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Review of 1960: The Making of the President
Blurb from the publisher: 'All elections are turning points, but the presidential election of 1960 holds a special place in American history. The 1950s had been a period of unparalleled economic growth and US global power under the stewardship of President Dwight Eisenhower and his Vice President, Richard Nixon. Nixon's humble origins gave him a common touch that appealed to small-town America and encompassed the idyllic spirit of the 1950's. Senator John F. Kennedy was in many ways Nixon's antithesis; charming, Harvard-educated, and the scion of an American political dynasty. In 1960: The Making of the President, you take on the role of one of these formidable opponents as they vie to lead America. As candidates, players must contend will all of the great issues of the day, from the Cold War and the voters' pocketbooks to civil rights and religious intolerance.
The contest is fought out on an electoral map of the United States as it stood in 1960, a map where Louisiana and Florida share the same number of electoral voters, as do California and Pennsylvania. Using a card-driven game system, all of the major events which shaped the actual campaign are represented: Nixon's lazy shave, President Eisenhower's late endorsement, and the 'Catholic question' are all included as specific event cards. The famous televised debates and final election day push are each handled with their own subsystems. Candidates vie to capture each state's electoral votes using campaign points in the four different regions of the country. At the same time, they must build momentum by dominating the issues of the day and attempt to gain control of the airwaves.
As with a real election campaign, the challenge is to adapt your game plan as the ground shifts beneath your feet. There are never enough resources or time to do everything that needs doing. You will need to make tough calls about where to expend your effort and momentum. Your sole object is to propel yourself into the White House. This fast-playing strategy game for two players challenges you to relive the most significant political contest of the Twentieth Century. Will you recreate history, or rewrite it? 1960: The Making of the President provides you the opportunity to do both.
Winner of the 2008 International Gamer Awards best two-player strategy game and nominated for numerous other awards, 1960: The Making of the President is widely recognized as the best U.S. presidential election game ever published. Of course, the inspiration for this design derives from GMT's blockbuster card-driven game, Twilight Struggle.'
What you get: Your USD 90 or equivalent will buy you the 1960: The Making of the President, an asymmetrical, card-driven, hand-management, area majority boardgame of medium complexity for two players that can be played within two hours. The game was initially printed by Z-Man Games in 2007, yet it found its current GMT Games home in 2017. It just received its second GMT printing, where all known errata have been incorporated into the rules. The copy I am reviewing is one of 2017's first printing, yet this is ultimately irrelevant. Potential errata aside, there are no other differences between the two printings, not to mention that GMT Games provides living rules for all its games on its website.
In addition to the 20-page Campaign Manual that can be also downloaded from the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: one 22'' x 34'' mounted game board, 50 State Seals, 3 Issue tiles, 2 Candidate tokens, 12 Momentum markers, 2 Turn Track and Phase Track markers, 170 cubes (85 blue, 85 red, as well as a few spares), 15 Endorsement markers, 97 Campaign cards, 2 Candidate cards, 2 Prevention Event markers, 16 Endorsement cards, one Political Capital bag, and one Debate board.
In the interest of full disclosure, I own 1960 since 2018 and have played more than a dozen games on it. This is not your usual playtest.
Gameplay: The board depicts the US of A, with its states grouped in regions. The game begins with the candidates already enjoying some support in different states. As an example, the Republicans already start with two cubes on the board in Kansas, the Democrats with two cubes in Louisiana, while Kentucky does not support anybody yet. Twelve cubes per player are inserted in the opaque Political Capital bag. The game is played in nine turns, each representing one week of the campaign. All turns except 6 (the Debates) and 9 (the Election Day itself) follow the same format and are broken down into eight phases.
During Initiative each player is dealt new cards, six before the Debates and seven after. An initiative check (a random draw from the bag until two cubes of the same colour have been drawn) determines the player who decides who will play first.
Activity is a phase that gets repeated five consecutive times; in other words, it covers phases two to six. Each player plays and resolves a single card. A card can be played either as an Event or for its Campaign points (2 to 4, depending on the card). Alternatively, a player can play a Candidate card. When played as an Event, the text instructs on what to do. Some events last for the round, while others last for the game. Debate events are resolved on round 6, Election day events on round 9, while Prevention Events render other Events unplayable.
If a card is played for Campaign points, the player can use them in three different ways: campaign in states, advertise in regions, and position himself on existing issues.
