Mr. President News

[p]Next Monday is officially Washington’s Birthday, a federal holiday celebrated in honor of George Washington, the first President of the United States. There’s a lot of confusion around this holiday as technically, Washington’s birthday is on February 22nd. Furthermore, this holiday is widely known as Presidents’ Day.[/p][p]In celebration of Washington’s Birthday and Presidents’ Day, we're excited to announce that Mr. President is now available on MacOS. We're also providing an overview of our next major content patch scheduled for March 19. Since our launch less than a month ago, we’ve delivered 23 major bug fixes, 34 minor bug fixes, and 11 UI/UX updates for a total of 68 fixes. It’s time to focus on more content and features![/p][p]Here’s what’s coming next:[/p]

• [p]Focused National Intel placement and effects segments[/p]
• [p]UN Actions[/p]
• [p]Trade Agreements[/p]
• [p]The rest of the action lists for the PRC and Russia:[/p]
  • [p]The PRC will get its Secure Sea Lanes action, its ability to veto sanctions and invest in global oil partnerships, and further invest in the PLA and cyber warfare. Most dangerously, if they have a lot of actions, they’ll be able to access their Prepare for War action - this can lead to war with either India or Japan.[/p]
  • [p]Russia, meanwhile, will get the ability to more directly test or confront NATO, and get rid of sanctions (this can have a big impact, since they start the Sandbox scenario with Multilateral Sanctions in place). Two of Russia’s actions, though, will have to wait until the North Korean and Iranian missile programs are in the game. [/p]

[p]These features will continue to flesh out the turn sequence and get the Peer Rivals closer to the threat level they’re intended to have.[/p][p]Last but not least, we want to recognize a few of our community members who have been extra helpful. On the Steam forums, Finarfin and Rockhopper are not only finding and reporting bugs, they are helping other players. On Discord, we have folks like birb, pepper0nc1n1, JustAnotherNerd2025 and many others helping new players. And it’s been incredible to see players like Black Knight (Discord) reach 60 legacy points, VeronicaCardican (Steam forums) with 71 legacy points, and Lenty (Steam forums) with 66 legacy points, playing through bugs and a lack of features. [/p][p]As always, we appreciate your continued support.[/p][p]Happy Presidents’ Day![/p][p]On behalf of the development team,[/p][p]Jon[/p]

Thanks to everyone for participating in Mr. President’s Early Access! Our first patch includes new features, and a bunch of bug fixes. Originally we planned to launch Early Access with the “1 Action for POTUS and each Cabinet Member” segment, but it didn’t quite make the deadline. With this patch, you’ll be getting at least 10 more player actions to take in each year of your Presidency which should help you contend better with the global situation.

We’ve also continued to burn down the bug backlog and we really appreciate everyone who has submitted a bug report via the Steam forums or through Discord. Additionally, we’ve seen reports of some game crashes which are a bit harder to investigate through those channels, so we’ve integrated a crash reporting client into the game. Now if your game crashes, we will get that information directly and should be able to get fixes for those kinds of issues in future updates.

Again, with the number of changes here, there’s a chance that save files from previous versions may no longer work. We’re going to make save files more durable between versions, but right now we’d rather go as fast as we can to get all the gameplay in.

• Added the “1 Action for POTUS and each Cabinet Member” action segments to the Turn Sequence.
  
• Integrated a crash reporter client into the game so we will now get reports when a player’s game crashes.
  

Rogue States were misbehaving a bit so we put in a few fixes for them. We also fixed a core issue with how our user interface was putting cards on the screen:

• [UI] Re-worked how various card widgets are added to the screen to prevent issues where quickly pressing “Continue” could cause cards not to show up, leading to the player getting stuck. This should fix a class of bugs that were reported where certain player selections were not available.
  
• [Gameplay] Resolving a war involving a Lvl 1 Rogue State no longer creates extra terror groups.
  
• [Gameplay] Cyber attacks against Rogue States now properly decrease their strength in the current war.
  
• [Gameplay] Defeating a Rogue State in a war no longer places terror groups in other regions.
  
• [Gameplay] DRMs referencing Secretary of State’s Diplomatic rating now correctly use Diplomatic skill instead of Domestic skill.
  
• [Gameplay] Players should now be able to Joint Raid with NATO in East Europe.
  
• [Gameplay] After winning a war, free military movement actions were not always accessible, leading to a stuck state. This is now fixed.
  
• [Gameplay] End of Turn Consequences now reduces Rogue State levels based on regional Stability.
  
• [Gameplay] Military Professionals action is now limited to one use per activation phase.
  
