ELECTION PARTY — THE CARD GAME FOR CHARISMATIC SOCIOPATHS

Democracy is a noble experiment in collective self-government.

Unfortunately, it involves politicians.

Election Party is a satirical card game about the really important parts of electoral politics: saying whatever will get you elected, defending policies you would have laughed at five minutes ago, surviving scandals that should by any reasonable standard end your career, and persuading everyone in the room that your opponents are manifestly less fit for office than you are.

This is the PDF print-and-play edition. Download it, print the cards, cut them out and gather an electorate gullible enough to give you power.

There are 100 cards in the core game:

• 10 Candidate Cards

• 70 Policy Cards

• 20 Scandal Cards

The cards create the political catastrophe.

The players have to talk their way through it.

SO YOU WANT TO BE PRIME MINISTER, PRESIDENT, SUPREME LEADER OR WHATEVER

First, become a candidate.

Election Party includes ten political personas, including such specimens as The Celebrity, The Social Justice Warrior and The Dull Moderate.

You are not simply choosing a hand of statistics and waiting for the game to resolve itself. The candidate gives you somebody to play.

Talk like them. Campaign like them. Work out what sort of slogans they would use and what sort of voter they imagine exists exclusively to agree with them.

Perhaps you are sincere.

Perhaps you are shameless.

Perhaps you begin sincere and discover, two minutes into the campaign, that shamelessness polls considerably better.

What matters is whether the other players will vote for you when the time comes.

Politics has always been theatre with a budget.

Election Party has removed the budget.

THEN COME THE POLICIES

There are 70 Policy Cards, and political consistency is somebody else's problem.

You may find yourself campaigning to:

• Declare war on Mars

• Expand drone warfare

• Introduce Fully Automated Luxury Communism

• Ban the Internet

…and another sixty-six contributions to the improvement, restructuring or complete wreckage of civilisation.

You do not get the luxury of quietly discarding the stupid ones.

The stupid ones are where the game lives.

Your job is to make whatever policy lands in front of you sound like the obvious answer to the nation’s problems.

War with Mars?

Jobs in aerospace. National unity. Strategic defence. Think of the children.

Ban the Internet?

Productivity. Community. Protection from misinformation. Also, regrettably, your opponent's entire campaign has just disappeared.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism?

Prosperity for everybody.

Expanded drone warfare?

Strong defence and considerably less tedious mucking about with conventional war.

The policy does not have to make sense.

You have to make it sound as though it does.

Policies can be drawn at random or inflicted upon you by another player with the entirely wholesome intention of watching you suffer.

This is politics. Cruelty becomes strategy when enough people are taking notes.

MAKE THE SPEECH

Election Party is built around improvisation.

You have a candidate. You have policies. Now stand up—or lean forward dramatically over the table—and tell the electorate why this platform represents the only serious choice available.

Sell it.

Reframe it.

Invent consequences nobody has checked.

Discover a mandate.

Invoke ordinary hardworking people.

Explain that economists agree with you without identifying any of them.

Demand to know why your opponent refuses to answer an entirely unrelated question.

Should you become trapped by facts, announce that the public is tired of experts.

A brilliant Election Party speech may be genuinely persuasive. It may be hysterically incompetent. Quite often the best speeches are both.

You do not need a political-science degree.

You need nerve, improvisation and the ability to continue talking after everybody else has started laughing.

AND THEN SOMEBODY FINDS THE PHOTOGRAPHS

There are 20 Scandal Cards.

Because no political career should be allowed to proceed entirely on its policies.

Perhaps you murdered somebody.

Perhaps your nudes have leaked.

Perhaps an old social-media post has resurfaced and is now being discussed by people using expressions such as deeply concerning and questions to answer.

A normal human being might apologise.

A political candidate has options.

Deny it.

Contextualise it.

Blame an aide.

Blame the media.

Blame your opponent.

Demand an investigation into how the information became public.

Explain that your private life is irrelevant and immediately spend ten minutes discussing your opponent's private life.

Announce that you have learned important lessons without identifying any of them.

Insist that the real scandal is everybody talking about your scandal.

The Scandal Cards force candidates to think on their feet. A beautiful campaign can disintegrate in seconds because somebody suddenly has to explain why the police have found a body.

