I’ve gone to some lengths to try to keep Mr. President from reflecting a partisan point of view, as I have no interest in being part of any game that would further the deep divisions we already have in this country around party loyalties, personalities, and platforms. What I have tried to do is present you, the new President in game terms, with the reality that you have both a party affiliation and an opposing party to deal with. My problem-solving methods usually lean toward the pragmatic, so I tried to take the same approach with a game about the President, sometimes called the “Problem Solver in Chief.”

To say that I have tried to keep this game strictly non-partisan is not to say that it does not reflect some of my own beliefs about best practices. One of those is that “most of the worthwhile, lasting achievements in this world are accomplished by teams or partnerships of committed people.” I also believe that the best teams tend to utilize diverse team member backgrounds and points of view as wellsprings of strength rather than reasons for division. So in Mr. President, the game interactions and results are indeed prejudiced toward you doing better when you work with others and not alone.

If you want to get much done on the Domestic side of things, for example, you’re going to need to work on making sure that your Cabinet is Efficient (to better combat domestic problems). To have the most success in getting a solid legislative agenda passed,  you’ll want to encourage bi-partisanship in Congress (to get more good bills passed for the American people), and you’ll need to work to keep your relationship with Congress (for many reasons), your relationship with the Press (“spin” in the form of those Media Slant results add up!), and your relationship with your own party (they HATE bipartisanship!) in good shape.

To “go it alone” in Mr. President, from a pragmatist’s point of view, consistently returns worse outcomes simply because of the practical reality of the math that is built into the “Checks” system. It’s a lot easier to pass a RWC (Relations With Congress) check (a d10 where a pass is equal to or less than the current rating that you are checking against) when your relations are “7” than when they are “3.” That’s not a politically partisan point of view, but it is a way to reflect and reinforce my personal designer’s belief that “you will need to work in cooperation with others to be successful in this job.”

On the world stage, you’ll see this “prejudice toward cooperative action” in the fact that you’re generally going to be more successful when working a problem in concert with allies, regional partners, your Peer Competitors (that’s one reason game Summits are important), or the UN than you will be by attempting unilateral action. Sometimes, of course, because of the press of time or the lack of available partners, you have little choice but to go it alone. But when you can, use those Joint Ally Actions (especially Stabilize), Peer Summits, and UN Actions well.

Today, I’d like to take a deeper dive into how cooperative relationships with Major Allies work in Mr. President.

Major Allies

In Mr. President, the game presents you with nine Major Allies around the world. These are mostly the ones you’d expect (NATO, the UK, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, and South Korea), with one that might surprise some of you (India) and another that is a “design-for-effect” amalgamation of U.S. alliances in the gulf regions (Gulf States/Saudi Arabia). Practically, think of these Major Allies as extra influence that the U.S. can wield in the game’s eight world regions.

As you might expect from what I wrote above about the value of teams and partnerships, I highly value Ally relationships in real life. I believe that they are a core reason why the post-WWII U.S.-aligned world was able to achieve such a stunningly quick and successful post-war economic recovery (especially in those nations they had defeated in the war). Together, they built and contributed to a joint economic engine that propelled them to new heights of innovation, prosperity, and quality of life for their citizens while jointly protecting their people during the post-war “Twilight Struggle” (you knew I had to get that name in here somewhere!) with the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact and their influence around the world. So in Mr. President, you allow your alliances to weaken at your peril.

The game tracks your relationship with each Major Ally as either “Very Close,” “Close,” or “Estranged” (“Close” is printed on the map, and you place a counter back-printed with “Very Close” and “Estranged” atop those locations when that is the relationship status). Of course, you want those relationships to stay “Very Close” if at all possible. Keeping a relationship at “Very Close” maximizes the help you’ll get from that Ally when they act (see below) and helps protect you from your Peer Competitors making inroads into your areas of influence.

There is some variable interaction with Allies throughout each turn (year). There are also ways in which Russia and China’s actions can be more effective when your alliances are weaker. And you can take actions that may influence your allies or your relationship with them throughout the turn. But once during each turn (you most often don’t know exactly when), you will check to see how your Major Allies can help you in even more significant ways. When it is a Major Ally’s turn to act:

• First, you’ll get to perform 0-2 Joint Actions. The number is dependent on your relationship status with that Major Ally. So you get 2 Joint Actions if it’s Very Close, 1 if it’s Close, and 0 if it is Estranged (Note that throughout a turn Allies can also gain or lose an action due to various game circumstances; if so, you place a +1 Action or -1 Action counter on them. So a Very Close Ally could get THREE actions if they have a +1 Action marker when they Act. Or a Very Close Ally might only get one Action if they bear a -1 Action counter when they Act.).
  
  Most of your Allies act primarily in their regions, and these Joint Actions can really help with a lot of problems that crop up in the region. Stabilization (which the U.S. can’t really affect at all on their own) and Intel (where we benefit from the local knowledge and tracking provided by the Ally) are my favorites, De-Escalate can be massively helpful for an Ally that has a high Conflict Track Status, and Remove Stress is great for an Ally with a bunch of Tension counters (just before they roll their Unilateral Action), but there’s always that opportunity cost of having to choose to remove Tensions when you’d really love to be doing something else. Some Allies get special benefits based on my assessment of their real-life abilities. So, for example, NATO and Israel each get 2 Intel successes per Intel Action chosen in the regions they affect. At one point or another, a player will find all of these Joint Actions useful, just depending on the board state when the Ally Acts.
  
