I am looking for some playtesters for my game Campaign 2012: Romney vs. Obama.
I started designing it earlier this summer. My intention was to release the game (as free print and play), and as events occurred in the real-life campaign I would create new cards to reflect it. When the election was over, I would cull all the bad cards and keep the good ones and "finalize" the game.
Sadly, time got away from me, and all of my major real-life playtesters won't be able to play until after the election. I abandoned the idea for a while, when I realized that the game was about 90% done. So I've decided to let it out there for playtesting. There's still two months of election yet to go, so I might be able to do some updating.
I have playtested it enough that it works mechanically; the main problem is that I need to see if the two candidates are balanced enough. (I also, of course, need people to try and break the game, which given how the game is set up is likely.) Also: make sure it's fun, which it very well may not be.
A short synopsis of the game: Both players are trying to win the presidency by battling it out over 18 swing states. (While you can unlock additional non-swing states, it's expensive and rare.) Each turn, both players create an "Agenda" from a common stock of cards, and then use campaign tokens to execute this agenda. Players place support on states by winning various issues and demographics. Each player also has a set of candidate-specific strategy cards that only they can use. Events also occur, and each player tries to "spin" the event to their favor.
The main problem is that it might be a little huge for a print and play game. It is about 35 pieces of cardstock (works out to be about 220 total cards, plus some extras for various parts and markers). The good news is that not all of the cards need to be printed out, but that still places it in the upper 100's.
You will need some sort of tokens of two different colors. Otherwise everything is available to print, although I do recommend defacing some poker chips with a Sharpie for some of the tokens.
So, anyone interested in playtesting this game? Please let me know by replying here, or email me at campaign2012boardgame at gmail.com
Not really. While there is a focus on swing states, much like CM2008, the methods used to get there are not similar at all.
Instead of placing support in specific states, you place support either via Issues or Demographics. This is different than CM2008, where you are trying to align two issues and all the support, or 1960, where every state is in play and is much more event-driven.
From a concept standpoint I would say it is somewhere between the two, but there's also a lot of other factors thrown in that makes it unique. The playtesters so far say that the game seems to take about 2 hours at first, and an hour to an hour and a half once you figure out the rules and get a sense of the cards. This puts the game a little longer than both CM2008 and 1960.