Create a Character

Play as a Democrat or Republican in the American political system. Customize the name, age, and appearance of your character. Calculate your political ideology by selecting over 40 policy positions, each representing a different aspect of your social and fiscal ideology. Play as any kind of politician that you can imagine.

Choose and Customize a District

You can play in any part of the country. Choose from all 50 states and over 3,000 counties. Each district is unique and based on real life data. Fine-tune district details to create the world exactly as you want it. There are over 80 variables you can change in the advanced options, such as voter demographics, ideology, and turnout, district population, poverty rates, and more.

Run for Political Office

You can run for nine different political office positions across the city, state, and national levels. Use political strategy to defeat your opponents in primary and general elections. Create a campaign platform. Learn voter opinions by knocking on doors or conducting polls. Increase name-recognition by giving interviews and coordinating volunteers. Sway public opinion by using marketing campaigns. Watch the results come in on election night. For a greater challenge, run for the presidency. Create a strategy for how to divide your resources across all 50 states. With the correct strategy, you may become the next president.

Write Legislation

Choose from over 80 types of legislation. You can choose legislation related to taxes, education, crime, health care, poverty, and more. For example, you can adjust tax rates, decrease Social Security benefits, eliminate food stamps, increase higher education grants, reduce jail lengths, create free community college, and much more. Watch as your legislation progresses through the legislature - through committee hearings, amendments, and voting. Legislation that becomes law will influence various in-game metrics.

Balance Budgets

Create budgets as mayor, governor, or president. Determine tax policy and decide how to distribute tax revenues. Choose which government programs you will support and which you will eliminate. Make tough decisions that could have a lasting impact on your constituents. Budgets in the game are based on real-life budget data, and thus give a simplified, but fairly accurate, representation of the budget process. You will have to make the kind of budget decisions that real-life politicians make.

Actions have Consequences

Everything you do as a politician has consequences. The things you say on the campaign trail influence voter enthusiasm, which influences voter turnout. How you vote on legislation influences your approval rating, which can influence whether you have a primary challenger in the next election. The laws that you create can have complex effects by influencing over 100 metrics. For example, passing a law that eliminates food stamps will decrease childhood access to nutrition. Hungry children do not perform as well in school, so the high school graduation rate will decrease, which means more poverty, more crime, and lower tax revenues (since students who withdraw from high school earn lower wages and pay less taxes). The higher crime rate will increase the number of criminals in jail, which will increase the jail budget, but the lower tax revenue means that you cannot afford an increase to the jail budget, so you will have to make budget cuts to some other program. Those budget cuts will influence even more metrics. It is a complex puzzle. There are many variables to consider when making political calculations.

Explore a Dynamic World of Politics

The world is filled with over 600 procedurally-generated politicians with unique ideologies, personalities, and careers. The game simulates primary and general elections for every politician, and you can see these election results at the end of every election. The world is constantly changing as politicians retire, seek higher level positions, or lose a primary election to an up-and-coming challenger. Politicians have ambitions; like you, they will try to ascend the political hierarchy. All of these background events help to produce a more engaging political world.

Dictator Mode

In dictator mode, you can play as the president as long as you want, without having to win reelection. Write legislation and control the budget without interference from congress. Use Dictator Mode to test out various ways to balance the federal budget or to see how different combinations of laws influence the country.

Control the Fate of Your Party

Play as your party’s Campaign Committee Chairperson. In this position, you are responsible for electing party members to office. Recruit candidates and fine-tune their policies. Use party resources to sway public opinion and increase voter turnout, in an effort to elect as many party members as possible. If you are unhappy with a member of your party, you can select a candidate to challenge them in the next primary. If your party is becoming too radical, you can recruit moderate candidates to represent the next political generation. Be strategic in the candidates you choose. You may be able to win competitive districts if you are clever in the policies you select for your candidates.