Designer Diary: Campaign Trail, or How to Hold an Election on Your Table

Happy U.S. Election Day everyone!

Today is as good of a time as any to talk about my favorite election-themed game: Campaign Trail. I would like to give you some insight into what makes a good election-themed board game and tell a little of the story about how my brother Nathan and I brought our dad's game to reality.

Original cards

Campaign Trail started as "Hit The Campaign Trail", a hobby project of my dad, David Cornelius. I remember when I was 12 to 13 years old, playtesting with dad and discussing various aspects and tweaks that would make the game better. It really was my dad who gave me my love of game design. The design has changed a lot since then, of course, as my brother and I took our dad's game and reconstructed it into a modern board game, but the core concepts are still there because the core concepts are what makes a good election-themed game.

What are these concepts? What is critical to an election-themed game? We identified the following seven concepts that our game had to have:

• In-person campaign events
• Media advertising
• Debates
• Issues that voters care about
• A campaign war chest (that is, money you raise, then spend to run your campaign)
• The ability to incorporate common political occurrences such as press stories and endorsements
• Scoring via the electoral college

There were also other considerations that we thought of that would just make it a good game. We wanted any player to be able to win. We wanted the game to be about a U.S. election but to be apolitical, meaning it would not take a political stance on any issues. We wanted the game to feel balanced and accessible. And more than anything we wanted the game to be fun, to give people meaningful choices on every turn, and to result in an enjoyable experience by every player.

Let's look at all seven of our core concepts to see how they are incorporated in the game, but let's start with a bit about the mechanisms of the design. Campaign Trail is a card-driven action game. On your turn, you play a multi-use card from your hand and choose to take one of the actions on that card. You can get a more detailed look at the history of the cards and actions in Campaign Trail here.

In-Person Campaign Events

In a normal election year (sans pandemic), you see candidates traveling around the country to hold rallies, campaign events, fundraisers, and other things. Candidates meeting the voters is a lot of what running a campaign for election is all about, so we couldn't really have a game about an election without it.

This concept is accomplished by the Campaign and Travel actions. The campaign action in Campaign Trail has always been about where a player's pawn is located on the map. Even in the old "Hit The Campaign Trail" days, players would play a campaign card to move their pawn through the states shown on that card and thereby gain votes in those states.

Today's implementation offers a little more flexibility. The campaign action on the cards requires a player's pawn to be in a certain geographically adjacent set of states. They then can pay the campaign cost and place voters in those states. However, this new method decouples the travel action from the campaign action; instead of moving their pawn with the campaign action, players use a separate travel action to set themselves up for big campaign actions.

Media Advertising

Who here isn't sick of political ads? But they are a staple of every single election ever, so we had to include them. Advertising is about reach. Video ads, radio ads, and now online ads go out to the masses without the candidate being present in the areas that the ads reach.

In Campaign Trail, players can take the Advertise action to accomplish this. This concept has been consistent throughout the development of Campaign Trail. In the early versions that I played with my dad, we would play "policy cards" to place votes in various states that contained certain policy issues. Today, the Advertise action allows players to pay money per issue they want to advertise in and place voters in the states that have that issue.

Debates

Presidential debates have been a staple of presidential campaigns since 1976, so no presidential election game would be complete without them.

Debates were one of the hardest things to get right in Campaign Trail. We wanted them to feel like an actual debate in which players were responding to each other's points as they were being made. From the beginning, we have had debate topic issues on the cards that weren't part of the normal use of the card. (In this way, I guess you could say we've always had multi-use cards.) There was always a concept of a player cancelling their opponent's issue icons with the issue icons on the card that they played. This action was hard to track, however, and in three-party games multiple parties ended up gaining votes for the same issue, which meant that they gained little for those actions.

It wasn't until we came up with the idea of the debate track that debates took on a whole new level in the game. Now, players push and pull issue tokens along the track hoping for it to land as far as possible on their side. This gives the feel of a real debate in which players are answering their opponent's stance on the issues, but without taking any political stand within the game itself. If you would like to know more about developing the debate mechanism, you can check out my detailed design diary here.

