Ever
heard the call of a higher duty, or felt the pull of the Resolute desk?
If
you believe you might cut it as the leader of the free world, now’s the to time
test your mettle: the year is 2000 and you’ve just been sworn in as President
of the United States.
Mr. President is not an
election game: you’re already sitting in the Oval Office while your country awaits
your guidance, and the world your leadership. From now on, crises will rule
your every waking moment. Environmental catastrophes, terror attacks, White
House scandals, media blunders, legislation snafus—it’s all in there, and so
much more.
The solo game unfolds over four turns, each of them representing a year of governance,
and each requiring two or three real-life hours to complete. Yes, this makes
for a roughly 10-hour-long commitment. (And you can double that if you get
reelected.) What, did you think being President would be easy? Of course, few
people will steel themselves to take that much abuse in one sitting—although I
can tell you right now the game’s fascinating enough that I’m tempted to go for
it.
If
a game ever deserved the “not for everybody” label, it’s Mr. President. You’ll need three essential things to emerge
unscathed from all of this: a table that can hold about 3’ by 6’ of gaming
materials, a room where you can leave said table fully loaded for a few weeks,
and enough grit to power through nested procedures within nested procedures
until you reach a conclusion. Interestingly enough, having the patience to read
the 50-page rulebook isn’t a requirement in this case, because you don’t need to
read much of anything in order to get started.
As
daunting as the game may look—and photographic evidence does paint a scary
picture—GMT made it easy on us mere mortals by deciding to go with a flipbook.
(A first for them, as far as I can tell.) That’s a
spiral-bound book telling you exactly what to do for each of the 50+ steps that
make up the turn sequence. So no need to worry about actual rules: your first act
as commander-in-chief will be to set up the massive board with its myriad
gauges and levers. Where’s the State of the Economy track? What’s a UN Goodwill
marker? Since you’ll need to figure out what everything is and where it goes,
it’s not unusual for your very first setup to take upwards of an hour. (Which
is its own fun, if you’re the sort of gamer who’ll enjoy this game.) And then
you’re off, taking your first steps under the guidance of the flipbook.
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| Turn sequence in full swing |
The
turn sequence is organized in four activation phases that each allow you, the player,
to proceed however you see fit, while also leaving ample room for the game’s
various bots (Russia and China, of course, but also a host of US allies and adversaries) to do their own things. When it’s your turn to spring into
action, you’ll find yourself torn between repairing damage done to the word and
working towards your objectives—and never accomplishing quite enough of either.
What
happens during a typical turn? You have access to a wide menu of options: domestic,
diplomatic and military. Each involves its own procedure where you check on
various aspects of the game state (stability level in the Middle East, your
cabinet effectiveness, the health of China’s economy, etc.) and input that data
into the computation of what you’re trying to accomplish. The result—most often
obtained with a die roll after all is said and done—leads to the adjustment of
yet more gauges around the board, in a sort of domino effect where everything
can be bright and shiny one moment, and dark and rotten the next. Do be
careful.
When
the “others” get an opportunity to act, they follow their own, mostly automated
procedures and either wreak havoc (in the case of enemies) or provide
assistance when it comes to allies. Then again, if a friendly country like India
finds itself under too much pressure (given form in the game by an actual stack
of scary red counters), it might do something reckless that will not necessarily
help matters. That’s one more aspect you’ll have to manage.
Several
of the turn sequence boxes—the brown ones—have you draw a crisis chit at
random. In turn, that chit triggers a problem you’ll need to solve, and which
is established either through a dedicated procedure, or by revealing crisis
cards from a face-down deck.
That
deck is prepared ahead of time, with a sprinkle of natural disasters, a
peppering of terrorism events, a smidge of cascading events (that you might
need to deal with over and over again), and also a few positive things liable
to give you just the boost you need to get up in the morning. There is one
crisis deck for each year of your presidency, and unused cards from the
previous year are shuffled into the deck for the next. Remember that devastating
terror attack you knew was in deck 1 but which never popped up? Don’t worry:
it’ll be waiting for you in deck 2.
