Hiya BGDF:
I’ve been lurking around the forum for a few weeks now and wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. I grew up with RPGs and wargames but have almost entirely switched to Euro-style games out of admiration and lifestyle constraints. I’m a social scientist (poli sci/econ) by training and trade and hold games that incorporate social science mechanics in high esteem. The well tuned economic and trading engines in Catan, the supply and demand mechanic in Power Grid, the tradeoffs between collaborative and selfish goals in Republic and Rome, are all things of beauty.
I’m working on a few board games based on my experiences in Washington, D.C. and politics in general and joined the forum to find like minded people and try to keep myself focused. The farthest along, currently beginning playtesting, is Filibuster, obviously based on the Senate. There are two basic mechanics. First, a simulation of the Senate Players try to corner political capital from five different interest groups by introducing legislation favorable to those groups. They can then use that political capital to influence neutral senators. Players can then caucus with other Senators (form a coalition with others who have common interests in terms of which legislation to advance and block) to elect a Majority Leader who determines what legislation is placed on the legislative calendar. Legislation that passes increases the political capital generated by certain groups, and decreases that generated by others, so this feeds back into what coalitions have the ability to corner the most political capital.
The game is loosely based on the late 19th century “Gilded Age” Senate when it was quite a powerful body and, while quite partisan, there were a number of interesting possible political coalitions. Labor and Industrialists may unite on manufacturing tariffs, Labor and Agriculture on populist policies such as free silver, Industrialists and Rural Elites on policies such as regressive taxes and protecting trusts, and the small and growing Professional Class has a small but vested interest in a lot of varied fights.
The second game I'm working on is Beltway. I'd generally pitch it as Die Macher for US politics except you play an interest group instead of a party. Players donate and lobby two political parties in DC and across the nation. Donations gain you leverage (in the form of cards) and increase the strength of the party. Lobbying may get your preferred platform in place and get you lots of friendly legislation and nice earmarks but may lose the party you're lobbying the next election of they're out of touch with the nation. Never fear, you can always donate to the incoming party, or try to get the nation to change its opinion with direct issue adds.
My final political game called Urban Machine where players play out their political careers in a corrupt and divided city. On a completely different note I'm considering a game where all the players have predetermined objects off of the board. You try to get yours off, and guess which ones your opponents want and take those too but you get penalized if you guess wrong.
Hope you find some of the above ideas interesting. I'm enjoying what I've seen on the forum so far, and it is helping me stay focused on games, games, games, so I keep working on moving my ideas forward.
Chris
aka Swampbug
Comments
Congress - the Learning Game
Now what seems like half a lifetime ago, when I was teaching courses in American Politics to college undergrads, it occurred to me that a well constructed game might simulate the workings of Congress far better than my lectures. At the time, there was no time to pursue the idea beyond a few preliminary sketches. But, I still believe that there is a lot of promise to a game about Congress.
Your particular vision for the Senate may in fact be the only serious version marketable to a broader audience though. The alternative is to focus on current Congressional structure as an educational game or to make an electoral parody just in time for the 2012 elections. So, I like the idea of setting it in the Guilded Age. It gives it that proper sense of robber baron, pre-modern, expansionistic, gentlemen's governance and nepotistic corruption that might make a serious attempt at simulation marketable to a European audience.
But, the devil is in the details. In order for it to be a proper Euro game, it will need a number of mechanics which feel like a European game underneath the general political 'metabolism' you described. Do you have any idea yet how you will quantify some of these Senatorial actions so that you can begin to look at it as a set of auctions and economic investments towards victory points? What do you think victory points represent? Is there an election cycle at the end of each turn which constrains your choices? Or is the point to get reelected? What if elections were the standard hours of the clock of the game, staggered every three turns for each player and what mattered at the 24 hours point was something else? But, what else would that be? Money? Fame? Legacy?
Ultimately, a game about politics is not likely to be very political. Especially if it is a Euro Game, the players will not actually engage in politics with each other. Instead they will make tactical decisions that feel more like economics. But, that is ok, just as long as the range of options is complex enough and the mechanism is unique enough to keep the players engaged in the business of being a Senator, I think your theme will sell it.
