Any ideas for mechanics, themes, or games inspired by this year's presidential election?
With economic policy perched between austerity (collect fewer taxes, spend less money) and stimulus (spend more money, collect fewer taxes); with pressing economic game like issues like labor, debts, ongoing wars, imminent threats, and healthcare (life points); and with candidates who can be had fun with for advocating moon colonies, promoting return to the gold standard, circulating birth certificates, seeking endorsements from casino moguls turned reality television personalities, and formerly running pizza shops, there is plenty of fodder to create great game play challenges.
This question motivated by a game design contest I may sponsor on BGG in conjunction with the mid-year launch of the 2012 edition of the Presidential Poker playing card game I first published in 2004. Presidential Poker is a cleverly constructed and richly illustrated card deck depicting the personalities and issues contesting this year's election and containing unique pips and humor which represent different points-of-view.
The construction of the deck makes it well suited for use with any number of card games and game mechanics. By combining the deck with other components which can be found in a typical gamer’s closet and/or can be inexpensively produced-- dice, poker chips, coins, standard playing cards, maps, chart, illustrations, icons/graphics which can be adhered or drawn on the playing cards, or a second deck of custom cards or dice-- it should be possible to create compelling new games. I am hoping designers will appreciate the unique availability of this high quality game component to accept the challenge to do so. (May also be producing dice with the proprietary political-point-of-view pips.)
What do you think? Interesting ideas for mechanics related to this year's US Elections? A contest to create new games incorporating Presidential Poker cards compelling? (FYI: Don't expect the new games would necessarily be poker related.)
Excellent suggestion, though sounds literally more like a "trick taking" card game like Bridge, Hearts, Spades, Euchre, etc, than resource management poker.
Though the question posed by this thread is meant to be open-ended and I don't mean to necessarily limit the discussion to mechanisms that can take advantage of the PrezPoker deck, each suit in that deck is a different political point-of-view and the non-honor cards (meaning 2-9) do depict issues (the honor, or face, cards depict personalities, candidates, congress people, cabinet secretaries). In your construct, the issue cards could represent the "promises", the lead honor card could represent the politician whose turn it is to persuade on that issue and thus establish the trump suit for the round, and the value of the cards in the trick taken could represent the "votes".