by Bonghwan Ju

A Presidential Election… in South Korea??

President Maker is an election game in which you become a candidate for president of South Korea and compete to win the office.
If you live in a country where democracy actually works, you’ve probably taken part — as a voter — in that peculiar ritual we call an election.
(Don’t worry. I’m not here to start a political argument.)

My point is simply this: elections — and politics in general — sit very close to our everyday lives, which makes them wonderful material for a game that people can connect with and get absorbed in.

The heart of an election is the same everywhere, after all.
Get as many votes as you possibly can from the voters.

And the lineup of political forces that fills out an election isn’t so different from country to country either.
Conservatives and progressives face off, some players hold the middle ground, and a few strike out on their own, independent of everyone else.
For that reason, I believed this game could resonate with board gamers well beyond its Korean setting — anywhere democracy is genuinely at work.

Where the Idea Started: A Bag-Building Voting System

South Korea’s presidential election is beautifully simple.
Any adult may vote, the votes are tallied nationwide as one big sum, and whoever finishes with even a single vote more becomes president.
That means campaigning in a region where you’re politically at a disadvantage is never a completely pointless exercise.
Squeezing out one more vote — anywhere, by any means — can decide the whole race.

When election season comes around, Korean politicians visit traditional markets and eat cheap street food, almost as if they’d all agreed on it beforehand.
Presumably to project an image of being a man or woman of the people.

One day, watching exactly that scene on TV, a question popped into my head:

“How many more votes did they ACTUALLY gain by eating street food at that market?”

Nobody could guarantee that a single visit to a market translates into extra votes.
But for a politician who needs to make themselves known, it’s surely better than doing nothing at all.

And that’s when I decided I wanted to take the subtle, undeniable gap between “eating street food at the market” and “doing nothing” — and turn it into a game mechanism.

I came to define that gap like this: even if no single move converts directly into votes, repeatedly showing yourself to voters gradually raises the probability that someone out there might cast a vote for you.

Let’s dissect how an election works, mathematically.
In the end, it’s an equation produced by just two variables: approval rating and turnout.

In a region where my approval rating is high, the higher the turnout, the more votes I’m likely to collect.
By the same logic, in a region where my opponent’s rating is high, the lower the turnout, the better for me.

That felt like an excellent starting point. And turning it into a game mechanism wasn’t so difficult. Put tokens into a cloth bag equal to each candidate’s approval rating, then draw tokens equal to the turnout — that alone looked like a convincing election game.

I set that as the core mechanism and began designing, layering the many other elements of an election on top of it.

Winning the Hearts of Five Regions

President Maker features five regions, including Seoul (the capital area).
They’re based on South Korea’s real geographic and administrative divisions, the do(도) — provinces.

Map of South Korean administrative divisions

Political leanings in Korea often differ sharply along these provincial lines.
So depending on a candidate’s Political Orientation, some regions are a home turf while others are hostile ground where you’ll receive no welcome at all.

In this game, each of the five regions takes one Political Orientation — Progressive, Center-Progressive, Conservative, Center-Conservative, or Neutral (the capital area) — while the four candidates players can choose from are Progressive, Conservative, Centrist, and Independent.

Political Orientation has a big effect on the game’s initial setup.

– A Progressive candidate, for instance, starts at rock bottom in a Conservative region — and vice versa.

– The Centrist candidate leads nowhere, but begins with a middling Support level everywhere.

– The Independent candidate has the lowest name recognition in every region (much as in the real world).
But — unlike in the real world — they carry the underdog’s power to flip the whole board.

Deciding which Political Orientation went to which region took a fair bit of thought. Political sensitivity in Korea has been climbing for years now, and it’s no longer something you can treat lightly. Declaring outright that this region is progressive and that one conservative carried real risk, even when it happened to be true. Such a setup could poke at regional resentments, or lead players who’d gotten a little too invested in the game to genuinely offend one another. So I chose to randomize each region’s Political Orientation instead — accompanied by the slightly absurd premise of “South Korea in a parallel world.”

The result was that a region known in reality as staunchly conservative might come up as progressive, producing situations you can simply laugh off together.

Who Actually Shows Up to Vote?

The other thing I wrestled with while setting up the five regions was population — that is, the number of voters. As I mentioned, this is an election where a single extra vote wins, so naturally the more populous a region is, the more it matters. Seoul, the capital, was set as the most populous region, just as it is in reality. It therefore becomes, quite naturally, the key battleground where every candidate fights over support.

The other four regions hold equal status as provinces, but when I looked up the real numbers, their populations turned out to differ quite a bit. Reflecting that faithfully, though, would have assigned each region a fixed absolute value based on population — and that didn’t look desirable from a balance standpoint. So every region outside Seoul was given an identical population.

Someone might think:
“All four regions with the same population? Won’t the game feel flat?”

That’s half right and half wrong. The population here represents the maximum possible number of voters in a region. And just like in the real world, not everyone in a region actually turns out to vote. Some regions are keenly interested in politics, others much less so. That ratio of actual voters to potential voters is what we call turnout — the Engagement Level in this game.