All-pay auctions
Political lobbying in semi-corrupt systems is often modeled as an "all-pay auction". That means that everyone makes a bid (usually modeled with the bids secret and simultaneous), the highest bidder wins the auction, but everyone pays what they bid. (This is appropriate for semi-corrupt systems because unlike in fully-corrupt systems there can't be a clear quid pro quo.)
Hello backatchya
Maybe I should do a "hello" blog entry. In any case, I'm an economist by training (experimental and behavioral economics and game theory focus) though a papa by trade currently (part-time adjunct lecturer full-time snot-wiper).
Auctions
Hmm, that's an interesting way to put it. I have all pay auctions for neutral senators and legislation introduction (to sponsor and get the popularity benefits) but I hadn't thought of the mechanism through the lens of corruption. Right now they're open bid, but I think making 'em sealed bid might give a nice secretive and corrupt feel.
Economists
Nice to know there are more on the boards hear. A snot wiping game theorist sounds like a good conceit for nonfiction bestseller.
Political Education Games
Thanks for the extended reply rcjames.
I have had the concept of this game as educational in the back and the front of my mind as I've been working on it. Actually, the idea came from a little exercise the Library of Congress did to help educate staffers on the legislative process. I got to play the Senate committee version but sadly never got to play the full on mock Congress that they put on every couple of years.
I've oscillated between the educational focus (toning down the corruption and aligning a bit more with the current day politics) and the strong Gilded Age thematic elements. Basically I've tried to put off whether I would aim this at an educational audience or a gamer audience. I'm still on the fence but I'm glad you like the Gilded Age thematic, building something people would want to play, as opposed to be mildly coerced to play and hopefully not hate, would make me smile.
I think I've done a fairly good job with the basic mechanics but the devil has given me plenty of headaches and will no doubt continue to do so. The way I like to think of it is I have a Senate simulation, with a simplified political/economic module tacked on. The starting point for the external system is state of each of the interest groups. The better their state, the more political capital they generate, the worse their state the less. At the start of each turn, they all generate their respective political capital and this is added to a bag. Political capital is then drawn from the bag and is now available to the players. Players receive political capital from the respective interest groups based on their popularity with those groups relative to the popularity of other players with those groups.
Players can interact with the political/economic module in two ways based on their actions in the Senate. They can position themselves through introducing legislation so their relative popularity with given interest groups is high relative to that of other players. With this high relative popularity with a given interest group or groups, they will obtain more of the political capital from those given groups. Players can also pass legislation that will improve the state of some groups, and worsen that of others, thus increasing the political capital generated by some groups and decreasing that generated by others. This more complicated action will reward players who already have significant popularity with the groups that benefit from the legislation.
Political capital is the currency of the game and you bid with it to introduce legislation and bid with it to bring unaffiliated Senators into your sphere of influence, so yes, there is definitely a tactical/economic feel to certain elements. Political elements must arise from inter-player interaction necessary to pass legislation. So, if I am very popular with Labor, maybe someone popular with Agriculture might tempt me into a coalition, Right to Strike in exchange for Free Silver legislation? Or maybe, I'm just as happy sticking with the Industrialists and the very high manufacturing tariff?
I'm hoping as players get more sophisticated their politics will evolve from positioning, which will be simply tactical, to coalition building, to finally balance of power.
So what constitutes winning? That's something I'm still not sure of. As political capital is the currency right now I just winning set at whoever gets to a certain number amount of political capital. I am going to calibrate the winning number so that it leads to a decent length of play and allows for some sophistication in terms of tactics/strategy.
Elections, ironically enough, do not have any role in the game currently. Currently, their effects are subsumed under the political capital mechanic. Another possibility for the game would be to throw in elections and other texture and require players to sink political capital in them. Then, perhaps whoever has the most political capital after a certain election would be the winner.
The Age
And would make good business sense as well!
Ultimately, I think that the better game will be the serious historical Euro Game. But with a parody game, you might be able to induce some of these millions (soon to be billions) of undisclosed political campaign dollars from non-profits to come your way. So, it's really all a matter of how enchanted you are with politics. But, I like the Guilded Age idea.
