New Deal
onside report by Dave Boundy
Back in May, I played an online game with some people in Philadephia. It was a playtest of a Megagame that they planned to put on at Gen Con 2025. The game was based on the negotiations for Roosevelt’s “New Deal” – the package of legislation intended to revitalise the USA economy after the Great Depression. I felt that the approach lacked something for a Megagame, but had potential for a club game at CLWG. After gaining their permission, I scheduled it for the October weekend online day.
Their original game and a site giving detailed cover of the New Deal can be found at
Original Game and History of the New Deal
My original intention was to run the game as designed and then to go over ways to improve it. As time approached, however, I could see that we would not have the numbers to do that, so I made my own conversion to a club game, including ways to scale it back. My document is at CLWG Version of New Deal . I’d like to thank Brian for adjudication help/playing Roosevelt and to Jim, Adam, Andrew, Nick and Evan for being the players.
Game Structure
The game has different influence constituencies (such as Eastern Farmers, Industrialists, Union Activists) each with an amount of political capital(PC). PC can be spent on presenting, supporting or opposing legislation. Legislation is classified into different importance (e.g. major or minor program) requiring different amounts of PC to get it accepted. Constituencies lose committed PC but gain PC if they propose or support legislation. Legislation success or otherwise affects the country stability/perceived stability which itself has an effect on PC to be given as “income” to each constituency.
Player Reaction
The players had no problem understanding the concept or the mechanics and the game seemed to operate well enough mechanically. However, it lacked energy and it lacked real commitment from the players. I think to them, it must have felt a little like going through the motion of playing. I think there were a number of reasons for that:
- the affect on each constituency of different legislation was not clear to the players. This led to a lack of real understanding of trade-offs and when to support or when to/ how to negotiate, so an optimum strategy could be to put all your effort and PC into just one piece of legislation
- there were not enough players. The game as envisaged has 9 or 10 constituencies, which would improve the negotiations
- online play dampened negotiations
Future Development
Discussion concluded that most of these problems can be resolved. It was thought that face-to-face play would improve things and that a series of cards detailing potential legislation, would make for better play. Whether on the cards or separately, more explicit impact on each constituency of different legislation would allow negotiation to be much more productive. To this end, Brian had produced some information at the time and has expanded that since. The one area that could be a killer is the area of player numbers. I’m not sure that enough CLWG people would be interested enough to participate, so that remains an area of real risk if I were to develop the game further.
