Bidens Successors

 John wanted to run another modern political committee/matrix game, this time covering the selection of Kamala Harris' VP running mate. As with the Putin and Trump games, we all took political roles with individual aims and objectives, and made arguments as to why various things would happen each turn, the likeleyhood being adjudicated by the umpire. 

These things are never very photogenic I'm afraid, just a bunch of talking heads.

One of the big innovations in this game was letting us choose which characters we wanted to be, from a proposed cast list on a first-come, first-served basis. I was very pleased to end up as Barack Obama.

The full cast was:

 Barack Obama - me

Tim Waltz - Jim

Chris Wray (FBI Director) - John B

Pete Buttigeig - Micheal

Mark Kelly - Russell

J D Vance - Tim

Josh Shapiro - Mark

so we had a good range of both VP candidates and other interested parties. 

The second innovation was letting us write out own objectives! We had to pick a candidate for VP and some other thing we wanted to do. Normally in ,matrix games the umpire does this as part of the player briefs. 

I was prompted to do some research into the various candidates and in end plumped for Kelly for VP, as who doesn't love a fighter pilot and astronaut? Otherwise I just aimed to behave in a dignified and rational manner, as befits a two term ex president and ex economist.

Along with making arguments, in the current incarnation of the rules, we can also support or oppose other players arguments, and I decided early on to just support or oppose. I'd already done my time at the top, so just offering sage advice from the wings seemed more appropriate.

I won't bore you with a wall of text account, suffice to say the DNC featured a number of exciting events - a second attempt at assassinating Donald Trump (which failed), the forced evacuation of the DNC to O'Hare airport due to security threats, Senator Kelly leading a flypast of vintage aircraft and Taylor Swift and Barack Obama having a duet at the conference. Ahem...

Anyway, Kamala Harris rather pre-empted things by picking Tim Waltz the day before the game, but we went ahead anyway and the players had fun pursuing their more peripheral objectives. What was interesting for me was seeing how the new game format worked, and and letting the players both choose their own characters and write (some) of their own objectives was a roaring success. It avoided the onus on the umpire of casting, and it also meant players could pick characters and aims which suited their own play styles. I suspect it only really works with an established group of players, as the possibilities for wild choices de-railing things is even more present than  usual, and it was interesting that we chose a range of roles, not just would be VPs.

Anyway, it is good to innovate and in this case it paid off handsomely. I expect we will be doing another US politics game around November time....