• [Performance] Game no longer consumes large amounts of CPU when not in focus.
  

• [Gameplay] How the Sausage is Made no longer gives an extra friend in Congress on certain results.
  
• [Gameplay] Fixed copy/paste issues in China Acts which referenced Russia and vice-versa with Russia Acts referencing China.
  
• [Gameplay] Crisis Card#104 now correctly reduces Relations with Media on a failed Prestige Check.
  
• [Gameplay] Add in missing selection in failure case of Raid Terror Group action.
  
• [Gameplay] Regional Major Crisis now correctly removes a level 1 Terror Group before adding a level 2 Terror Group.
  
• [UI] War Strengths visually update when moving US forces.
  
• [UI] Clicking the Settings icon in the top right could cause windowed resolution to drastically change; now the last resolution is retained correctly.
  
• [UI] Russia Acts stack now correctly shows the number of remaining actions when loading a saved game.
  
• [UI] Fixed typo in Arms Sales action.
  

• [UI] Added additional summary information for the Media Slant procedure to clarify what was happening.
  
• [UI] Added new Tooltip for active war tokens to show the current war status and force ratio.
  

Now that the POTUS and Cabinet Member Action segment is in the game, our next major focus will be on adding in missing turn sequence segments like Focused National Intelligence, UN Actions, State of the Union, and more. Additionally, we are still looking into hardening save files across versions and will soon add an Auto-Save feature. We plan on shipping patches every two weeks.

Thanks again to everyone that has participated in Mr. President’s Early Access, if you’re enjoying the game and have not done so yet, please leave us a review on Steam!

It's been a crazy week for Exia with the Early Access launch of Mr. President. We’ve been delighted at the response to the game so far and really appreciate everyone who’s joined us for the first week of Early Access.

This week we’ve been focusing on gathering lots of fantastic bug reports from the community both through the Steam Forums and our Discord. We’ve tried to prioritize and fix most of the reported bugs in this first patch to give everyone a more stable and less buggy build to play going into the weekend. We greatly appreciate everyone who reported an issue - you’re helping make the game better for everyone.

Lastly, with the number of changes here, there’s a chance that save files from the initial launch version may no longer work - particularly if you saved the game during one of your Action Segments. We’re very sorry about this and will be working on making save files more durable between versions.


From saboteur Secretaries of State to some quite “unconventional” war setups, there were several high-impact bugs. We prioritized fixing them as fast as we could:

• [Gameplay] Secretary of State no longer sabotages Cabinet Improvement rolls and properly assists with improving the effectiveness of the cabinet.
  
• [Gameplay] Wars should no longer carry over combatants from previous wars (no more countries fighting themselves, civil wars are tracked with their own tokens).
  
• [Gameplay] Turn Sequence Phase 3: Any 4 Diplomatic or Military Actions segments are no longer skipped. This one was causing the game to be much harder than we intended. Now you'll have an additional 4 (or 5 if spending 2 APs) actions each year.
  
• [Gameplay] Regional Major Crises are now correctly triggered in Central America.
  
• [Gameplay] Opponent’s passed Bills no longer remain as opponent bills if you re-introduce them in a later Legislative Segment.
  
• [Gameplay] Congress is no longer incorrectly antagonistic against your attempts to rally for bills; using the Bully Pulpit now applies the correct DRMs.
  
• [Gameplay] Use Military Professionals action had numerous issues. This action has been completely re-worked and should no longer have these problems.
  
• [Gameplay] Gather Intel/Drone Strike/Air Strike/Raid Terror Group also had several issues, especially with the DRMs, these actions have been re-worked and these problems should now be fixed.
  
• [Gameplay] The Joint Maneuvers and Training action could sometimes decrease your Ally’s relative strength. This has been fixed to correctly increase it instead.
  
• [Gameplay] The De-Escalate action now properly reduces the conflict between RoK and DPRK and removes Tensions counters from both nations involved in the conflict.
  
• [Crisis Cards] Added more event cards to Year 1 crisis card deck to reduce the chance of running out of cards. Due to us having fewer Cascade cards than event cards, this deck was smaller than it should be. We’ve added more Event cards than the paper game calls for temporarily to account for this until we have more Cascade cards implemented.
  
• [SFX] Sound effects now correctly play if you Load Game or start a New Game.
  
• [UI] Loading games during certain in-progress choice selections should no longer lead to a hard-lock due to selections not showing in the UI.
  

• [Gameplay] Left-most and Right-most can be confusing. The initial Bipartisan Cooperation value is now set to the correct box based on the number of Radicals and Moderates.
  