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| Some crisis cards are friendlier than others. |
A
reckoning takes place at the end of each turn, where you and the bots reap what
you have sowed throughout the year—and let’s be honest, the harvest usually
stinks. This sets you up for a subsequent year with your work more than cut out
for you, and where you can only hope you’ll be up to the challenge.
You
tally up your score after four years, aiming for a sufficient total of legacy
points in the core scenario or else trying to hit specific targets if you’ve
gone through one of the historical scenarios on offer. (Yes, re-election is a
possibility.) You’ll find out whether you win or lose but it’s really more
about the journey, as cliché as this may sound.
RULES
Before
we get any further, let me state for the record that Mr. President was one of the easiest complex games I ever learned
to play.
Good?
Okay. Now I can say that the box comes with 10 rulebooks.
However,
the only one you’ll probably read cover to cover is the slim “How to Play”
booklet that provides a general overview of what makes Mr. President tick, what you’re trying to accomplish, and the fact
that the game will keep you up at night with fifteen different ways to lose. Other than this, the flipbook is
your friend. Just sit down and do what it says. It’s as a simple as that.
The
other rulebooks cover scenarios, examples of play and designer notes, as well
as a variety of charts and procedures you’ll reach for in order to make sense
of whatever the world throws at you. But each time, you’ll be told what section
you need to look up and when. No need to read it all ahead of time.
Lastly
we have the actual rulebook—termed “Governing Manual”—which
I recommend you don’t read until you
have at least one full game under your belt. By then most things will make
sense and you’ll just add a detail or two to your repertoire of international
best practices.
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| Rules? Where we're going we don't need rules! |
I
can’t stress enough how helpful and powerful that flipbook is. What I love the
most about it is not only that it makes learning the game an easy and engaging
experience, but also that when I pick up Mr.
President again after playing other games for a while, I won’t have to
spend an afternoon relearning everything. I’ll just crack the flipbook open and
get going.
My
one nitpick would be about wars, where I thought the whole sequence could have
been clearer. All of the required info is in there somewhere, but I ended up
looking for clarity online. Which doesn’t take anything away from the fact that
GMT bent over backwards to ensure everyone could hit the deck running with this.
So
rest easy: you’ll be juggling West Wing scandals and rogue states wielding weapons
of mass destruction in no time.
FUN
FACTOR
Even
though I’d been waiting for Mr. President
for a long time, I wasn’t convinced I’d find it all that fun. I mean, it’s a lot of procedures. And sometimes
procedures within procedures within procedures. On its own, each of them is no
more complicated than what you’d expect from a bot opponent in your average
solo game; but since we’re talking about the whole world reacting to your
actions here (and initiating a bunch of stuff on their own), it’s a lot of problems
you need to resolve with tables and charts.
And
yet, despite all of the above, the game is thrilling, frustrating, fascinating.
It’s damn addictive, too: I’ve gone to sleep way past my bedtime on several
occasions since that big blue box entered my life. You start playing, and
before you know it, you’ve been sitting there for four hours without moving.
(“I can’t come to bed, honey—there’s just too much crap going on in Eastern
Europe right now!”)
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| Africa wasn't faring much better, to be honest. |
Mr. President is as much of
an experience as it is an actual game. It offers more than enough agency for
players to plan out a strategy (or try to), but the fact remains that I had
even more fun with the game I lost on year 2 when a rogue state detonated a WMD
in Israel, than with the early game I won ‘cause I was such a great president.
(I was playing on easy difficulty, while die rolls and crises decided to be
very nice with me. Won’t happen again, I’m sure.) The story the game unspooled was
just more compelling when everything went to hell in a handbasket.
PRODUCTION
Mr. President ships in the
biggest box I’ve ever seen for a GMT title, a massive trunk that holds the 10
aforementioned rulebooks, plus two mounted boards (along with two smaller,
cardstock ones), 180 sturdy cards, a couple of dice, and markers galore.
Once
all laid out, the game makes grown men whimper and women swoon.
