are computer games, and a few are online/email games. For some I have only managed to produce short concept statements while others I have extensive notes and mathematical models.

These past few months, sorting through the physical and intellectual baggage of my life, I have come to the conclusion that the probability that I will ever get back into game design is fairly small. There are just too many other things I want to do more to believe I will ever have the free time to invest in this. Given that, I can free up some space on my bookshelves by punting several books I have on game development (certainly the computer game books are now obsolete given new technologies) – but what to do about all of my ideas?

The decision I made over the holiday break is that I would start posting the ideas here and making them freely available to anyone who finds something useful. As per the license for this web site, all I ask is that I be given credit in any resulting products. I know the list of regular readers of this blog is small and they are equally unlikely to use the ideas; but someone may stumble here by Google or other search engine. So expect another category of post to be added soon – game ideas. There are a couple of ideas I plan to hold back for now (I’m not yet willing to completely let go of the dream of doing games again); but any of the rest that I still think are worthwhile will get posted here.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)