Die Macher

From:Hans im Gluck Cost:~$50 Players: 3-5 Playing Time: 3-4 hours Type of game: Gamer strategy Skill level: 8 Complexity: 10 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 5.2 (18), Spring 1998

I frequently describe myself as apolitical. I despise politics in all of its forms and dread the months of media frenzy surrounding an election year. "With 1% of the vote reporting in, it looks like Joe Frontrunner will be our next President…" So it's safe to say I'm not predisposed towards games in which elections and campaigning are the central themes. When then-manager Mark Green of London's Just Games recommended a game about German elections, I found it hard to muster much enthusiasm. I may not like politics, but at least I understand the American political system (as much as anyone can understand a system which put Dan Quayle in the White House). I know nothing about politics in Germany. Mark heaped praise upon it, though, and based on his say-so I picked up a copy of the original Die Macher.

Designed by Moskito's Karl-Heinz Schmiel and published by Hans im Gluck, Die Macher packed a lot of components into a small box. The game itself consisted of a handful of interlocking mechanisms and an intimidatingly arcane scoring system. The game wasn't revolutionary in any sense and in fact was processional in nature. Yet it was widely hailed as a classic. When I finally played the game, I could understand why. But clocking in at around four hours, really requiring exactly four players, and existing only in a limited edition of 500, it was a classic that just didn't get played very much at all.

This year Hans im Gluck tries to change that with the reintroduction of Die Macher in an improved edition with wider release. The first thing veterans notice is that the new box is over twice as big as the old one. More importantly, it's at least twice as attractive. The functional but spartan presentation of the original evoked images of bald, beady-eyed men plodding through a grey Orwellian landscape. Apropos, but not very stylish. Not so the new version. Everything in the game has been given a complete cosmetic overhaul and now looks like a product of the nineties. The biggest improvement is with the redesigned cards, adding iconic images which make it easier to differentiate the cards from across the table, and make the game friendlier to non-German speakers. Less successful is the redesign of the regional boards, which trade functionality for appearance with the new trend chart.

The rules have been tweaked here and there, generally resulting in streamlined gameplay. The single best change is the simplification of the score system. You can't throw the calculator away completely, as there are still a bunch of numbers to add up at the game's end. But the way in which those numbers are derived is far more intuitive than before, where the scorekeeper seemed to perform shamanistic incantations to derive the winner.

The original game required four players, but the new edition offers greater flexibility. The game allows 3-5 players to assume the roles of rival political parties campaigning through seven German regions in a quest to gain the most national power (points). Power is accumulated in a number of ways: through increasing the membership of your political party, gaining influence over the national media, and manipulating national opinions on key issues to match those of your own party (changing your party's opinions to ride the prevailing winds).

The game revolves around seven regional elections. A number of things are tracked in each region: each player's influence over the local media; the bias or trend of the regional voters towards each party; the amount of effort, represented by party "meetings", each party expends on the regional campaign; the four issues most important to the region and the prevailing opinion on those issues; and each party's standing in that region's election.

That's a lot of information for players to consider, and they must do so for four regions at a time (an election is held in only one region each turn, but campaigning for a region begins three turns earlier). To further complicate matters, each of these elements is manipulated through a different mechanism. Fortunately each turn is broken down into phases, with each mechanism handled in its own phase.

When I introduced the game to our regular group, another table of gamers played an entire game of Auf Heller und Pfennig in the time it took to explain the rules. Trying to summarize the gameplay here would be fruitless. It's hard enough to get a handle on things when everything's laid out on the table in front of you! Instead I'll try to convey the flavor of the game and discuss the key mechanics around which the game is built.

To win votes, parties must hold public meetings where they can bring their message to the people. Parties spend money to add meeting markers to a region. Later these meetings can be converted to votes based on how popular the party is (their "trend") and how well the party's platform matches the region's opinions. Imagine a business game where you can buy stock in various companies for a fixed price, then sell it later for variable returns depending on market forces. Since available stock is limited, the idea is to manipulate the market forces for the best possible return. That's essentially what's happening in Die Macher, substituting "meetings" for "stock" and "regions" for "companies".