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| The game ain’t exactly small. |
Despite
the display’s impressive footprint, all of the information becomes easy to find
once you’ve grown familiar with it—which happens surprisingly fast. (Kudos to
the graphic designers who, somehow, made this possible.)
I’ve
seen online complaints about errata, and sure, Mr.
President is not immune to that plague. But given the sheer amount of
documentation required to play the game (over 200 pages), I’m amazed even more
mistakes didn’t slip in, and with much more dire consequences. I played a
couple of games before even looking at the errata, and once I did I kind of
shrugged. Sure, I’ll incorporate those moving forward, but I’m not convinced
they would have altered the outcome of my games so far.
PARTING
SHOTS
There
are two different ways to play Mr.
President: going into the core “sandbox” scenario where all the crisis
cards are potentially in play, or opting for one of the four historical
scenarios, each of which requires a specific crisis deck construction and
operates according to special rules and unique victory conditions.
Both
approaches and valid and interesting, but I think I slightly favor the core
scenario. While I’m intrigued to face a specific geopolitical context (let’s
pretend 9/11 just happened—what do you do?), I love not knowing what lies ahead
and letting the gears and cogs of the game engine create a unique landscape for
me to navigate. There’s an emergent quality to the whole thing that really
talks to me.
I
rarely go for a “one of the best” turn of phrase, but I feel forced to say here
that Mr. President is indeed one of
the best solo games I’ve experienced, and I’ve played several of those
contraptions (going so far as creating a couple of them myself). With a scope
and ambition that boggles the mind, the game was clearly a labor of love for
designer Gene Billingsley, who finally realized a vision he’d been carrying
around for decades. And the work’s not done: GMT has already put up a new
scenario on their website, with a promise to provide more of them down the
line.
I
can only hope the game is successful enough for Mr. President to spawn an actual series. After all, this volume
does bear the subtitle “The American Presidency, 2001-2020.” Can you imagine
taking the wheel in 1960 and dealing with the impending Cuban Missile Crisis?
Or in 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War?
Now
if you’ll excuse me, I have to wipe the drool off my keyboard.
* * *
POST
SCRIPTUM
I
can’t in good conscience stop before I provide new players with a few
hard-earned tips.
- Play the core scenario first. It’s got no special
rules and the victory conditions are straightforward.
- Play your first game on “easy.” You’ll have
plenty on your hands, believe me. (The game offers some sort of “super
easy” difficulty level where you get a -1 on most die rolls. I didn’t find
this necessary.)
- Don’t punch out all the counters to begin with. Perform
your setup and punch counters as you need them. You’ll cut down on your digging-in-piles
time.
- Add two spare, brightly-colored pawns to your
game equipment. I’m using one of them on the Prestige/Action Point track
to remember the number of actions left (for you as well as for your allies
and opponents), and the other on the world map to indicate where the
current action/check/crisis is taking place. Together they speed things up
tremendously.
- In the big world region boxes, always put
specific counters in the same spots. For instance, you could put the China
influence counters in the upper left corner, the terror group counters at middle
top, the civil war counters at bottom, and so on. Because the game will
ask you to scan those boxes repeatedly (“For each civil war on the board…”),
knowing where to look within each box will cut down on your playtime.
- When you do move on to historical scenarios,
you’ll be required to build the four crisis decks according to a precise
roster of cards (listed by number). Picking each of them out of the
shuffled deck is a pain, and so is reorganizing the entire stack in
numerical order so you can then find the required cards more easily. What
I do it divide the shuffled crisis deck into semi-sorted piles: one pile
for cards 1 through 9, one pile for all the 1X cards (10-19), the next for
all the 2X cards, and so on. Even though the cards won’t be arranged in
order within each individual pile, this method makes it much faster to
then assemble the listed crisis decks.
- Spend a few minutes learning how to tell whether
you’re holding a die-cut counter face up or face down from touch alone. That
skill will come in handy for pieces like the tensions counters: you’ll be
able to throw them in a cup and draw them randomly instead of trying to
constantly shuffle them face down on the table. (Plus you’ll be able to
use your new superpower in countless other games!)
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| The first thing you see when you crack the box open |
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