Matthews and co-designer Christian Leonhard spent many hours balancing the relative power of the campaign cards.
Leonhard: "Every time we felt the need to adjust a card by strengthening or weakening its effects, we not only had to offset this with a corresponding change somewhere else but needed to ensure that balance was maintained across the deck -- if we reduced one of Nixon's cards from 4 points to 3, we either needed to reduce one of Kennedy's cards as well or increase a different Nixon card from 3 to 4 to compensate, a change which might itself require shifting debate icons between cards to preserve the relative balance between those.
"Of course, what I refer to as something we "needed" to do might just as easily be diagnosed as OCD by someone else!"
Matthews: "It was basically a simple mathematical equation, that we played with in our heads more in playtesting. All cards add up to 4 -- either 4 ops and no rest, or 3 ops and 1 rest, etc. After we came up with the equation, we tried it out, and it seemed to work really well. We never looked back."
Published by Z-Man Games and designed by Leonhard and Matthews, 1960: The Making of the President is for 2 players, ages 12 and up. It takes about 90 minutes per game. The suggested retail price is $49.99.