Designer Diary: Divided Republic, or The Game I Never Thought I'd Design

A great artist once described the process of sculpting as envisioning the sculpture locked away within a lump of marble. The sculptor wasn't creating, so much as freeing the "masterpiece" that lay locked within.

Well, I'm not arrogant enough to call Divided Republic a masterpiece, nor to compare myself to a Renaissance master, but I will say this for that wacky Italian gentleman: He was on to something.

Let me get ahead of myself by disclosing a bit of personal information: I have a learning disability, a fairly severe one. This isn't something that I share with you in order to get your sympathies, so much as it is to explain what it's like to have my particular learning disability. It's a lot like having a room full of televisions, each television on a different channel, each television at the same volume, and you are the one sitting in a chair, perhaps strapped to it, forced to watch every television screen at the same time, unable to focus on one thing for too long, because while you are restrained and can't stand up, those television programs are all really good stuff. On one channel they're playing Zulu, and on another they've got I, Claudius. Over in the corner there's film of Jesse Owens wowing the crowd at Berlin. In another, there's a repeating loop of your first love, as beautiful as you ever remember her, saying the sweetest thing she ever said to you. Up top, there's a collection of your favorite Saturday Morning Cartoon shows, and just below that, they're showing all three Indiana Jones Movies (we shall pretend that the fourth does not exist), Batman, and UHF. That's only a fraction, of course....

When attempting to take a test or to write a paper, all those televisions can be extremely distracting – even debilitating, if you don't learn to filter them appropriately. But when you're doing something creative, you've almost got a blessing there. In that unified wall of noise and imagery, there is a beautiful theme just waiting to escape and be organized into something cogent, a narrative waiting to be shared, if only you can parse the various bits of it together.

Why am I telling you all of this? For me, as a writer, that's sort of like that block of marble the "famous dead dude" was talking about – only instead of neo-classical sculpture, I'm attempting to bring out short stories, novels, historical research, and, every so often, a game design.

I have been a gamer for years, ever since a rainy afternoon in the mid-1980s when I came home from the library with Dungeons and Dragons in one arm and Miniature Wargames by Donald Featherstone in the other. Almost as early as that rainy afternoon, I can remember attempting to come up with my OWN game designs. The first were basic things, like an attempt to re-theme War based upon the red and blue card backs in our family deck of cards, or an attempt to add artillery effects to Castle Risk.

Over the years, those ideas for game designs have matured, and I've actually attempted to design a real, working game from time to time. Divided Republic is the first of my designs to be picked up and considered for publication. I certainly never expected this would be the one, but I can't say I'm unhappy about it.

So how did this whole thing begin, what is Divided Republic about anyway, and what's an ancient historian doing writing a game about an American election?

Seeds of Interest

When I was a child, I became a virtual pariah (*gasp!*) for loving something that children are NOT supposed to love. I loved History. This, if you are familiar with children, is something which is not done. Kids want to go outside and play sports (I hated sports), they want to ride their bikes (I wanted to ride my bike only to the park so that I could play "Army" and look at the statues), they want to go to the arcade (or they did, and anyway, I didn't care for the arcade – I wanted to go to the museum).

Part of what would become a lifelong passion and career was an early interest in maps. I don't know why I like maps, but I did – and I still do. I was fascinated by the squiggly lines, the dashes of color, the interesting names, the places that no longer exist. One map that interested me, in particular, was an election map of the Election of 1860, something that appeared in an Indiana history textbook about the fourth grade. I have no idea why that map stuck with me as it did - perhaps because Indiana history was fairly dull to me. (My parents encouraged me to read, and a lot of my father's books were on history, so... I guess you can say I "read ahead" of the rest of the class.) That map stuck with me nevertheless, and started broadcasting on the screen of one of those TVs I told you about earlier. It stuck with me throughout childhood, through my undergrad education, and through endless trivia contests when studying overseas in the UK. It stuck with me when I had to come up with something interesting that I knew about American politics when meeting my future wife's family for the first time.

I had almost learned to ignore that station, however, until 2002, not long before I decided that being a high school teacher was not for me. I was teaching one of the last lessons of the third quarter in a Government class when we came upon the subject of Presidential elections. The kids were really interested in the topic (to my surprise), and somebody asked me, "Mr. Bagosy, how come there are only two parties that run for president?" I disabused her of that notion and was explaining the situation, when I randomly came upon a picture of that map, that same map, in my Teacher's Edition. I flitted to the page and enthusiastically told the story of the Election of 1860 to my students. They loved it. We even held a mock election the next week. (Lincoln won, beating Breckinridge by one vote.)

