Deploy, Debate, and Defend
By now you have understood the issues and drafted your manifesto by selecting the best policy cards. In this phase of the game, you will send your troops to the constituencies and then argue for, and defend your policy-solution combination.
If you have not read part 1 and part 2 please go back and read them.
Deploy
Each player must ‘mark’ their influence by deploying their ‘workers’ or ‘vote cubes’. All players can compete and retain their influence on the same issue. Democracy allows for a variety of opinions to exist.
As you see below, the player believes that each of their policies provides one or more tangible solutions to the problems on the board.
As mentioned earlier, each constituency card has issues and on the left of each issue is a (+) sign with cubes next to it. These are the number of vote cubes that each player must place from their cube reserve of 40.
Remember that while you can ‘take back cubes’ during the debating phase, once you’ve successfully put a cube on the board it is not going to come back to you
If you think your manifesto solves the first two issues with two distinct policies, then you may place two of your own coloured cubes for the first issue and two for the second one. This does not mean that other players cannot do the same - All players have an equal chance of placing their cubes and defending their arguments.
Defend & Debate
Once every political is done marking their influence by placing ‘vote cubes’/workers they then must present arguments for why their policies in their manifesto solve or are the best solution for the issues of the constituency.
Think of your favourite politician, spokesperson or tv anchor and go nuts trying to convince others as to why your policies solve the issues on the board, be imaginative, be creative and don’t give up.
If a policy doesn’t work on an issue and you have a back-up try using it.
- Every political party gets a total of 5 minutes (3+2) to argue for and defend their policies: 3 minutes to argue for their policies and 2 minutes to counter argue
- If players do not finish their points in the 3 minutes, they then must remove their vote cubes from the issue.
4. The other players at this point act as ‘voters’ and their concerns and objections must be from that perspective.
Gaining Confidence or Losing Confidence of the people
Each political party needs the support or vote of two other players to keep their ‘vote cubes’ on the board.
If a political party gets 2 or more votes from the other teams then they may keep the vote cubes on the issue.
If a political party fails to get at least 2 votes, then they must take back the cubes they have placed from the issue back and place them in their reserve.
Safeguards
No amount of counter-argument can remove the vote cubes of a political party if it satisfies the following conditions
- If the title of the card is relevant and directly linked to the issue
- If there is adequate content in the card that offers a solution to the issue
- If there is a health care issue and a policy that solves it directly then its influence cannot be removed.
- Lastly, if the keywords match