A major one of those forces is the political issues of the day. There are seven political issues in the game, each with two opposing opinions (pro/anti school reform, pro/anti nuclear power, etc.). Parties begin with a random platform of four such cards displayed before them, plus a concealed hand of three more. Meanwhile, every region has a set of four opinions. Only one of a region's opinions is known at first, with more revealed as the region's election approaches. Sharing opinions with a region makes it easier for a party to gain votes; having opposite opinions makes it harder. Parties can alter their platform during the game, but slowly— only one opinion each turn. Synching up with one region could make it difficult to succeed in the following region if that region cares about different issues or holds opposite opinions. If only players could just change the voters' minds instead.

Well, they can. Players have five "media" markers to play with—think of them as bribed media moguls. Each turn gives players the chance to bring markers into regions one marker at a time, using a circular "pay or pass" system. Each region has only five media outlets (major newspapers, television stations, etc.) and once they've been bought, that's that. A player owning the most media markers in a region gains control of the media. So great is the media's influence that it allows the player to change one of the region's opinions, even replacing it with another issue entirely.

Pressing palms and kissing babies is part of a politician's life even in Germany. "Trend" charts monitor each region's attitude toward all the parties, which begin neutral. Since a party's trend directly affects how many votes it secures in a region, players would do well to win over their constituents. Apparently Germany's elections are as plagued by pollsters as our own, and they're constantly generating new research on public opinion. One opinion poll is auctioned off (sight-unseen) in each region every turn in a circular "bid or drop" system. The high bidder can publicize up to 2 results from the poll, adjusting the affected party trends up or down, or he can publish nothing and roll special dice to increase the party's national membership (directly increasing the party's score). While the concept of rewarding candidates for keeping their mouths shut is appealing in a cynical sort of way, the rationalization for it in game terms escapes me. This is certainly the fiddliest part of the game. The results of each die range from 0-3, and rolling exceptionally well or poorly can have a dramatic impact on a player's standing. In a game where so much is under direct player control, this inexplicable random element is jarring and perhaps of too much consequence. Twenty-one opinion polls get auctioned off during the game. Many of these could yield die rolls, and it doesn't take very many for the results to have significant impact. Rolling the dice is particularly attractive early in the game, since at the end of rounds 1, 3, and 5 your national membership translates directly into a cash bonus. So investing in opinion polls early on not only pays for itself in purely monetary terms, but gives you a tidy scoring boost at the end of the game. To ensure that opinion polls get adequately valued during the early auctions, be sure to impress upon all players how important they are. Otherwise a player buying them for a song can sprint to an early lead.

Far more interesting, and a holdover from the original game, is the Shadow Cabinet. All parties have an identical group of advisors, each with varying costs and abilities. Players deploy them in a region, paying their fee to trigger one of their talents. Abilities include gaining votes, increasing your party's trend, decreasing an opposing party's trend, replacing another party's media marker with your own, or doubling a region's opinion. The latter ability doubles the effect of one opinion in the region (making it twice as good to match, or twice as bad to oppose). It also prevents that opinion from being changed (for example, by the player with media control). Each cabinet member may be used only once per game, and even though they may have multiple abilities, only one ability can be used. Choosing and timing their use is an essential part of each player's strategy.

Some cabinet members perform a second function (whether their parties want them to or not). If these cabinet members show up in a region, their party becomes capable of forming a coalition there. Any two such capable parties can join forces in an election if their party platforms share two opinions in common. With three matches, either party can force the other into joining the coalition—somewhat dismaying if the forced party could have won on its own. The votes of a coalition's member parties are combined as if cast for a single party. This facilitates coalition victories, making coalitions very powerful. Matching two opinions isn't hard, but coalitions are generally viewed as a last resort. Each party would prefer to win solo rather than sharing the spoils with a rival.

Victory in an election translates into points towards victory. If the winning party has a media token in the region, it gets transferred to the national scoreboard. This leaves the party with fewer media tokens to use for later elections, so the game compensates by awarding more points in early elections than in later ones. The winner also gets to transfer two opinions from the region to the national board, canceling any opposite opinions already there. At the end of the game players earn points for each national opinion their party matches. Late in the game, players often must choose between changing an opinion to match a region, or keeping it in hopes of matching the nation when the game ends.