Not long after, a friend exposed me to the classic Mr. President. I had played election games before, but this one was the first I'd really enjoyed, the first that wasn't just a thinly veiled trivia game or roll-and-move. Suddenly, I got a very strange idea in my head: What if somebody were to design an election game, but make it as challenging as Mr. President, for multiple players even? What if that game were based upon an actual historical election, rather than a hypothetical situation (as in the case with Mr. President)? Wouldn't the Election of 1860 work well for that? And that was the genesis of the game that would become Divided Republic.

Evolution or Intelligent Design? Development of the Game

Over the years since that first sprouting of an idea, I have attempted to craft the concept for Divided Republic into a playable, workable concept. The changes have been significant, and the game that is now pending for publication (and your [url]Kickstarter consideration[/url]) has come a long way from its humble beginnings.

Originally, the game wasn't even called Divided Republic. I called it "1860". Two things changed that, however. The first was the prominence of the 18xx railroad games, which might cause some, err.., consumer confusion. The second was the development of 1960: The Making of the President, which is a beautiful game, but not much like Divided Republic in execution. I wanted to avoid assumptions that the two were linked, or that I was attempting to "steal the fire" from that very laudable game, or that the game was somehow an official or unofficial sequel.

Ultimately, however, I still get questions about whether the two games are related. I consider it a real honor to be even remotely associated with 1960, but I can assure you that the games are two entirely different beasts.

Two things are absolutely necessary, in my opinion, in order to provide an accurate election game based upon historical events.

The first is an understanding of the historical strengths and weaknesses of each candidate involved in the campaign. This is not impossible, but difficulty can be exacerbated when one attempts to model those strengths and weaknesses too accurately. A lot of time and effort has been spent in playtesting Divided Republic, but a great deal of that time has been focused upon tweaking that particular aspect of the game. The actual mechanisms for creating an election game are usually the "easy" part; the hard part comes in attempting to create an historical candidate who is playable but not always victorious, flawed but not without at least some chance of victory. Otherwise, an election game goes into the realm of simulation, not recreation, and in my opinion, simply replicating the historical results over and over again can get pretty boring after a while.

Thus, much of the game design time has been spent attempting to accurately portray the strengths and weaknesses of the four major candidates depicted without allowing these strengths and weaknesses to dominate the play too much. Interestingly enough, this actually tends to give a more accurate game in the long run. Let us consider the case of Abraham Lincoln. Among the candidates, Lincoln alone refused to actively campaign. While it was generally considered unethical to do so, virtually every presidential candidate from the 1820s on had been forced to do so at one stage or another in order to give himself a slight boost in the final count. Lincoln, however, remained aloof from all this, sequestering himself in his Springfield, Illinois Law Office. He was always happy to welcome visitors and would answer any questions they might have, but he didn't make speeches, didn't shake hands, didn't kiss babies. His opponents, on the other hand, DID do all of these things. All of them made at least a handful of appearances and "impromptu" speeches, even though electoral etiquette at the time said that they should not.

As a result of all this, contemporary analysts believed that Lincoln was, in fact, giving up his chief strength: his ability to sway individuals with his powerful speaking ability, his folksy humor, and his towering presence. By allowing the other candidates to actively campaign while he himself did not, his critics charged, he was surrendering initiative to them and dooming himself to failure. On the other hand, Lincoln did win the election after all, proving all those critics wrong. So how did he do it? Superb organizational skills, brilliant campaign tactics, and the placement of the right stump speakers at the right time. Lincoln played an active role in his campaign, but it was a role that no one who didn't know the man personally would have guessed.

So, how to give Lincoln his advantage of organization without making it a guaranteed "kingmaker" rule, while at the same time weakening him by restricting personal appearances, but not making this a weakness a kingmaker for his opponents?

I decided, ultimately, to give Lincoln a singular but decidedly useful advantage, by giving him one extra card each turn. This allows him more options, gives him the advantage, and allows him to be "one step ahead" of his opposition. I also established the "Personal Appearance" action for Divided Republic. This allows a candidate, once per game, to make a personal appearance to cancel the play of a card or action by another player, to double the value of a card used for campaigning, or to cause any die roll in the game to be re-rolled. It is a powerful tool, but not a game winner in and of itself since it can be used only once. It is a particularly useful tool for Lincoln's opponents as Lincoln is prevented from performing such an action, under normal circumstances. (There is a card in game that makes it possible, but as only one in 114, the odds are fairly low.)

