Campaign Manager is, I think, the game I played most in the 2009-10 period, with a total of [laughably low] plays. It took the fancy of one of my friends from the office, who, to his delight, kept drawing Obama as the candidate he was trying to guide to victory. Sadly for him, McCain (hi!) always won. I don't recall reading anything about undue brokenness to the game, so I'm forced to assume that I have an innate skill at Campaign Manager 2008.
I'm not sure it really feels like running a campaign, although it does a decent job of evoking the contest, assuming you read the flavor text on the cards. Without that, it's reasonably themeless. That's a big "without," though; we would get into our "roles" pretty thoroughly and that was a big part of the game's fun. If we treated it more reverently, as a chess-like test of wits, I doubt I'd have liked it very much.
I'm hoping that it's part of a series. There have been plenty of interesting campaigns in American history that could stand a game treatment. We've seen 1960 as a board game; 1860 would also be interesting (especially if you started in the year or two prior to the election, with a Republican player, a Secessionist player, and a national Democrat player). 1800 would be all kinds of wacky fun. I suppose that's what I like about Campaign Manager, in a way; it evokes an historical event without being, well, like a wargame--fairly complex rules, lots of pieces, lots of exceptions. It's not a simulation per se, especially since 2/3 of the events (all of which happened) don't occur in a given game, but it's still evocative, it still tells a story. That's part of what Tim and I were after; we each wanted to win, obviously, and we put serious thought into putting our decks together, but we wouldn't have bothered playing it more than once if it didn't have that storyline.
Another part of the fun--for me, anyway--came when Tim's fiancée would call. She'd always call around 10 or 10:30, after the game was over, and Tim would have to explain himself, detailing why, precisely, Obama lost this time.
For SdA purposes, Campaign Manager scores high for having been played an appreciable number of times, and especially for being a fairly simple but subtle and evocative gaming experience. Now that Tim's graduated, married, and employed I'm going to have to track down someone else to play it with...
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