The first option adds support cubes to individual states for a candidate. However, only colours of a single party can be found in a single state. Thus, if a candidate already has cubes there and the other candidate wants to place his, part of his action will we spent towards eliminating his opponent's cubes. If a candidate has four or more cubes in a state, he is considered as carrying that state. In that case, the other player must make a Support Check (a draw from the bag) for each campaign point spent to gain cubes on that state. If he draws his own cubes, all is well; if not, tough luck, his undertaking was not met with success. The same is valid when the candidate is physically present in that state. Moving the candidate is free when Campaign points are used for state support and no regions are crossed.
The second option adds media support cubes to the regional advertising boxes on the board, through the now well-known bag draw. Just like states, advertising boxes can only contain one colour of cubes, and in order to place yours you need to remove those of your opponent first. Media support allows the players to ignore Support Checks when they place state support cubes in states carried by their opponent. It also allows players to switch the position of adjacent issues on the Issues track during the Momentum Phase.
The third option places cubes on issue tiles. There are three issues all in all: economy, defence, and civil rights. Only one player can have cubes on an issue. Issues provide two types of benefits. First, they interact with Events creating synergy and added value. Second, the leader on an issue receives momentum rewards and/or endorsement cards during the Momentum phase.
Irrespective of the manner Campaign points are used, each time a card is used like that the opponent gets the opportunity to use his Momentum in order to bring forth the Event, if that benefits him. Each time a card is played, players also collect the number of indicated Rest cubes in their colour. These are important, seeing how they will be placed in the bag in the last phase of the turn.
A player may also play a candidate card for 5 Campaign points. The card becomes exhausted and cannot be used in the future, unless an Event refreshes it.
Following the five Activity phases players get into Momentum. First, they lose half the momentum they had already earned. Then, the player with the most media support may switch the gravity of two adjacent issues, if he wishes to. The candidates then gain new Momentum and Endorsements if they lead on issues. The third issue hands out one Momentum, the second one Momentum or one Endorsement, and the first both a Momentum and an Endorsement. Endorsements allow the placement of markers inside a region, and follow the same rules as support cubes. Finally, one support cube is removed from each issue tile.
Campaign Strategy is a turn's final phase. On the first five turns players place one card face down to their Campaign Strategy Card Stack, while on the last two turns they place two cards. The cards from the initial five rounds will be used for the Debates round (the sixth round), while those of the last two rounds will aid you towards Election Day. Rest cubes now get mixed into the Political Capital bag.
Rounds six and nine play differently. In Debates, Initiative determines the player that will start, not the player that decides who starts. It is followed by Campaign Strategy, whereupon each player retrieves the five cards he placed in his Campaign Strategy Deck during the previous rounds. The players Set the Stage by confirming the gravity of each issue, and then they Debate. They do so by selecting a card from their respective stacks and simultaneously revealing it. Each card shows a debate icon, as well as the icon of one candidate, or both. These indicate where a card will be placed when played. Thus, a player can actually place a card on his opponent's side of the debate. When two cards have been placed on the same side of an issue, that issue is won by the player with the highest value of Campaign points on the issue. Obviously enough, that might not necessarily be the player with the two cards on his side. In case of a tie, the player with the initiative wins the the issue. The winning player receives State Support cubes depending on its importance. In a twist, these cubes ignore potential Support Checks. The round continues until either all three issues have been won, or until both candidates exhaust their cards. In that last case, the candidate with the most Campaign points already placed on an issue wins it.
Election Day (or round nine) follows another structure. First, players add their media support and issue support cubes from the bag to the board, while adding, one more time, the number of media support cubes. Existing Momentum is exchanged for two cubes per marker. These cubes also go in the bag. Initiative is determined as in the Debates round. In Campaign Strategy players reveal the four cards they placed in the last four rounds. For each card, the player gains three Support Checks in the state indicated by each card. The player with the initiative resolves his checks first. Players check Election Day Events, i.e. the cards that have been played during the game in order to take effect right now. Examples include gaining 5 support checks in Illinois, gaining 5 support checks in California but only if you lead on Connecticut, or not counting Alabama, Louisiana or Mississippi if these are not won by Kennedy with four support or more. States that don't have a support cube for any candidate will earn a cube based on who has an endorsement marker in the state's region. If nobody has an endorsement in the region, support will be allocated by the state's inclination.