On the other hand, what about strengths that, historically, should have won the election for candidates, or at least given them a better chance, but did not? Consider John Breckinridge for a moment. Breckinridge's campaign did make some efforts in the North, but usually only at his personal insistence. Otherwise, their efforts were concentrated too strongly in the South to win the necessary popular and electoral votes to compete with Lincoln. In fact, most of the Southern Democratic leaders were so focused upon the south that they even managed to lose Kentucky, Breckinridge's home state and the source of numerous electoral votes, to rival candidate John Bell. Yet, Breckinridge appears on the ballot in every state, and receives votes in all of them as a result, which is far more than Lincoln can say. Why on earth didn't the Breckinridge Campaign mount a more effective challenge?

A period political cartoonshowing Breckinridge, Douglas, and Lincoln ripping a map of the country apart while Bell attempts to paste it back together.

Divided Republic doesn't place artificial restrictions on this. The rules don't prohibit an intelligent Breckinridge player from taking the fight to Lincoln. Beyond that, it's really up to the Breckinridge player to get off of his butt and make things happen! Early on in playtesting, Divided Republic DID restrict Breckinridge's movements by reducing his gains in the North by a pre-determined factor. But this did no one any good. It pretty much guaranteed that the Southern Democrats would campaign North only if they felt they "had to", and it also ensured that the lion's share of a typical Breckinridge strategy focused South. Realistic perhaps, yes – but playable for game purposes? Absolutely not. One might as well make him an NPC, and that ISN'T the intent of the game.

The other important aspect of an accurate, yet playable historical election game is an appropriate understanding of the issues at hand. I could take the easy road out with this one, as has been done for this and other periods before, by simply pointing at the gorilla in the room – slavery, in this case – and making the entire game about the slavery issue. But that would be doing a huge discredit to the candidates at the time and the very major issues with which they were confronted each and every day. Slavery was certainly a major issue: that cannot be denied. But to focus entirely upon that would make this unrealistic, and overly simplistic to boot.

Instead, I wanted to get at the most important issues at the time. Originally, I had intended to pick the ten most common issues mentioned in period sources, but after several months of research, I identified twelve key issues, rather than ten, that pop up a lot in political discussions of the period. From that point on, most of the cards in the game were designed to revolve around those issues or something peripherally related to these. So, taking the issue of slavery by itself as an example, while we don't simply have a "Slavery" card in the game, per se, there are plenty of issues related to slavery: John Brown, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Underground Railroad, the Fugitive Slave Act, Kansas and Nevada statehood, to name just a few.

Now, as I've said before, the candidates of the era weren't really supposed to go campaigning for themselves. Instead, the common solution was the "stump speaker", a man who would travel from town to town with prepared speeches written by the candidate or campaign and deliver them at pre-arranged times from various points around town. The problem was that a speaker could often wear out his welcome if he concentrated on one issue for too long, so he had to carry a wide variety of materials to keep his audience interested. This inspired the concept of the Platform Speech, another way to keep the game focused upon the most important issues of the time.

There are twelve Platform Speeches, each of them regarding specific issues of policy that were of critical importance to the voters of the time, and each of these happens to correspond to the twelve most commonly discussed issues I mentioned earlier in this post, which are: Abolition, Cuba, Defense, the Fugitive Slave Act, Indian Affairs, Kansas, Mexico, Popular Sovereignty, State's Rights, Suffrage, Tariffs, and the Trans-Continental Railroad.

Over the course of the game, a player can use her stump speakers to spread the party's message on those all-important issues, but she is limited by two factors. The first has to do with regionalism: an issue that will play very well in Oregon may not play well in South Carolina, and an issue that can incite a crowd to blood in Florida might cause little more than a passing glance in Kentucky. The second, of course, is that lack of attention span that we Americans are so famous for having. As I said before, a stump speaker had to be well prepared to keep the attention of his audiences, especially if he had to spend a large amount of time in one area.

The first issue is handled simply, with modifiers. A player who gives a speech in the Lower South may soon find that the same speech would play far more effectively in the Middle West, or vice versa. The second issue, while it can be slightly more challenging to track without a good memory, is also fairly simple: a candidate can make a Platform Speech only once per Platform Speech Cycle. That is to say, she must have circulated through every other Platform Speech in the game before returning to a Speech she's already given. Abolition may be earning huge points for the Republican player, but it can't be used again until ALL of those other issues are dealt with. This also helps, to a lesser extent, to explain why the dozens of minority parties in the election did so poorly on a national level: they were too regionalistic in focus, too obsessed with one particular issue rather than the other issues of the day, which are just as important.

(This can be likened, incidentally, to modern candidates. Would Ross Perot have run more strongly if he had been able to move beyond the economy to other issues such as domestic and foreign affairs, for example?)

