One Crisis After Another: The Crisis Deck in Mr. President

Providing a variable set of unexpected challenges in every game

We call Mr. President a sandbox game. One important reason for this is the large Crisis deck, which provides players a widely variable set of unexpected challenges in every game. There are a lot of curve balls the game can throw at a player, but the barrage of Crisis Cards is one of the most important and fun ways the game provides for a player to tell the story of their own Presidency.

The general system for Crisis Cards is simple. Each game will assemble a deck of Crisis Cards, and at various points during each activation phase, you’ll draw Crisis tiles. Many, but not all, of the Crisis tiles then prompt you to draw from the deck. Some Crisis tiles have other effects - and they’re not always bad! I’ll write about those as we continue to work on the game.

Crisis Cards come in a variety of flavors. This is a Cascading Event. The first time it comes out of the Crisis Deck, you’ll get the “C” result. After resolving that, it goes into the “2” pool, where it has a chance to recur whenever you draw a Crisis tile that draws from that pool. When a card’s “2” result is resolved, it goes into the “3” pool. After that, it depends - usually, they’ll go out of the game, but sometimes particularly persistent crises will go into the reshuffle pile.

This card is an interesting example - the press (or the internet!) dig up a number of damaging conflict-of-interest issues. So you’ll get a Domestic Crisis hit right away; if that track hits 3, then you’ll have to resolve a Domestic Failure, which can send things sideways in a hurry. You’ll also get some internal tension in your Cabinet, reducing their ability to address problems.

Now look at the “2” section. If you’ve been able to really strengthen your Relations with Congress (RWC), then when you draw this card again, it’ll go to Discard (which in Mr. President means it’s removed from the game). And you saw all this the first time you drew the card… so hopefully you planned ahead and prioritized reaching out to Congress with your action choices! If you didn’t, though, then your chief of staff will resign and the crisis will deepen. And, if you still haven’t gotten sufficient support in Congress to defuse the scandals when you draw the card from the “3” pool, then there’s a chance your Vice President - or even you personally! - will be personally implicated, leading to investigations, Congressional hearings, and even possible impeachment. Getting impeached doesn’t end the game… but getting convicted by the Senate does.

This card is also tagged with “Media Slant”. If your relations with the media are good, the media coverage will downplay your administration’s involvement, and run some interference. If not… well, every reporter dreams of being the next Woodward or Bernstein.

In digital, we’ll be looking to help players out with managing these cards. We want to make it easier to spot the play-arounds - in this case, getting Relations with Congress to 7+, which counters this card on its 2nd or 3rd appearance. In the paper version, you’ve got to keep an eye on that card pile, which can be painful if the pile has grown to more than a few cards. We’d also like to reduce the text density by spreading the card’s effects out over its multiple phases, but not at the cost of easy inspection of the future effects. And we’d like to tooltip some of the rules references, so players don’t have to look up how Media Slant works or remember that “RWC” stands for “Relations with Congress.” So there are definitely some user-experience opportunities here, but as with everything in game development, they’ll come with tradeoffs, and we’ll have to find the right approach.

I’ll be writing about Crisis Cards regularly - we’ll take a look at some of the other types of Crisis cards, such as Terrorism events, Natural Disasters, and the many different kinds of general Events that you’ll have to contend with when you step into the Oval Office in Mr. President! Please wishlist the game on Steam!