At this point players claim the state seal for every state where they have support cubes. Each state hands out a different number of electoral votes, from 3 to 32. There are 537 electoral votes available. If you win 269 you are immediately elected president. You can however win with less if Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are not counted due to the aforementioned Election Day Event. In the event of a tie in electoral votes, the candidate that won the most states wins. In the extremely unlikely event of a tie on that level, the candidate with the most state support cubes wins. In this game, and in contrast to the US electoral system, the popular vote actually amounts to something.
Optional rules include using the Vice President cards as always available (until played), and a more restricted use of Campaign points when it comes to issue support.
If all that sounded hard enough, the rulebook covers a sample turn, a sample Debates turn, and a sample Election day. It also presents the election map of the era along with its results and numerous points of interest for those interested in election statistics.
The strong points: The American presidential elections! An electoral system that, even assuming that it was an acceptable design for the society it was created to serve in the first place, has been mercilessly exploited since, while becoming so mind-numbingly outdated that it doesn't rate well even when examined through a gaming lens. There's a solution to that, of course: register and vote on every single election. Vote as if there is no tomorrow, vote for meaningful change, including a full overhaul of this zombie-like anachronism. If that system is facepalm-worthy however, can a game emulating the election campaign based on it come out as good?
Indeed, this is not a 'good' game. This is an amazing game!
The theme is flawless, and fits the mechanics like a glove. You are not placing cubes on a board; this feels like a political campaign, with each candidate having to influence a myriad things in order to win it. Your actions do not have guaranteed results. Any inroads you make on political issues, or the message of your campaign, will fade fast, something that is cleverly emulated by the loss of cubes at the appropriate parts of each turn. The Political Capital bag is the pinnacle of brilliant design. Its contents are not random at all. You'd better play cards with high Rest values in order to influence the future, while bearing in mind that the more your cubes keep coming up, the less likely they are to keep coming back. That's an inspired way of emulating the inherent risks of a political campaign, of messages that looked good on paper but left the audience wandering, of a fickle electorate which gives the impression that it wants something, only to prove that it was leaning elsewhere. If games were ever ranked for the integration of theme and crunch, 1960 would have been a prime contender for the top-5.
The production values aid enormously towards that extend. The map is gorgeous and a pleasure to play on. The cards are thick and glossy, with shades of blue, red and beige that instantly transport you back in the 1960s. The cardboard for the tokens is thick, the box is extra sturdy, the wooden cubes are big and visible (even though I don't know how they are seen by colourblind players since they don't have other defining features). In other words, everything shouts 'attention to detail'. GMT Games once again included resealable plastic bags. What more should they do? Provide you with an opponent to play?
What truly makes the game great however is the design itself. The rulebook is long, it is however fantastically written. No ambiguity, no issues, no nothing. Plenty of examples, well-placed imagery, total clarity. At the end of the day, and even though you will need a full game or two to establish the few exceptions, the game is easy to play. Each phase is contained; after you do what you need to, you proceed to the next phase. My first games lasted over two hours. Now, and against an experienced opponent, we can finish a game in less than 90 minutes. Not many engaging games can be played more than once per session. Even War of the Ring (Second Edition) fails on that aspect.
Is 1960 easy to master, however? No, and that's the glory of it. The game doesn't advertise itself as asymmetrical, yet after you play a few times you realize that Kennedy and Nixon behave differently. Powerful Events appear to back JFK; Nixon needs a lot of focus in order to gain cubes, and even more grit in order to keep them. This does not however mean that the game is prescribed, nor does it play the same time after time; on the contrary. In one game Campaign points might appear to dominate with only few events taking center stage. In another Endorsements might carry the day. In another still, it will be the consistent pounding through Momentum expenditure that will give you the winning edge. There is not one path to victory, and no side is guaranteed to win. No matter which side wins however, the game creates moments that few games can. From cold, calculated, chess-like moves, to plays that resemble sentimental explosions, 1960 has it all.
The game shares some superficial similarities with Twilight Struggle yet it is unfair to compare the two games. 1960 is lighter to begin with. Secondly, there are numerous differences like the fact that you cannot restrain an opponent in one region, or that 1960 uses a singular deck. A card, any card, can be drawn at the beginning of the game, or its very end, something that is not the case with TS. 'Chaos!', some might shout. Wrong. This makes the game much more approachable, since you don't need to start memorizing the cards deck after deck, in order to speculate on what's coming next and react accordingly. This is a highly tactical experience, not a strategic one. You will play with what you have, not what you would have hoped to have.