Once those aspects were considered and designed to my satisfaction, Divided Republic really fell into place quickly. Control of states could be determined via the placement of "points" in the affected states (Political Control Factors, not unlike similar points used in games like Twilight Struggle). Once a player had reached a certain threshold within that state, he could be said to "control" that state. After playing several times with testers at conventions, a common complaint was that states appeared to change hands too easily. Therefore, at the suggestion of Mike Sterling, one of my friends and a long time playtester of DR, we added the "locking" mechanism. Now, a party could not only take control of a state; the player could also "lock" that state, making it impossible to further affect the outcome in that state and forcing candidates to move on to other battlefields.

Locking had the added benefit, incidentally, of re-emphasizing one of the critical bits about the Election of 1860: every state mattered. Since the odds were that an electoral victory wasn't going to happen, a Party had to be willing to campaign everywhere from New York to Rhode Island in order to secure the votes necessary for deciding the contest.

Other games do this to one extent or another, but this is usually a forced action. Action cards might force a candidate to visit North Dakota, for example, even though he doesn't think it's a critical part of his electoral strategy. But very few systems actually make doing so a desirable, possibly game-changing act. Divided Republic DOES, however. (Of course, visiting North Dakota would be impossible, since it doesn't exist as a state in 1861, but I think you get my general point.

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Finally, after six years of development, I felt that the game was ready to be pushed on the unwilling public in 2007. But we had a problem – how to get the game noticed, and how to get a publisher to take note?

Great Game, Man, But Who the Heck Are You?

From the summer of 2007 on, I attempted to push Divided Republic and see about actually getting it published. Playtesting had gone very well to this point. Most had agreed that the game concept was at the least, original, even if they felt that the execution needed work. After the execution bit was firmed up, I'm not ashamed to say that the positive comments came in a flood. People not only liked the game, they loved it! But there was one problem. I was a nobody.

You see, the game industry is a funny thing. I've been writing supplements for game systems on and off for years, but I've never been given pride of place as the author of a system. This has a huge effect on recognition. It sounds ridiculous, this being a niche hobby as it is, but it's true: Most companies will NOT publish you if they don't know who you are, and most of the "playtesting groups" that receive and test games (sometimes for a nominal fee) in "blind, controlled settings" are pretty much the same. It doesn't matter if your game is the new Settlers of Catan or if you are a younger clone of Francis Tresham – if you aren't somebody whose name they recognize, it's pretty much a "forget it, kid" kind of situation. At best, the industry views you as a talented amateur; at worst, they assume you're yet ANOTHER gamer with ANOTHER idea that will never see the light of day.

So, I did send Divided Republic to numerous publishers. I rarely, if ever, got a response. When I did, the response was inevitably one of the two responses:

• "Looks interesting, but our schedule is booked. When you have more games published, please consider us again."

•Or, "This is great, but I've got to level with you. It's a huge risk to publish an unknown and with the economy as it is... I'm sorry, try back in X months."

One publisher was actively looking for a multi-player election game after the success of 1960. They were even, I was told, looking for something involving an earlier period in American history, so I pitched Divided Republic to them. I actually did get a response from them, an email response to my snail mail letter, nine months after originally sending the thing out. They were definitely interested, they said (yay!) – but there were two catches. The first was that they needed a fully worked-up prototype. (Not impossible, but expensive and difficult to do in the pre-Gamecrafter days, as many designers can attest.) The other was that they were looking for a specific KIND of prototype, with part of it using electronic formatting so that it could be sent to blind playtesters. Fair enough, right? Only issue here was that my contact point wasn't sure "which format they wanted, so I'll get back to you." In 2011, three years later, I'm still waiting on that follow up email.

I also tried to get the thing blind playtested. "Blind playtesting", for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is essentially the act of testing a game sight unseen with little information other than basic data about the type of thing. A group of volunteers (as I said, paid or unpaid) tests your game, then they give you feedback. The idea is that you don't do anything by way of explaining the rules or mechanisms. You simply send them the prototype and have them work it out – an ideal situation, and quite scientific, actually. The problem is that many such groups will NOT take unsolicited playtests, and that they typically prefer designs from established authors since they are spending their time to do this. (Which I can respect, and understand.)

Either way, it was the same: "Good idea, kid. Go bother someone else."

I had just about given up hope on seeing Divided Republic in print until early this year, when my wife, Boudicca, insisted that I enter it in the BGG database. "It won't hurt you to get some attention," she said. Besides, I had lots of free time; with the California economy as it is, Ph.D. programs aren't taking a lot of new students, and my list of rejection letters for education was matching my list of "this is a good idea, but.." letters from potential publishers!

