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Political/ Negotiation Game Idea

4 replies [Last post]
Mon, 02/09/2009 - 22:15
WindowsMEXP
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Joined: 02/09/2009

Hey everyone, I just found this site as I was looking around to see what needs to be done to create/publish a boardgame. I was wondering what everyone would think of a game that would be a Political/Negotiation game where each player represents a political party in a ficticious country. The basic premise of the game is that players spend some type of currency/tokens to campaign in the various states or provinces in the country for either the Presidency or seats in Parliament. Campaiging would be based on rolling dice and adding or subtracting various modifiers to see if campaigning would be successful and therefore increase or decrease their support for winning the Presidency or additional Parliament seats.

Elections would then take place and determine who wins the Presidency and how many seats each party wins in Parliament. Players would then negotiate to form a coalition to pick a Prime Minister. By getting elected or being picked PM, you win victory points.

Then there would be a Parliament phase where players would try to pass agenda cards into law for additional victory points. Play would go on for several rounds with the various parties vying for control of the government to eventually have the most victory points. Comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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Mon, 02/09/2009 - 23:27
#1
SiddGames
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Joined: 08/02/2008
Decide on Scope/Scale

That sounds like an awful lot to put into one game. "1960: the Making of the President" is a 2-player card-driven game that covers just a US presidential election, and "Die Macher" is a 3-5 player game that covers a series of regional elections in Germany. Die Macher, especially, is a substantial game and it runs at least 2 hours, I think (I've only played once so far, and it was 3.5 hours for 5 newbies).

If your game is going to include actual legislative competition, that means the election and coalition parts of the game (well, sections) would need to individually be shorter, unless you were shooting for a 4-6 hour game. That's fine, just decide in advance how long you want the whole game to be and then scale each section of it appropriately.

It might also be tough integrating scoring from each section. For example, what if one party (player) wins a landslide number of parliamentary seats. Does that mean he will just steamroll right through the selection of a PM and then also win all the legislative goals? How can you prevent that without making the game feel, well, gamey? e.g., if you do a sort of "reset" at each point, it might devalue the progress players felt they made in the earlier part of the game.

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Tue, 02/10/2009 - 15:40
#2
brisingre
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Joined: 01/21/2009
Interesting

You should also decide if you are going to try to incorporate the really fun backstabby dealings that political games sometimes get. The trick to this is pretty simple. If each person has many diverse and possibly secret goals, and if people can assist and sabotage each other anonymously, you get backstabbery. If players are in open direct competition, (which seems to be what you have going there) you get none. Just something to think about...

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Tue, 02/10/2009 - 20:10
#3
WindowsMEXP
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Joined: 02/09/2009
Thanks for the ideas so far

Thanks for the ideas. I am thinking the total game should take 3-4 hours as I think the rules are not too complicated (at least what I have so far) so once people get going it should be pretty straight foward. The idea of secret objectives was not part of my original intention, but that might make the game more interesting. Hmmmm... All good suggestions, and will be nice some nice food for thought as I continue to write the rules for the game. Thanks!

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Tue, 02/10/2009 - 21:05
#4
brisingre
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Joined: 01/21/2009
Glad it was appreciated

I love political/diplomatic games, that's all.

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