Conniving Bureaucrat Election

Conniving Bureaucrat Election is a turn-based strategy game for 4+ players. It was born out of a combination of fragile alliance games like Coup, Risk, or Mafia and rules-generating nomic games like Twenty Plus One or Daifugō (westernized as President).

The players assume roles of candidates trying to win an election. While the base rules (laws) are fairly simple, the game can be redefined through play to give you advantages. If there is a law you don't like, challenge it! Or better yet: make a new law as an amendment to cleverly introduce a loophole. As the game progresses, everyone becomes mired in their collective bureaucracy as cascading laws-interactions make it more and more difficult to follow who is at an advantage or disadvantage.

A session can be completed in approximately 90-120 mins, depending on who is playing, how familiar they are with the game, and how muddled the rules of the game get in the process.

This game was originally created to be played in person using the materials listed at the top of the rules sheet. However, due to quarantine, play-testing has been happening exclusively online. I personally have found the following to work pretty well:

Combine a voice chat option of your choice:

• Discord
• Google Meet
• Zoom

With the collaborative tracking option of your choice for keeping track of resources, turn order, current turn, proposed laws, ratified laws, and discarded laws:

• Stickies.io
• Trello
• Tabletop Simulator
• Miro

If you don't have 10 coins, you can use this online coin flipping tool to flip them for you: https://observablehq.com/@iamgrahamallen/virtual-coin-flipper

Credits:

Thank you to Minerva McJanda for the layout design and the banner, cover, and document art.

Thank you to Cam, James, Emily, Liam, Kate, Emily, Brian, Nick, Val, Jon, Amber, Diana, TJ, Jared, Alex, Ben, Ivan and the folks at PlayerLair, Crowe, Dr. Clayman, Whitesmoke, and ChrisApple for helping play-test and providing feedback.