It is by now evident that there are simply too many things to do, and you have to prioritize heavily in order to come on top. Everything interacts with everything else. You might omit campaigning in a state, yet try to claim it through the region, while a card gives you an advantage towards an issue where you are heavily investing in in order to reap both cubes and endorsements. The feeling is not so much that of creating something beautiful and inspiring, like political campaigns want you to think. It is about the grim realities of the practical stuff, the fact that you are plugging holes left and right, and try to change the narrative every time you realize that you are underperforming. Events are of paramount importance, yet you cannot keep omitting your Campaign points. You also need cubes on the ground, and woe the to the candidate that allows his opponent to micromanage states with allegedly low electoral yields. Once you pass a certain breaking point (and no, the four cubes on a state is not the only breaking point), the effort you must put in order to uproot your opponent's effort becomes exponentially harder. Luck is important, both when it comes to your available cards at a given time, as well as the cube draw from the bag. Yet, as I wrote before, what goes in that bag is not a result of luck favoring you or not. Only a bad player will blame his defeat on luck on this game.
The game challenges the opponents until its end, even though at times a candidate's superior play will ensure victory earlier. In contested situations however, what happens during election day can easily alter the way the board looks. Again, think of all the cubes that go in the bag, and the cards that you strategically played in order to benefit from them now. You might have had second thoughts at the time; playing them here meant that you missed an opportunity of doing something differently. If you played correctly however, you are about to reap the dividends. It's all about hard choices, really.
The weak points: You don't like highly confrontational games? This is a hard pass. There is no deviousness, diplomacy or lies, don't worry about that. Yet, the theme of the game gets to you, and spirits may flare up. Do I mind that? No, I love it.
1960 is prone to AP no matter how self-conscious you are about it. That's totally understandable; many games are played on points, on the other hand however this is a zero-sum game. No arithmetic? No party. I never went as far to play the game with a spreadsheet on my laptop yet if someone did it in order to track down electoral voter sums, it wouldn't sound that extreme. The more you know, the best you can plan. Forget my exaggerated example for a moment and use a notebook when playing, in order to keep a fast track of where you are numbers-wise. It might look unfriendly at the beginning, in reality however you will be doing yourself a service. The easier one assimilates the game's inner workings, the faster he can enjoy it.
To a great extent plays are circumstantial, and I am not talking about the game's luck factor. Different card plays will make the game take different routes, yet some options will always feel safer than others. By definition certain states will always be contested, while others will be largely ignored. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it does however causes problems for less experienced players, since certain options appear to be less effective. They might be... or they might not. As I said, circumstances...
...and yes, there is evidently a lot of luck in the game. Yet, this is not dice rolling. To a very large extent you control your fate, seeing how the bag fills up and gets emptied according to your actions. I said something about a notebook before, didn't I? Do yourself a favour and count the cubes that go in and out of that bag for either player, so that you always know what's in there. This isn't a casino, the game does not prohibit it, and you'd be stupid not to do it. You will be surprised how accurate knowledge of the bag's contents will change your tactical patterns. Ignorance leads to trusting luck. Knowledge leads to alternatives and better formulated plans.
The Debate turn is partially anti-climactic. I enjoy the tactical aspect of it, in reality however you are limited in what you can do. Most of the decision-making has been made in the previous five rounds; the only thing left to do is to orchestrate your attack. If you planned poorly earlier on, you will underperform here. Having said that, I honestly don't know what could make this aspect a bit more engaging.
Why is this game so hard to find? GMT has an excellent track record when it comes to gauging request for its games, yet this is a title that should be in constant circulation. Needless to say, I am very happy that it became available once again, even though I have no reason to upgrade my existing copy.
On the nitpickiest of comments, the game depicts the Democrats as blue and the Republicans as red, something that is concurrent with the parties' colour attribution following 2010. Interestingly, the way colours were used back then was much more convoluted. Wikipedia's entry for that election uses the colours in an inverted way. This is definitely not an issue. If however you are a geezer or a history buff, it is something that you will immediately notice.
Conclusion: 1960: The Making of the President is a dominant game. It offers a smooth gameplay, an unbeatable theme, and an engaging, committed experience, and all that in only a fraction of the time one would initially expect. It doesn't matter if you don't know, or don't care, about US politics and real-world history; this is a must-play.
For more info on 1960: The Making of the President and GMT Games take a look at http://www.gmtgames.com.
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