Somewhere, somehow, the game intrigued one person, who mentioned it to another person, who mentioned it to another, and then I was in contact with Numbskull Games, the producer of one of my favorite ACW era games, Blockade Runner. We discussed matters at Kublacon 2011, and the publisher wasn't just interested in a proposal – he wanted to see the prototype. A few months later, here I am.

Divided Republic, as it currently stands, is a 2-4 player game of the Election of 1860. Parties are drawn randomly, and the game is entirely card driven, with a few die rolls thrown in to handle the outcome of certain event cards. The game generally plays in two to three hours, and results can vary dramatically from game to game. Recent playtests of the current version have proven very successful, and we have been slowly, but steadily gaining a following. The game has been developed; I have a shinier, nicer looking prototype; I've got an artist who's done the box art, and another working on the board. The cards are formatted and ready for print. The whole package has been placed in a burlap bag and soundly beaten with reeds.

The only problem now is getting the money to publish the thing. The problem is that Numbskull Games is a small publisher. They do not have a large budget, and the economy hasn't done the company any favors. Nevertheless, there's one critical difference between Numbskull and the other companies I submitted to in years past: They're actually willing to take the risk and make the game happen. Unfortunately, they lack the money to do so... so that's where Kickstarter comes in.

Kickstarter, or How I Learned to Love and Fear the Pre-Order System

Kickstarter is a creative funding web portal. That's exactly what it is. Does just what it says on the tin. Essentially, creative types (writers, musicians, directors, etc.) post their projects to Kickstarter, usually with promotional videos, and attempt to entice interested parties into investing money in the initial production run of their product, film, invention, etc. The product featured receives the money only if it makes funding, in a goal set by the creator, then approved by KS admins.

There are a number of legalisms here, and things aren't cut and dry. First of all, you can't back yourself, so it's impossible to contribute any further personal funds to the project once it's been posted. Another problem is, well, the sheer competition of the thing. Until recently, it was an equal opportunity type system. Put up a project and you have as much chance as anybody else.

Now, however, creators with more money are using the site, and they are using their advertising budgets to push their KS campaigns. Kickstarter has gone from being a funding portal for independent creators toward being what is essentially a pre-order system for anyone with an idea and the time to invest in making that idea a reality. In terms of games, we're even seeing games that are being funded on Kickstarter appear on store shelves before a KS project is finished, while others are simply seeking the funds to finance new art schemes or the money to print a second run. This does mean that gaming companies can print more now, and it does mean that board games reach a wider audience as a result. It also, however, means, that small projects like mine tend to get lost in the noise...

We are now at four days left to go in our KS campaign. We have met just over a third of our $13,000 goal, and support has been slow to build. Fortunately, we get new backers every day, but we have only a few days left and many obstacles to cross before we reach the goal. Will we reach it? I don't know... I certainly think it's possible, but I wouldn't call it an inevitability.

So, the question now remains: what to do if we don't make funding? If taking nearly ten years to develop this thing has taught me anything (other than the simple lesson that I can't afford to take that long to develop my next game design), it is that there is a market and an interest for a game like Divided Republic. That market only increases in the months prior to a Presidential election. It may even decrease thereafter.

Either way, this much is certain: Divided Republic -will- be published. The question of how, however, is not one I've fully solved at this point...

If you'd like to follow the continued development of Divided Republic and have a look at the components being cranked out by our artists, there are three places to do so.

First, I plan to start a designer's blog, which will track how things are going with Divided Republic, as well as my other projects. (Closest to completion: a game on the Seven Weeks War, and a strategic tile laying game that I haven't entered in the database here yet.)

Second, you can visit the Divided Republic listing here on BGG. There, you can find several threads on the topic of the game, as well as various files that can be downloaded, including a PDF version of the beta rules, a discussion of the cards available in Divided Republic, a list of the platform speeches, and a discussion of the various "Electoral Regions" into which the states have been divided, among others.

Finally, and most importantly if you'd like to see this game succeed in the near future, there is our Kickstarter page. There, you'll see a short video of my lovely wife Boudicca, who explains the game clearly, using our current prototype board. If you feel like supporting us, well, that would be hugely appreciated, and you can do that, too! You can get cool goodies like Stovepipe Hat wearing Meeples ("Ableples"), and sculpted busts of the candidates. Why, I'll even SIGN your copies for you, and then the value of your game may increase by -almost- twenty five haypennies!

Assuming all things come together, we hope to have Divided Republic published and ready to go to the public by March 2012.

In any event, thanks for taking the time to listen to my little discussion of the design process!

Alex Bagosy

Preliminary design for the game board