  Here’s a list of Joint Actions:

• Then, after Joint Actions are carried out, you’ll roll for a Unilateral Action for that Ally. They have minds of their own, after all, and many regional concerns that are at least somewhat independent of their relationship with the U.S. Thus, each Ally has a Unilateral Action Table, with d10 results from 0-13 or so (it varies a little between Allies), where the low results are pretty benign, peaceful actions and the higher results are more aggressive. Sometimes high results can result in war, just depending on the Ally. There are a few drms for each ally, but the big one is based on how may current Tensions counters are on the Ally. In order to make the example below make more sense, let’s do a quick Primer on how Tensions work on the world stage in Mr. President.

Tensions counters are placed on Allies, Rogues, and your Peer Competitors throughout the game by a variety of game actions and results. Basically, anything that would make a real-life situation more tense and difficult or threatening is indicated by placing one or more Tensions counters on the affected country during play. These Tensions counters have different numbers on the back (0, 1, or 2), and they are placed number-side down on the map, so you don’t know EXACTLY how much Tension they bring until the values are revealed when an Ally or Peer or Rogue Acts. One of the jobs of the U.S. President in the game (often achieved through using a Diplomatic Action called “Decrease Tensions”) is to keep Tensions low, especially in key regions and with key allies and Peer Competitors. The game is set up so that when Allies, Peers, or Rogues act, you flip over all the Tensions counters on them and total the Tensions to get a drm to their Action die roll. The Action Tables are structured so that they tend to act much more aggressively (high rolls) when they have a higher number of Tensions and less so (low rolls) when Tensions are low.

So, back to the Ally Unilateral Action, the resolution is simple—just flip the Tensions counters on the Ally, quickly compute the drm, and roll a d10 to get the result. Let’s look at the ROK (South Korea) as an example:

Let’s imagine two different situations when we activate the ROK. The first is that you have done a great job with managing Tensions, and there are no Tensions counters on the ROK and also none on North Korea. Let’s also imagine that the current Status of the DPRK/ROK  Conflict Track is “3” (“1” is as peaceful as it gets in the game; “5” is War). In this case, your drm calculation would be:

•  -1 because there are no Tensions on ROK
• (ignore the next two drm lines because there are no Tensions to count up)
• and +2 (1.5 rounded up) for the “3” on the Conflict Status Track.

That gives you a net “+1” drm. Let’s say you roll an “8,” which in this case is modified to “9” by the drm. So “Strengthen Military Ties with U.S.” adds a new Tensions counter to North Korea and moves the “Relative Strength” portion of the Conflict Track by one box in favor of the ROK. That’s a pretty mixed result for you, potentially causing a bigger problem with North Korean Tensions but also improving the ROK military strength and preparedness should war occur.

But what if you hadn’t done a great job with managing Tensions or the Ally Activation came at a particularly bad time after a sequence of event cards created Tensions on the Korean Peninsula? Let’s say each side had two Tensions counters (and trust me, that’s not a terrible situation; there have been times in games when I would have LOVED to have ONLY TWO Tensions counters on each side there) when you activate the ROK. You’d flip the Tensions for ROK, and see that they are both “1.” So you get a +2 drm from the ROK Tensions (2^nd line). Now you get a +1 because of the two Tensions counters on North Korea (you keep their values hidden until THEY Act) and a +2 for the ”3” on the Conflict Status Track. That’s a net of +5, but the MAX drm is “+4,” so that’s what you get. Your “8” die roll now becomes a “12” result, which results in a Cyberattack from the ROK against North Korea. I’m not going to walk us through that here, but suffice to say that whatever the result of the attack is, it’s going to inflame Tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

So basically what’s happening with these Unilateral Action rolls is the Ally is doing something that is in THEIR interest, but might also be in yours. If you do a good job of managing Tensions, most of their Unilateral Actions will be tempered and less confrontational/aggressive—generally benefitting you or at least skewing the game state towards “more peaceful.” But if you allow Tensions to add up so that when your Ally Acts they’re getting max DRMs most of the time, well, you’re probably not going to be happy with the results (note that the 13+ result on the ROK table could cause war if the DPRK/ROK Conflict Track was already at “4” when you make the Unilateral roll). If I only had a nickel for every time I’d heard a tester (or myself) bemoaning, “How do I reign in the Israelis?” The high (11+) rolls (representing situations in which Israel is angry, tense, or feels threatened) on their Unilateral Action Table can get really aggressive, causing lots of headaches for you. So the lesson here is “Do everything you can to keep Tensions low.” If only it were as easy as just saying it…

I hope you have enjoyed this brief look inside some of the design philosophy and game systems of Mr. President. Stay tuned for more over the coming weeks.

Gene

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