Regional elections aren't all-or-nothing deals. Everyone increases their party membership (which, you'll recall, translates into money and points) according to how many votes they garner in each election. Each region, selected at random from a pool of about 18, offers a different conversation rate of votes to membership. This makes some regions more valuable, and usually more hotly contested, than others. No party has enough resources to compete in every region, so players have to pick their battles carefully. Do you concentrate your efforts on the big regions, or spread a little thinner in smaller regions hoping your opponents will overlook them?

Each election ends with a donation phase. Players play cards valued from ten to fifty thousand. If played face-up, the party collects the cash and rolls the aforementioned dice to see how many members they lost to the resulting scandal (the more money collected, the more dice get rolled). If played face down the offer is refused, but the party's integrity attracts new members with more dice rolling. As a bonus, whoever refuses the largest donation each round gets to roll extra dice for party membership. This phase plays out as a subgame unto itself, with each player weighing their need for cash against the chance for more points.

Players tally points after the seventh election, scoring for their party membership, matching national opinions, and national media tokens. The two parties with the most members get small bonuses, and the high score wins.

Die Macher is complex and long in precisely the ways a game should be. Downtime is minimal—players are always involved in the action or are planning their next move. Consequently the game doesn't feel as long as it really is. The complexity arises from both the variety of the different subsystems and the relationships between them. Something as simple as player order—determined via sealed bid each turn— influences the outcome in subtle and significant ways.

Perhaps the greatest feat is the successful melding of these varied mechanisms into a cohesive whole. Each component of the election—media, trend, votes, opinions, etc.—is too important to be neglected, and generally no one element overpowers the others. The possible exception is the trend chart—getting it to +3 makes a party's life much easier in that region, and woe betide the party stuck at –3. In the original game the trend ran from 2 to –2 instead. If you suspect it holds too much influence over the outcome, you might consider revaluing it accordingly. This will also ameliorate the other big complaint many players have with the voting system, which is that votes max out at 50. A party earning 65 theoretical votes can lose out to one earning only 52 since votes over 50 are lost and ties go to the party earning its votes latest. If this bothers you, you could track excess votes for use in breaking ties. Of greater concern to me is that while an individual party can't exceed 50 votes, a coalition can. Conceptually this just feels wrong. Coalitions already get the deck stacked in their favor by merging votes, and this added advantage doesn't seem necessary. Again, counting excess votes to break ties solves the problem. Note, however, that it may create another. Limiting votes to 50 means it's always possible for trailing parties to catch up. Removing that ceiling may allow a party to take an insurmountable lead, and that's not much fun. Pick your poison.

Of all the rule changes between the original and the new version of Die Macher, the one I'm least pleased with involves moving opinions to the national board. Both versions allow promoting a duplicate opinion. The difference is that in the original the promotion of a contrary opinion cancelled just one of the duplicates. In the new version, it cancels all of them. Worse, it places tremendous importance on winning the final election since the winner controls the final opinion promotions. With opinions harder to keep on the national board, much of the early jockeying to get them there is rendered pointless. I'd be interested in hearing why the designer changed this rule, as the old method was intuitive and functional.

The game's designer has just made an official rule change not reflected in the printed rules: when an opinion is cancelled from the national board, all opinions to the right of it slide left to close the gap. This provides an even greater incentive to nuke the earliest opinions, exacerbating the problem already outlined. Whether or not to adopt this rule is up to you.

It's always a pleasure when an old treasure comes back into print. Hans im Gluck hasn't merely resurrected Die Macher, they've revitalized it. The improved components, more flexible player requirements, and simplified scoring system will help get the game onto the table more often. Sadly, its playing time remains at the highest rung of the German ladder. But this isn't Empire Builder or History of the World. Players remain involved throughout in a time-compressing contest. I don't know how well it reflects the actual German electoral system, and I don't really care. What matters is that Die Macher is fascinating, deep, and still a classic.

Hans im Gluck has printed English rule books for Die Macher. You can obtain one at no charge by sending a 9x12 SASE (make sure to use enough postage for 2-3 oz.) to: Rio Grande Games, 1804 Platte River Rd., Rio Rancho NM, 87124)