• [Gameplay] How the Sausage is Made should no longer force you to be for/against a bill when rolling the best result.
  
• [Gameplay] When Cyber-attacking, if China and Russia accuse the US of Warmongering, you no longer lose all of your UN Goodwill counters and a decrease in World Opinion of US.
  
• [Gameplay] When Cyber-attacking Rogue states, they now correctly lose strength in their active war.
  
• [Gameplay] The Attempt to Remove Chinese or Russian Influence action is no longer selectable if there is not a valid influence token to target.
  
• [Gameplay] Tensions tokens should no longer be drawn with their number side up.
  
• [Gameplay] Min/Max DRM range added to Corralling the Cabinet as well as fixed incorrect procedure description.
  
• [Crisis Cards] Card #120 correctly removes Russian Influence from the Eurozone instead of a random region.
  
• [Crisis Cards] Card #159 now correctly removes a Russia Influence counter.
  
• [Crisis Cards] Card #164 correctly adds strength to DPRK and not RoK.
  
• [Crisis Cards] Card #174 text no longer spills outside of the card face.
  
• [SFX/VFX] Certain token changes (trends going from Increasing/Decreasing to none or DARPA Rapid counters being added/removed) should now correctly make sound effects and flash.
  
• [UI] Corralling the Cabinet action showed a D10 in the Take Action box instead of a D6.
  
• [UI] Terror/Chaos table roll now mentions the correct D10 roll range for Chaos.
  
• [UI] Tooltips should no longer get stuck on the screen, especially in the top left corner.
  
• [UI] Fixed a few occurrences of widgets staying on screen when they shouldn’t such as the left side shadow or certain choice selection widgets.
  
• [UI] 1 Action for POTUS and each Cabinet Member segment now properly greyed out in the Special Activations Phase to show that it is not currently in the game. (We’re working on it! See Upcoming Features/Changes below)
  
• [UI] Tensions on POTUS/Cabinet Focus now correctly display in loaded games.
  

For this first patch, we mostly focused on bug fixes, but there were a few things we wanted to tweak to better help players understand certain aspects of the game.

• [UI] War Status tracker added to the Board Walkthrough.
  
• [UI] Better Tooltip descriptions of how certain tracks (State of Economy, Regional Alignment, Cabinet Effectiveness, etc) work and what the Trends mean for these tracks.
  
• [UI] Tweaked the crosshair indicator when targeting Terror Groups to improve readability of their levels.
  
• [UI] Added clarifying text that Israel cannot use the Joint Action: Stabilize Region.
  
• [UI] Added a new widget to the Begin Turn: Set Starting Action Points segment to better explain where the Action Points were coming from.
  
• [UX] War Status tracker added to the WASD mappings.
  
• [UX] Arrow Keys for panning map added to the Controls section of the Walkthrough (this one was in the build on launch, we just forgot to call it out in the Walkthrough).
  
• [UX] Increased the maximum zoom level so you can now get a closer look at the board.
  
• [UX] Removed a few places with empty pauses where the Continue button needed to be pressed but nothing happened.
  

There were quite a few bugs reported across the channels and despite our desire to fix them all, we just haven’t had enough time yet since launch to do so. Below are a few of the larger bugs that we’re aware of that are not yet fixed in this patch. Not all of the bugs that have been reported are listed here, just some of the bigger ones, though we are tracking all of the issues you report.

• [UI] Quickly spamming the Continue button can lead to UI widgets not appearing on screen and this can lead to a locked state (usually fixable with the Get Unstuck button).
  
• [Gameplay] Loading a saved game does not always correctly apply the restrictions on certain player actions leading to the ability to take some actions more than once an Activation Segment or Phase.
  
• [Gameplay] China/Russia Acts Espionage table roll 4-7 result not correctly adding strength to US opponent in war.
  

Our highest immediate new feature priority is the POTUS + Cabinet Member Action segment at the start of each year. This just barely missed Early Access launch, but it’s the player’s only action window before a Peer Rival activation, which in the event of really bad rolls can lead to a pretty nasty situation for the player without much they can do about it. We’ve also heard your consistent requests for an autosave feature, so we’re looking to get that in ASAP as well.