Unfortunately, I must admit ignorance to a detailed knowledge of the procedure of the Senate during that time. I know that the house has changed significantly over the past thirty years. But, modern American politics courses tend to rush over history until about Nixon and the subsequent sunshine policies. As a result, wikipedia will probably do a better job right now than me on double checking the realism of the game.
But, in delving into history, a designer has the poetic license to be legendary instead. To focus on certain things and down play others in order to create a feel, I think is part of what makes a pre-20th century model compelling. The Senate can be more what you want it to be than what it was.
But, to be that way, I feel like it needs to use a currency other than political capital. That is a very modern term and doesn't really have any meaning unless you watch the sunday morning talk shows. What Guilded Age Congress was about was money, power and political machinery. The terms was probably more like favors than 'capital'. And, these favors were set up along intricate idiosyncratic networks based upon personal connections, right? Not because a group likes what you stand for.
I don't know... as I said, there is an oclusion here in my history of politics, but I get the sense from studying a lot of the reforms during the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s which lead up to the Spanish American War that favoritism, nepotism and the spoils system were a serious problem on the local as well as federal level.
In addition to that, the role of Congress at the time was much much more limited than it is right now. Land grants for universities, railroad, infrastructure, canals, etc... were the perview of the federal government as well as gun boat diplomacy abroad. The tariffs office was the principle source of revenue and states still chose their senators.
So, I see this game developing with multiple currencies and a very idiosyncratic metabolism. Favors are bought in one place, sold in another for money to buy a judicial ruling somewhere else. It becomes a juggling act of working the complex system for favors... which an enterprising young senator might one day expect to parley into a bid for President.
Favors
My wife actually got a promotion due to her organization's new work on (mitigating the impact of) Citizen's United. It'd be hilarious if we both cashed in on the decision. That said, this is a labor of love so I'm not going to go there, but on the other hand, if someone starts waving billions around...
So, I see this game developing with multiple currencies and a very idiosyncratic metabolism. Favors are bought in one place, sold in another for money to buy a judicial ruling somewhere else. It becomes a juggling act of working the complex system for favors... which an enterprising young senator might one day expect to parley into a bid for President.
I plead guilty to taking a modern perspective and system of the Senate and projecting it backwards. Professional lobbying as we know it didn't exist back then and as you note patronage was an incredibly big part of how things were done. That said, I'm hesitant to adopt the multiple currency approach. The patronage system was incredibly efficient at what it did and the parties and their constituents were acutally more integrated than they are today. A few old men in the Senate were able to hold and maintain an incredible amount of power and steer the country through this system, so even though we consider this system to be based on informal networks, in many ways it behaved like a rational political system. In fact it was in many ways more responsive to the populace than our current system. (Civil service reform was in fact seen by many as a power grab by a growing professional class who of course favored their 'meritocratic' credentials over the former system based on loyalty.) I argue, the old men in the Senate, by necessity, would develop their own common currency, in fact there may have been more of a common currency back then there is now.
It becomes a juggling act of working the complex system for favors... which an enterprising young senator might one day expect to parley into a bid for President.
I think this note hits on a nice romantic conceit Americans have about politics. It's an attractive conceit, all mixed up with Horatio Alger, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, and Camelot, that can pull people into a game, but I'm not planning to play on it for this game. For one, the Senate, particularly back in the day, was really about crushing enterprising young senators and making 'em play by the rules. It might be a term or two before older senators would even talk to you. In more modern times, LBJ operated in very unique circumstances that probably won't come around again, and the successes JFK and Obama are more linked to the modern media then any institutional advantages from the Senate.
The other reason I'm not using that conceit for this game is I'm saving it for a later game. Basically, I see these games as a series of essays on the American political system. Filibuster is focused on the legislative process, which is partially why elections are absent. It's about the sausage making and positioning that moves the process forward day to day. Beltway will focus on the political process, and then Urban Machine will be from the candidates perspective. I see the multiple currencies being very much at home in a city with fractured constituencies, shady deals, big money, but the promise of reform. There, maybe a few popular proposals, a secret deal with a large developer, might be just what one needs to launch a mayoral run. But you may end up having to use all the resources at your disposal, to keep your dark past from seeing the light of day...