Prime Minister

From the fields to the drawing rooms, then: British domestic politics and political scheming in a GMT package. Prime Minister is highly thematic, with rules that are relatively easy to get into and mechanisms simple enough to serve the theme without smothering it. It reminded me of the same family of experiences as Versailles and Churchill, except that here the promise is less grand political drama and more of a personal knife fight within your own party.

Players are split into two factions and play cards that affect the major issues of British domestic politics in the period. The goal is not merely to squeeze the opposing faction: at the same time, you have to move within your own, undermine your leader, and build your own route to the top. The interaction, in other words, is political in the most uncomfortable sense: you cooperate for as long as it benefits you, while looking for the moment when you can become caliph in place of the caliph without sinking your party along with you.

In practice, the whole game revolves around when you will make your defection and whether you can get ahead in time. It has something in common with Founding Fathers, which attempts similar things in a more complex way, but Prime Minister remains drawn out and, at least in my game, started repeating the same pattern. When the events arriving on the table are anywhere from mildly to very uninteresting, the intrigue quickly loses its edge.

After roughly two hours, we stopped at 60% of the game because we felt we were watching the same political show again and again. I do not think it is a bad game; I just would find it very difficult to play it again. I might give the quick tournament game a chance, but there the game asks you to know it very well already and to know what is coming, since the margin for error is almost zero. Thank you, next.