Right now, the missing pieces in the Early Access version are:

• The POTUS + Cabinet Member Action segment, as noted above
  
• The Summit, Trade Agreement, and Sanctions player actions
  
• The lower-end actions for China and Russia
  
• Unilateral Ally actions
  
• Adversary actions (Iran and North Korea), and their Missile Tracks
  
• Part of the Missile Tracks feature is adding the two auto-loss conditions if either Iran or North Korea reaches full nuclear capability and becomes involved in any war
  
• Several of the Cyber Attack variations (particularly relating to Adversaries - once we add e.g. North Korea’s ability to advance its nuclear program, players need the Cyberattack option to disrupt it in that way)
  
• UN Actions
  
• Great Society legislation
  
• These are large-scale, transformative legislative packages that are harder to pass (they have to go through the process twice) but have larger impact, and aren’t repeatable
  
• The remaining Crisis Cards, Crisis Chits (particularly NSA and Good Times)
  
• The Chaos portion of Terror/Chaos in Activation Phases 2 and 3
  
• The State of the Union Segment
  
• Re-election for a second term as well as the Mid-Term elections
  
• Difficulties other than Normal (Harder, Easier)
  
• Exceptional White House Resource cards
  
• Scandals track and update procedure during the Legislative Segment
  
• New Year’s Surprise during the Begin Turn Segment (omitted due to low number of Cascade Cards at the moment)
  
• Focused National Intel placement and effects segments
  

[p]Mr. President Early Access begins on January 26, 2026 during Steam’s Board Game Fest. If you haven't wishlisted the game yet, please take a minute and please do so and share this with your friends who might be interested in this game.[/p][p][/p][h3]Why Early Access?[/h3][p]Mr. President will continue to receive substantial UI, feature, and content updates on a monthly basis for the next year or so. We would like to involve the community in the game’s development so that we can create the best presidential simulation in the market.[/p][h3]Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?[/h3][p]Mr. President will be in Early Access for approximately 1 year.[/p][h3]How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?[/h3][p]During Mr. President’s development, we plan to make the digital version have feature parity with the paper version (2nd edition) and include additional digital-only features. The full version will include 100 additional Crisis Cards which will be delivered in subsequent updates as we build upon the initial Early Access Build. Also any missing gameplay systems from the board game such as Scandals, Nuclear Missile Tracks, and the remaining Crisis Chits and table roll entries will be included in the full version. The full version will also include several special scenarios based on modern presidencies as well as two additional difficulties (Easier, Harder) for the Sandbox scenario.[/p][p]Additionally, we plan to implement some special digital only features such as:[/p]

• [p]Allowing for the player to select an avatar portrait to represent themselves in the game.[/p]
• [p]A detailed Legacy screen summarizing all events that took place in a player’s presidency.[/p]
• [p]Steam Cloud Saves and Achievements[/p]

[h3]What is the current state of the Early Access version?[/h3][p]Players are able to play through a significant part of a presidential term in the Sandbox scenario on Normal difficulty. This includes Actions (domestic, diplomatic, and military), Terror and Chaos, Wars and Civil Wars, UN Acts, joint and unilateral Ally Actions, Rogue States, Russia Acts, China Acts, Conflict Tracks, landmark legislation, the Nobel Prize, the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, Cabinet priorities, Summits, and more![/p][p][/p]

[p]We’re marking the end of the government shutdown with something special — an updated demo featuring the Legislative Segment (now live on Steam) and we also have a few exciting announcements to share.[/p][p][/p][p]Legislative Segment[/p][p]Adding the Legislative Segment was important for two reasons. First, we wanted to tackle the top feedback we received from our June Steam Next Fest Demo:[/p][p]Players weren’t sure how to tell whether they were doing well or making progress. The demo emphasized the risks and dangers in the foreign policy sphere, but “survive the demo” is only a small part of the picture.[/p][p]Provide a more intuitive user interface. Some players wanted even more tooltips whereas other players felt that the zooming options were not sufficient (text too small).[/p][p]If you look at the flow below, we’re exposing more of the breakdowns and modifiers involved in resolving actions. Here you can see just one display that tells the player what their overall political leverage in Congress is, along with the result (increased or decreased support for your bills).[/p][p][/p][p]Second, the legislative segment is a major source of Legacy Points, which is how you win in Mr. President. It’s not enough just to survive the many possible loss conditions - will you have a high Legacy score at the end?[/p][p]Key Announcements[/p][p]Early Access is getting closer — we’re locking in a Q1 2026 launch! We’ve got a specific date in mind, but we’re teaming up with a few media partners to make sure the announcement lands big.[/p][p]Before then, we’re running playtests in Brussels with NATO staff, plus we’re opening up an exclusive in-person session for Mr. President fans, strategy gamers, and wargamers. Sign up to join the action: [/p][p]https://luma.com/kmlhtnii. Two participants will also win a signed copy of Twilight Struggle — autographed by Ananda Gupta![/p]