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Oh thank you so much! When I started off, it was just going to be a find+replace hack so my group could build out a world rather than a city to play Wanderhome in our homegame, and then it just ballooned.... So I'm glad to hear the character I tried to write into it paid off!

Hey thanks zerodan! It's really great to find out people are enjoying it!

Oh these kids are very anti-Bush to be clear, it was more the fascists won the propaganda war too lol! Anyway thank you again for a great game!

What a wonderful, strange, nerdy, genius bureaucrats fighting over powerpoint simulator game! I knew before I'd even opened it, just from this page, that it would suit down to the ground the group of wonderful-strange-nerdy teen geniuses I run games for – and it did! Although thank god I could scrape together some graphing ability from those foggy memories of maths classes, or else I would have been absolutely lost once they got on a roll with those boxplots...

We played this last year as part of a sort of campaign lead-in while we debated what our main game would be, and while it didn't tie into Wanderhome QUITE as neatly as I may have hoped (really more on my failings in imagination as to how a horsemeat scandal would translate than any fault in either game), it certainly did a lot for how this group relates to games!

[Documentation of the "scandal" in question. Note the break in the timeline also, fully intentional on the part of the graphers 💀]

We ended the game with enough tampered paperwork & belligerence to start a small civil war (to determine the true name of the city, of course), but I like to think the rules themselves dovetailed into this quite neatly. By the time we got to the point in the game where you're called to return to a previous graph & disprove its findings with outliers or decide that it was misleading from the beginning, every player was just simmering with frustration just waiting to explode. This was mainly because of how each round operates: you set up the perfect graph to show how your idea of the city is the One True & Correct Path Forward, and then those horrible other players will start with their additions, absolutely WRECKING your clearly scientific conclusions!! This was very very fun, and only moreso after you 'unlocked' the ability to go back & tamper with past graphs, which as the above example shows we proceeded to do shamelessly.

The tone of this game is established immediately & really well, from the excellent cover right through to the slideshow layout and the spiralling madness of the example graphics. I think the chaos of those examples really helps spur you on to see if your table can match it! That balances really neatly against the interjections that start appearing deeper into the rules, to remind you that your City should be recognisable – or rather, that it already is & forever will be, because your foundational context of real life is inescapable. So you should probably introduce injustice intentionally, with this handy piechart that can literally carve up your City between the highest bidders! Or do anything else you can dream up with a piechart, but it's nice to bring the social realism in :)

Things this game reminds me of:

• I Am In Eskew & Discworld & Man-made Object by Lemon Demon & all that kind of absurdist art about cities and/or buildings
• the game City Planning Department, another rpg that brings out the petty bureaucrat I didn't know was hiding inside me
• The Thick Of It, purely because of how many policies were decided off-the-cuff and then justified backwards through various focus groups & inquiries & studies & etc, which these graphs could be pulled right out of
• The Pepsi Breathtaking Design Strategy, which seemed to share similar design principles

Anyway, suffice to say that this game really got me thinking about what exactly it is that we want world-building games to do, so thank you very much for that! I should note also that despite all dice probability & min-max statistics & mental arithmetic role-playing games are associated with, this is the only game so far that had me using a ruler, a compass, and a protractor again – and to be honest I was half wondering if I might need a graphing calculator. If that sounds like a fun night to YOU, trust me: it was!

Played this game as part of a world-building session with a group I run for teens. Lead to a good deal more competitive gameplay than I think most playthroughs of this would tend towards! A lot of players cheering when their crew got to take over a rival holding, or cackling when they drew the right card to allow their evil empire to claim the city...

Anyway, it teased out some brilliant characters from the collective imagination, such as the Orator who rambled incessantly from the irreplacable cultural landmark of the Loose Stack Of Crates bang-slap in the middle of our map, or Kevin The Local Dead guy who of course predeceased the entire game but nonetheless caused a great outcry at the table when he was then run over by a train. The card prompts are really good for those big moments of reversal, because the questions asked left & right essentially give 3 players ownership of the scene – who are then going to remember what happened (a major problem in a chaotic group of kids, trust me) well enough to tie it back into later prompts.

