After finishing off the logistics for Molecular, I had a real hankering for another project.

Molecular ended up being unexpectedly popular with school teachers, which was a fantastic surprise. We hadn’t originally intended for it to be but we were really pleased when teachers from both sides of the Atlantic contacted us and said they’d be using it in their classrooms. There was even a library service in rural New York State that bought ten!  

After that, I really wanted to explore more academic themes, and craft them in a way that both gamers and students would want to engage with. Around about the same time as these thoughts were buzzing around my head, I got ill, nothing serious, but enough to keep me in bed watching endless YouTube vids, the favourites being Crash Course and CGPGrey. I got completely absorbed by both these channels as they managed to make some seriously boring topics that I wasn’t even remotely interested in at school, really fun.

At one point I realised that I’d just spent about 2 hours watching videos about electoral systems, miraculously without falling asleep. It occurred to me that most of the time, politics, and particular a lot of the more system-y stuff, is really, really dull.

Both of them seemed to have this magical special sauce that they just kinda drizzled all over this chewy cardboardy boring uninspiring pile of funk and made it interesting. I wanted to pour some of this special sauce all over a board game.

So there was the challenge.

Make a game about politics. That’s a reflection of reality. That’s actually fun.

In the rest of these posts, I’m going to attempt to detail the process I went through in taking Statecraft from a wiffly-waffly idea about making politics fun to, hopefully, a really innovative and engaging game. We’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, had some incredible supporters and radically reenvisioned the project countless times. Here’s how we did it.

• Episode 2 – Representing Political Ideology
  
• Episode 3 – A Game About Voters
  
• Episode 4 – Political Policies
  
• Episode 5 – The Big the Bland and the Untrustworthy
  
• Episode 6 – Tactics vs. Strategy
  
• Episode 7 – The Five P’s
  
• Episode 8 – Oiling the Machine
  
• Episode 9 – Painting the Machine
  
• Episode 10 – Final Product
  
• Episode 11 – Irony
  
• Episode 12 – Democratising the Game

Find out when we relaunch Statecraft

Plz watch this.