Divide & Conquer
I hacked together a quick game, inspired by the shitty voting system that will be used in the upcoming UK General Election: First Past The Post (FPTP).
This is currently a 2-player game prototype. I will experiment with more players (ie, introduce more political parties) over the next weeks.
Setup
You’ll need:
- Two humans, who will play the leaders of two competing political parties
- A simplified map of the UK, made out of 65 hexagons
- Coloured tokens for each player: 24 round tokens (the safe ones), and 9 square tokens (the marginal ones)
- Event cards, shuffled (more on these below)
- Parliament card, with 13 seats
Phase 1: election campaign
Players take turns in placing all their coloured tokens on the map:
- 3 tokens per turn
- The player going last can replace one (any) opponent’s token with their own when there are no free hexagons left at the end of this phase.
Phase 2: election day
Players take turns in collecting tokens from the map:
- Draw one event card and do what it says (it may be things like “Move one of your tokens by 2 spaces” or “Lose one of your tokens”)
- Take 5 adjacent tokens of any colour. You want to try and get at least 3 of your tokens in there. 3 out of 5 means you will get one spot in Parliament. This is how FPTP works.
End game
The player with a majority of spots in Parliament (at least 7) wins!
Hang on, why is FPTP shitty?
Check out the explorable explanation To Build a Better Ballot by Nicky Case and play District by Christopher Walker.
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