I will say that Debt-Asset-Holding economy side of the game feels a little underdeveloped. For example, there's no downside really to picking up more & more Debts, besides the narrative weight of course (and I suppose the possibility that if you reduce them to zero, there's no consequence if you fail to Seize Control? if I'm reading those rules right) – and so my players didn't bother ever repaying them. It didn't help that like other commenters, I was a bit confused about whether you started with Debts or Assets or not (you've fixed it now, but I think maybe I was operating off of an earlier pdf?), but once we realised the mistake & went back and defined our starting resources, that did actually add great colour to each crew. I will say though that the headlines & Overhear Gossip aspect definitely suited our style of play! The person-on-the-street perspective after every event really brought this beautiful aftertaste of callousness or comedy or craziness (and so on) to everything, and personally shaped so much of how I thought about that city.

All in all, the game achieved exactly what I hoped it might: a fun 2-3 nights of zero-prep gaming, some interesting footholds to boost me up into creating factions & character-motivations & politics, and this now-familiar map of a strange strange metropolis we could start to dig deeper on... Oh, and the kids managed to end the game by recreating fantasy 9/11, but I had NOTHING to do with that!

Ran this for a group of teens I play RPGs with, and it went down a treat! One of those deceptively-simple games that delivers a set-up so neatly in such economy of language (even though our story ended up being about, in their words, "New Sealand, an ocean world mostly taken over by the Welsh with few humans left"*) that you think you'll be left twiddling your thumbs by the session's second half, but it actually fits beautifully into a 3hr timeslot of people shouting ideas over one another.

President Kaiju's mechanics are actually perfectly tuned for this exact scenario:– the 'break-out' teams are great for focusing energy on the game while at the same time fostering some competitive friction - the resolution dice can be handed out to players to give them an immediate reward for having solved each phase's 'riddle' - and the match-up between the labels & the President's Choice is so crystal clear that you can reel players at any level of participation into nail-biting suspense about the outcome.

I made a few additions to the rules – mainly because I knew how my group likes to engage with character drama (like I said, I really admire how tangible the original rules are & I think it was the right move not to clutter them with this stuff) – but I thought I'd share them here in case anyone is interested:

• First, I had them establish entertainer/caterer characters by detailing looks, roles in their respective teams, whether they were Welsh, etc.
• Then each player got to pick one character to be their Friend (who they want to see succeed & not get eaten by a kaiju) and one to be their Enemy (who they want to trip up right into the President's jaws).
• What do you know, they ended the game with at least 1 die each for that final resolution roll! How crazy!
  
  • I increased the stakes there a little bit by allowing them to poison the chargrilled human-burger (🙃) in the meal phase, so that they were actually rolling to kill the President. Or half of them were – we ended up with two competing dice pools as half the group split to defend their great kaiju-god.
• Then I told them they could barter their dice before the roll. Each player could burn a die to kill their Enemy, or burn it to prevent their Friend from being killed. Dice belonging to the departed would be inherited by their killer, to dedicate to whichever cause they pleased.

Naturally, things descended into chaos from there! I think this approach did de-emphasise how inevitable the President's rage feels, which is a big concern in the rules as written. On the other hand, it sure did encourage a lot of back-door, back-stabbing politicking which I felt was definitely in the spirit of this game's cartoon logic!

This is one of the most successful one-shots I've ever run, probably because of how easy it is to get the players on board off the bat. Not just with tone & premise, which are pretty much established once you finish reading the title, but by how it takes roughly as long again to get the group on the same page as you-the-facilitator about the rules; makes sense given it's a 1-page RPG, I guess. This gives it a remarkable accessibility for all kinds of players who may usually struggle to engage fully with a game: first-time players, young children, shy people, those who have trouble grasping complex rules or paying attention to long explanations.

It works so well with these players because it's really almost closer to a party game, and yet there's an elasticity allowing the world to expand around the table's imagination that you really only get from role-playing games. What a wonderful balance to strike!

* I think this originated with a discussion about whales?