Issues That Voters Care About

Every election season seems to have new issues. Sometimes it's health care, sometime jobs and unemployment. The economy is always up there on the list as well as some national security issues. Our challenge was to incorporate these kinds of things without making the game into a game that would cause political disagreements and fights at the table.

The key to this, dating all the way back to the "Hit The Campaign Trail" days, has been to focus the issues thematically around states instead of around parties. We don't say which party cares about which issue and what stance a party takes on that issue. Instead, we worked toward selecting issues that fit the time in which we were designing that particular prototype and placing them into states in the most thematic context we could come up with (while maintaining balance so that no one issue was superior to others). For example, the "Military" issue exists in Virginia because of the presence of the Pentagon as well as all of the defense contractors in the northern Virginia area.

Campaign War Chest

As much as we all probably want it to go away, you can't talk about a presidential election without talking about money. One of the key indicators of how a candidate is doing in the race is how big their war chest is, so Campaign Trail has always contained resource management mechanisms related to money. In early versions, money was just another type of card a player drew. It would come up in the deck randomly, and some candidates would have a lot while others had not much. We realized quickly that this was too inconsistent and also not very thematic.

Our solution, as with so many of our development problems, was to go back to the theme. In a real election, candidates must do something — hold an event, call donors, run ads, etc. — to raise money, so we decided to make fundraising its own action. This gave us a lot of flexibility with our multi-use card system. We also realized from a thematic standpoint that we hadn't included any concept of voter registration. Turning registered voters into a resource is what really made the entire card system shine. That gave us six different actions for our multi-use card system and made the choices much more meaningful.

Common Political Occurrences

There have always been things that could happen in a campaign that we couldn't fit into any of our pre-defined actions, such as a popular governor endorsing a specific candidate or a news story detailing a scandal about a candidate. These are fun events that make the game more thematic, but they aren't campaign events or advertising campaigns.

We originally included a "general" card with a lot of these types of things, but when we switched from phases to multi-use cards, it made sense to make these occurrences their own action. We came up with the idea of making some of these action instant and some ongoing. That way we could include a little engine building in the game.

These have proven to be the most fun to design since you really get to bring out the theme. Right now we have things like endorsements, October surprises, voter registration drives, campaign donor events, and much more all included in the various Politick actions on the cards.

Scoring via the Electoral College

The game has always decided a winner based on a candidate getting the most electoral votes. After all, this is the way the U.S. selects its president, so it's hard to make an election game without it — but placing a working electoral college system in the game so that players could know where they stand at any time proved to be difficult.

We have all seen the electoral maps with red and blue states that the news networks show this time of year, usually accompanied by a helpful "total" off to the side. We can see how close the race is and who is leading at any time via these maps, so we wanted to include a similar concept in Campaign Trail. The first versions of the game did not have anything like this. Players just added up the electoral votes they won at the end of the game and declared the winner.

But we knew we wanted more. We had been demoing the game at Gen Con for three years when it finally hit me how to accurately represent the electoral college. All we needed was a marked track that was scaled by distance to some value of electoral votes, then we could make tokens at the same scale to fit on the track, with players moving these tokens as control of the states shifted.

We found that a scale of 2.5 mm per electoral vote gave us the best track. This meant that the small 3 EV states were not so small that you couldn't pick them up and manipulate them, and California (which is worth 55 EV) was not so large as to not fit on a punch board. Players tell us that our real-time electoral college system is one of their favorite parts of the game.

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That's it! The secret formula for designing a great (U.S.-based) election-themed game. Of course, it is a bit more complicated that what I've talked about here. If you would like to know more, please check out our detailed design diaries on the Campaign Trail BGGpage.

Also, at the time of publication it's Election Day in the U.S. Many have already voted by mail or voted early because of the pandemic, but if you haven't had a chance to vote, I encourage you to get out to your polling place (in as safe a manner as you can) and make your voice heard. We all win when we all vote. Thanks!

Jeff Cornelius