Mr. President News

Mr. President: The American Presidency 2000-2020 is a game about being POTUS. And it’s unique. Most American politics games, both digital and tabletop, are about elections and campaigning; in this game, you’ve already won the election and must now govern. Likewise, most games in which you get to lead America focus on a narrow slice of that leadership. Not in Mr. President. You’ve got to take on the entire presidential portfolio: running the war on terror, dealing with domestic crises, managing your Cabinet, working with US allies and rivals, passing your domestic agenda through Congress, confirming Supreme Court justices if a seat comes open, and every other responsibility that comes with sitting in the Oval Office.

The game is an adaptation of the tabletop version, the result of a 9-year design and research process. It has a vast amount of content, ensuring tons of replayability - hundreds of crises and events, dozens of actions for the player to choose from, and subsystems capturing the whole range of presidential opportunities and challenges. Players can opt for the sandbox scenario, which puts them at the start of a 4-year term that encompasses a general variety of trends and events of the early 21st century. Or, if a player wants to see if he or she can do better than an actual president, there’s a scenario for each presidential term. Want to see if you can navigate the financial crisis, pass health care reform, and contain Iran better than President Obama did? Do you think you can deal with 9/11 better than President Bush did, perhaps even also achieving Bush’s objective of Social Security reform? Mr. President lets you take your shot.



The tabletop version is a monster game; one of the most common player comments about it is “I would love to buy and play this game, but I don’t have the table space” or “I can’t leave a game like this set up for days and days.” Another common comment is “I spend a lot of time finding the right tables to roll on and the right rules to apply.” Exia’s adaptation will remove all of that player pain and present players with a tightened but entirely faithful Mr. President experience. (Images represent prototypes and work in progress - not the final experience!)



But we know there are pitfalls with translating a game like Mr. President to the PC screen. Part of what’s compelling about Mr. President, and other open-ended sandbox simulation style games, is that by reading the rules and pushing the counters, the player gains a deeper understanding of the choices the game offers and how to play towards and around them. A system that automates everything and simply presents the player with results fails in two ways: it denies the player a moment to imagine what’s happening, and it forgoes an opportunity to understand what impacted the chance of success. Exia has an experienced game dev team. We will not fall into these traps.

Like any game about politics and governing, Mr. President expresses a particular creative vision. It portrays the American presidency as a great institution and America as a force for good in the world - but whose potential is strongest when people of different parties and views come together, and when America works well with its allies. Like any creative vision, people will disagree - but in today’s political atmosphere, many players may find Mr. President to be a breath of fresh air.

Ananda:

Mr. President is a game about domestic and world politics, with the highest of stakes. Not counting surprise losses from certain Crisis Cards, there are fifteen ways to insta-lose in Mr. President. That, and the fact that the Core Sandbox Scenario involves a tapestry of different possibilities from the entirety of the 2000-2020 period, means that part of the fun in Mr. President is alternate history.

One of the most fun - and scariest - things about alternate history is envisioning it. To that end, in the digital version of Mr. President, our art director Joshua Balcaceres is doing illustrations that depict the world as it might be, if you make too many mistakes (or if you can't hit a die roll to save your life... or the world!).

One of the instant-defeat conditions is triggered should China reach 15 Influence throughout the world. If this happens, this means the PRC has achieved its core strategic goal of the 21st century so far: the creation of a China-led world order and the subsequent achievement of its global agenda. The picture the player sees, then, is one of the starkest elements of that victory - the successful takeover of Taiwan. And now, you'll hear from Josh, who will talk about the artistic process and considerations that went into visually realizing this terrible outcome.

Josh:

One of the central themes of this piece is conveying, through art, the idea of a nation overtaken—losing not just its freedom and independence, but its very sense of identity. The dominant color is red, symbolizing the PRC’s takeover, and the scene is envisioned as a wide-angle shot of that grim possibility. At the heart of the composition stands Taipei 101—Taiwan’s tallest building—used here to represent the loss of national identity, pride, and progress.



The entire piece is painted in the chiaroscuro style, intentionally using minimal light. If any light appears, it is the setting sun—symbolizing the fading hopes of the Taiwanese people—as PRC destroyers and military helicopters cast looming shadows over Taipei. Chiaroscuro is a painting technique defined by stark contrasts between light and dark. Popularized by Caravaggio, it evokes powerful emotions such as uncertainty, drama, death, and sorrow—all fitting for the scene depicted. This stylistic choice aligns with the visual tone of our Crises Cards.



The term "chiaroscuro" itself originates from artists working with cheap, non-white paper, forcing them to bring light into their images using white pencil or chalk—essentially carving figures out of darkness.



The final touch was adding the PRC flag waving over Taipei 101 subtly, but powerfully.



Go paint some art into the world.

- Joshua Balcaceres
Studio Art Director - Exia Labs

Now that the Americana Style of Mr. President has been established for the art of the Game, then where do we go from here?

We wanted to evoke that the President was/could be anyone so we decided to not show the President’s likeness, but only his back. We want players to look within and imagine themselves as the President on the United States. This is an artist tool to mentally imagine themselves in the office while they picture the image. In Art Psychology, this is called: The Theater of the Mind. There’s no likeness, or President I can draw more faithfully and more artistically than what your own imagination will create, therefore visual guides like this help with the visualization process.

We start with some initial exploration images, akin to storyboards, for the main screen. Here you can see my initial painter sketches, one is close to the desk, and one is with the camera zoomed out to reveal some portraits with the President looking at the lawn from the Resolute Desk; looking at the windows, as if he’s pondering a decision or reflecting on a crisis that’s happening - and you as the viewer, are seeing him through your own window. The parallels were there visually so we chose the latter.




Simple digital pencil sketch with some colors and brushes indicating possible lighting and as well as two distinct portraits (these would become Lincoln and Washington), as well as the US Flag and the Presidential Flag with the motto, from the Latin ”E pluribus unum” — which means: from many, one. Thus representing even more the visual message to get across.

A few days later, leveraging modern painting techniques we discussed in the previous post, we arrived at this.



The Washington portrait by Gilbert Stewart oil on canvas 1796, and the Lincoln portrait by Willem Frederik Karel Travers, oil on canvas, 1865 - were the obvious choices for this.

While this was a good start, we felt it was missing some more details, aside from portraying the President as a Baseball Fan (with a ball signed on glass, acting as the painting’s secret Artist Signature) furnishing the Painting with a bust of Lincoln on his side and George Washington’s favorite flowers underneath him, we needed more. Our game designer Ananda mentioned that perhaps more details were needed from the Resolute Desk, as it’s quite elaborate and symbolic for a desk and to our nation.



With a reference image of President Obama I was able to then replicate and Draw all the details and make modifications (by hand) due to the select intricacy of the details that needed to be there for both accuracy and history buffs alike. After some time, and with more tweaks to the lighting we arrived at our final Main Screen of the game.



Overall, we tried to stay away from “partisan” colors like red/blue dominant colors as to not portray any bias and let them choose how the game of Mr. President will be played from the get-go. The carpet is usually blue for example, we went for a more cream, and classic look to the Oval’s signature carpet, as well as the drapery, which can sometimes have party colors depending on which President sat there.



At the end, the painting had over 280 layers of paint, VFX adjustments, Color Correction (LUT), Levels, Saturation and Color Balance were added, alongside a desk phone they have, with more papers and the reflection on the desk (see resolute details above).

Tools change, time goes on, but the Painter and its Art never dies.

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.