At the start of the game, every region sits at the lowest point of its Engagement Level. As play unfolds, various interactions raise interest in the election in some regions while leaving others relatively cold. In other words, turnout starts to diverge from region to region.

Each region’s importance as a source of votes therefore emerges organically during play. A region whose Engagement has climbed sky-high becomes a genuine battleground. (So sometimes a region climbs higher in Engagement than Seoul itself!)

The Dilemma Between Popularity and Attention

Think about what politicians do when election season arrives. I’ve already mentioned the traditional market visits, but fundamentally, the thing they care about most is making themselves known to people. One of this game’s core actions is the Campaign Rally — putting your face in front of voters.
During the Campaign Rally, each candidate may visit only two of the five regions. (You have one body, and time is finite.)

Every candidate picks their two regions and reveals them simultaneously. Then, some regions may overlap with other candidates’ choices, while others may be visited by one candidate alone. And here an interesting dilemma appears.

In a region you visit alone, your Support level rises by 2. You had all the attention to yourself.

In a region several candidates visit together, attention is split. Each of you gains only 1 Support level. But a region that politicians swarm to is also, by definition, a politically important region. Voters there feel “our region matters,” and more of them turn out to vote. That region’s Engagement level ALSO rises by 1.

However high your Support climbs, if people don’t make it to the ballot box, it never converts into votes. Conversely, even in a high-Engagement region, votes are hardly guaranteed when you’re locked in a fierce fight with the other candidates. For these reasons, each of the game’s three Campaign Rallies produces a genuinely interesting decision.

Be Bad — But Only Just Enough

We don’t have to think badly of politicians.
But when building a game on a political theme, scheming, slander, and dirty tricks were the first things that came to mind, and there was no helping it.

So yes: the action you’ll take most often in this game is running political risk to smear and tear down your opponents. Actions are performed mainly through Political Cards, and they fall roughly into “fairly decent,” “bad,” and “very bad.”

A “fairly decent” action means cooperating across the aisle, or honestly appealing to your supporters for their votes. No danger — and negligible effect.

“Bad” actions offer far more powerful, far more tempting effects. Spread a rumor to slash a rival’s Support level, or push a region’s Engagement up and down to suit your needs. But every time you take one of those powerful actions, you receive a Risk Card — the embodiment of political risk. The back of a Risk Card shows a risk value between 1 and 3, but players can’t check it.

And here I introduced another enjoyable dilemma: something close to a game of chicken.

At the end of a round, all players reveal every Risk Card they’ve collected and total their risk values. The candidate with the highest total is branded a corrupt politician and watches their core supporters walk away. The candidates with the second- and third-highest totals suffer nothing at all — because the press only ever chases the biggest story.

So throughout the game you’re constantly monitoring how many Risk Cards everyone else is taking. All so you can commit your “bad” actions in just the right amount. You only need to avoid being the worst person in the room.

“Watching” Election Night

The highlight of this game is the Vote Count. Every single thing a player does is ultimately in service of squeezing out one more vote right here.

What’s unusual is that although the Vote Count is the phase that decides the whole game, players have no way whatsoever to influence the outcome during it.
All you can do is watch the count unfold. Exactly as if you were watching election night coverage on TV. (But of course, the Vote Count is nothing but the result of everything you’ve already done.)

The Vote Count proceeds one region at a time, through all five in order. In each region, Vote Tokens equal to each candidate’s Support level go into the cloth bag, and tokens equal to that region’s Engagement level are drawn out. The tokens in the bag are the voters; the tokens drawn are the supporters who actually showed up and cast a ballot. With every token drawn, the candidates’ markers advance along the Vote Count Track in real time. When the final region finishes counting, whoever leads the track is elected president.

The Vote Count always produces cheers and groans at the same time.

“My Support is that high and this is all I get? Where did my supporters go instead of voting?”
“Thank God — both of my two supporters turned out!”

A drama unfolds, just like watching the real broadcast. Designing the Vote Count as a spectator experience was both the most daring choice and my personal favorite as a designer. Technically speaking, it is an ordinary scoring phase stretched out horizontally into a long sequence. All the potential points a candidate has accumulated by working the 5 regions meet the probabilistic factor of Engagement and are converted into actual points, one at a time. I couldn’t imagine a better way to express the moment an election is decided. And it really did work!

One Last Thing

There’s plenty more I agonized over in capturing the many faces of an election, but this diary is running long, so I’ll stop here. I hope you’ll experience the finer details for yourself at the table.

A couple of tips for enjoying the game more: try substituting Korea’s five regions with regions from your own country. The immersion goes much deeper. Also, when you play a Political Card, say its title out loud. Rather than “I’ll move Region A’s Engagement track back by 1,” it’s far more entertaining to declare: “I Expose Corruption in Region A — and so Engagement there drops!”

Elections are undeniably fun material for a board game. Someday I’d love the chance to design a game around a different electoral system.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end!