Conversely, a sufficiently shameless candidate may turn catastrophe into electoral momentum.

A politician falling into a cesspit is unfortunate.

A politician climbing out and announcing they entered voluntarily to understand the concerns of ordinary sanitation workers is a campaigner.

YOUR FRIENDS ARE THE ELECTORATE

The fun comes from trying to win over actual people sitting around the table.

They have heard your dreadful platform.

They have watched you respond to scandal.

They know perfectly well that five minutes ago you described your present flagship policy as insane.

Now convince them to vote for you.

That makes Election Party part card game, part improvisational comedy and part deeply troubling experiment into which member of your social circle should be kept furthest from public office.

A player who normally hates arguing may discover a talent for political rhetoric.

A quiet friend may turn out to possess the instincts of a dictator.

Somebody who entered the game with very strong principles may abandon all of them immediately after drawing a particularly useful policy.

Try not to judge.

There will be time for that after the count.

THE GAME IS POLITICAL. IT DOESN'T REQUIRE YOUR POLITICS.

Election Party is satire rather than a manifesto.

The joke is the electoral process, political personas, ideological absurdity, scandals, rhetoric and the extraordinary human capacity to defend almost anything once winning depends upon it.

You can come at it from the left, right, centre or somewhere beyond conventional political cartography.

The cards give everybody opportunities for hypocrisy.

This also means you do not need to be the person who follows every Westminster reshuffle, American primary or obscure ideological schism.

Knowing politics may give you more material.

Knowing how to bullshit is considerably more useful.

100 CARDS, A LOT MORE CAMPAIGNS

The core PDF contains:

10 CANDIDATE CARDS

Political personalities for the players to inhabit, including:

The Celebrity
The Social Justice Warrior
The Dull Moderate

…and seven more people who have looked at the state of public life and concluded that what it really needs is them.

70 POLICY CARDS

Your magnificent electoral programme.

Some will be plausible. Some will be ideological. Some will be ridiculous. Their sanity is irrelevant once they have become official party policy.

You have a speech to give.

20 SCANDAL CARDS

The sudden revelation that threatens to reduce all that careful campaigning to an apologetic statement outside your house.

Survive it.

Or at least make sure another candidate's scandal sounds worse.

With candidates, policies and scandals combining differently from game to game, campaigns can veer in wildly different directions.

A Celebrity selling Fully Automated Luxury Communism while trying to explain away leaked photographs is one election.

A Dull Moderate declaring war on Mars while fielding questions about a suspicious death is quite another.

The cards shuffle.

Human ambition takes care of the rest.

PRINT-AND-PLAY DEMOCRACY

This product is the PDF edition of Election Party.

Print the cards yourself, cut them out and you are ready to campaign.

It is a cheap way to get the complete core game, useful if you prefer print-and-play games, want to provide your own card stock or sleeves, or simply feel that spending large amounts of money on politics would set a dangerous precedent.

A professionally manufactured hardcopy edition of Election Party is also available separately while stock lasts.

The PDF edition gives you the 100-card core game without waiting for a postal service, manufacturing queue or recount.

SUITABLE FOR

Election Party works particularly well with groups who enjoy political satire, improvisation, argument, role-playing, speech-making and watching friends become ethically flexible the moment victory is within reach.

Bring it to a party.

Bring it to a gaming night.

Bring it to an election-night gathering.

Bring it to a political meeting if you want to make everybody profoundly uncomfortable about how recognisable the techniques are.

You will probably learn something about your friends.

You may wish you had not.

WHAT YOU NEED

This is a digital print-and-play product.

You receive the game electronically and supply the printing and cutting yourself.

The core game consists of:

10 Candidate Cards + 70 Policy Cards + 20 Scandal Cards = 100 cards.

Gather your players.

Deal with whatever political personality fate has assigned you.

Discover the policies upon which you have apparently staked your entire career.

Survive whatever dreadful information has just emerged about your private life.

Then make your pitch.

Somebody has to win.

That is the terrible thing about democracy.

Browse the other Postmortem Studios card games for more satire, party games and ways to discover regrettable things about the people you thought you knew.

Election Party.

Make promises.

Make excuses.

Make politics fun again.