Published by Z-Man Games and designed by Christian Leonhard and Jason Matthews, 1960: The Making of the President is for 2 players, ages 12 and up, about 90 to 120 minutes per game.
The players take on the roles of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in recreating the 1960 U.S. presidential election. The goal is to finish the game with enough electoral votes to claim victory.
A candidate's support in a state is measured by wooden cubes (red for Nixon, blue for Kennedy). At the start of the game, many states are empty, but some are predisposed to support one candidate or the other. For example, Massachusetts starts with two blue cubes while Ohio and Illinois each start with a red cube.
The game primarily revolves around the 91 campaign cards, which were painstakingly researched and evoke the ambiance of this historic election. These cards allow players to add cubes to the board, collect rest cubes (which are used at several key points during the game), advertise in a region, and more.
1960: The Making of the President is full of tough decisions. You will always want to do more than your resources allow. It captures many of the emotions in a hard-fought campaign, with swings of euphoria and depression, as well as the tactics and strategy needed to win a victory in the Electoral College.
Leonhard and Matthews were kind enough to answer a few questions about their game.
Note: For more comments from Leonhard and Matthews, browse this 1960 photo gallery.
Why did you choose to focus the game on 1960? Why not a more recent election?
Matthews: Looking over the course of history, there are five or so elections that are squeaky close and also interesting. The bulk of them are in the 19th century. But they disqualify themselves with their obtuseness. Elections in the 19th century were radically different from their modern counterparts. The most obvious difference is that candidates didn't actively campaign. That was too immodest and demeaning. Presidents at the time needed to seem to bend to popular acclaim. Furthermore, the issues are very alien to modern ears -- The Bank of the United States, anyone? So, that drew us naturally to more modern elections.
In the modern context, there are really only two elections that stand out -- 1960 and 2000. We talked about 2000, but it conjures up a couple of problems. First, we thought it was too raw. People still have an emotional attachment to their point of view about the outcome in 2000. We were not looking to launch a political debate, just a political board game. Secondly, the 2000 election was essentially decided by a series of court rulings culminating in the decisions of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that's an election game with a mere nine votes at stake. Might make for an interesting design challenge, but it was not one we were looking to undertake. Of course, if you ignore the Supreme Court, it's not the 2000 election.
So, by process of elimination, if nothing else, we ended up with Nixon vs. Kennedy. And I am happy that's where we landed.
How long did you work on perfecting the cards?
Leonhard: The card list came together reasonably quickly in terms of deciding on the people and events we wanted to have represented, say over a period of a few weeks at most. Nailing down the precise effects of each card, however, and the appropriate point value for each, was a process which went on for months. Obviously, it was important that this balance be right to ensure that both options for how to play a card would be attractive, but there was also a thematic element at play -- a desire to have card strength be proportional to the historical significance of the corresponding event.
How difficult was it to achieve the right balance of strategy and the luck involved in drawing cubes out of the bag?
Matthews: I really liked the cube drawing mechanism from The End of the Triumvirate (designed by Max Gabrian and Johannes Ackva, published in 2005 by Lookout Games and Z-Man Games). So we decided to incorporate cubes as a randomizer fairly early. At some stage in the development, we decided to use the cubes as a way to balance the luck of the card draw. The resulting see-saw effect of luck in the game is really interesting. If your cards are hot, you aren't going to want to go into the bag. But, if your cards are cold, at least you can take some comfort in advertising, support checks and even election day.
We did spend a lot of time working through cube draws on election day. We wanted to diminish any perception of randomness. After talking with a bunch of folks who had played the game, the endorsement system evolved. I think the end result has the right feel.
Why did you decide to focus on the general election instead of a primary, which could have been a multi-player game?
Leonhard: It's no coincidence that most games on the subject of presidential elections have done just that, for the reason you suggest. Our goal was somewhat different, though. We weren't looking simply to make yet another game with an election theme, of which many of varying quality already exist. (We wanted) to design one which specifically attempted to capture the feel of running a presidential campaign, of which there are remarkably few. And as important a part of the process as the primaries are, obtaining your party's nomination is only the beginning of the struggle for the White House.
Our desire to make a game rich in the kind of historical detail that card-driven games make possible also came into play, of course. Since we had opted to go with a specific election as opposed to something more generic, it was important that this election be as engaging as possible, and few would dispute that the Nixon/Kennedy contest -- with its famous televised debates and nail-biter of a finish -- resonates more strongly with most of us than does Hubert Humphrey's performance in the Wisconsin primary.
