A Alternate Presidency game has three turns Four Terms to win the presidency your campaigning is a full year. A year has three turns Enemy of the State Phase: flip a coin heads you argue as a foreign power trying to destabilize the USA, tails a rival party. The Mandate: After winning power you get to make 1 free unopposed argument...about whatever you want. Then the game returns to normal. During Peacetime: Movement is free if you want move Fort Knox's gold by rail to Alaska, cool. If you want to put nukes on Hawaii have at it. My game features Pres. Huey P. Long former Gov. of Louisiana: As the Famous "Kingfish" Huey P. Long I ran for President from 1936 until 1948, when I finally captured the White House with LaFollete, Jr. on the ticket as well. In between 1936 and my election I argued that Hitler died due to drug overdose putting Goering in charge. In my timeline WW2 never happeneded, but; FDR did die. I beat Dewey and Truman by pencil thin margins. The Depression was pretty much wooped before I could put a "chicken in every pot." However, I did make government service in the CCC or Military mandatory. My first foreign policy test was in the third turn of '48. Germany was deporting Jews, I quickly agreed to allow them to migrate too the US. In uninhabited states like the Dakotas, Wyoming, New Mexico. This would allow me to win these states to back my Populist party in a future election. Turning again to the domestic front a violent Puerto Rican nationalist uprising gave me the opportunity to allow Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, etc to vote for independence. Only Alaska left. This Started WWII. Soon after independence the Soviets dropped an Airborne corps. on Alaska. I pledged to rescue Alaska but; my invasion fleet was met by Russian subs who chopped it nearly to pieces. The fleet turned back. Luckily I brokered an alliance with Canada whose Mounties were quickly flung against the Soviets along with US long range Bomber support of the B-36s. Eventually Britain, Canada, Findland, and Japan joined the war against the Bolsheviks. Chinese communist captured Bejing and joined the reds. A huge Anti-British rebellion armed with soviet weapons began from Jerusalem to New Dehli. I knew I had to end the war. Over a hundred B-36s(All we had built by this time) took off from Maine one morning. They landed in Britain where they were but; on refurbished Aircraft carriers. They sailed into the Baltic aboard a massive Canadian, British, US fleet. Meeting in a sort of Second Battle of Judland the planes were launched aboard was Atomic bombs and the target was MOSCOW, Stalingrad, Lenningrad, etc. The Soviet Air defense was spirited but; all planes were on a semi-suicide mission they dropped their bombs even as they were shot down. Knowing where ever they hit it would cause damage. Stalingrad was spared everything else was KABOOM! Only 24 planes made it back. Unfortunately commies in the US (remember we had no McCarthy era to remove them) helped KGB agents plant a biological agent in NYC! (The Soviets luckily had no nukes). Both the Russians and myself hastily organized a peace treaty. After a massive rebuilding it was 1951. I installed Civil Rights act which would GROW in power each year. I sent Joe Louis to campaign amongst all Americans about how gradual civil rights legislation would avoid bloodshed. Now I'd pissed off everybody, Dems, Reps, Commies, and the Racists. I was shot by a Southern Racist in the winter of '51. I was severely wounded and LaFollette became Pres. He attempted to charter a United Nations but; his term ended too soon. By this time I was tired of playing and the game ended... What do you all think? COMMENTS DYLAN ALLIATA I think this is great! I would suggest a simple election mechanism you make two or three arguments for each side and add the winning arguments to a die roll highest die roll wins. But hell the game worked and that's what's count. Were there any hand recounts? Gotta go, need to steam off the "Don't Blame me I voted for Nader" bumper sticker. PAUL HAYES *Very* interesting game Joe, Some more ideas of the top of my head. 1) Alternities: Each player plays the same role in a solitaire game, with other players acting as GM's (resolving arguments or constructing problem arguments). This could work in a round robin system around the game players. What you'd end up with is a game of alternate universes and quantum physics/chaos theory. The fun would be in seeing how all the different realities compared at the end of a set number of turns. 2) Military/political games - as a wargamer (primarily) myself, this is what sold me initially on MG's as a concept. How about an MG on what EH Carr called the "20 years crisis" (a must read for all you international relations undergrads out there....) A Game of Europe 1919-39 with players representing ideological movements, eg conservatism, fascism, liberal democracy, stalinism, trotskyism. Start the game with a pre game "Treaty of Versailles/Trianon etc.." phase then run it through on 2 yearly turns to 1939. The object would be to control the greatest %age of european, measured in national GNP's. All you'd need would be a scanned in 1919 map of europe. Any takers?? In some ways very like an old waddingtons board game set in a ficticious middle east, the name of which unfortunately escapes me. Ah, this list is too damn fine to lurk on for long! MARCUS YOUNG Your game report makes interesting reading. It also makes me think- if you can run a game simulating in detail 15 years of world history (or, at least, the interesting bits for Americans) including an alternate WWII, then perhaps my hopes of simulating the entirety of the Pacific Theatre of WWII through Matrix Gaming are not so far-fetched... All the action you describe is at least superficially plausible, which I suppose is all that is required in such a game. From a military perspective, I have some doubts about any group of 1940s submarines chopping to pieces an invasion fleet (much harder than beating up on poorly escorted convoys)- and Russia did not have much of a fleet at the time. Also, over 100 nukes seems a lot for 1948 -- in the real WWII, the US only dropped 2 A-bombs, and then had none left. That was 1945, of course, but WWII had already been raging for 6 years by that time, as opposed to the very short WWII in your game. As the Manhattan Project was a child of WWII, one might wonder whether the US would have had any nukes at all in 1948 in your game world- but perhaps serious A-bomb research was started for some other reason in your game by an earlier Argument. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #21 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com