PROPAGANDA! -- A Game of Truth, Lies, and Domination!

How do you guys like board games?

Well, I enjoy making them. 

PROPAGANDA was a moment of inspiration that hit me back in March this year while I was watching the news and recovering from COVID. I had the house to myself for a few days while my 2 year old and lady were up in Phoenix, and despite feeling like my bones were breaking from the inside, I just had to follow the lightning bolt that struck me. 

You play as Dear Leader, ruler of an authoritarian regime, faced with a barrage of news events for and against your narrative, which you must then deploy your own methods of propaganda to turn in your favor. You'd do this by using popular media figureheads, and a number of action cards to downplay bad news, repeat good news, and recast defeats as victories and injustice as justice.

Just t muddy the waters a little more, there is no clear-cut good guy or bad guy in the game.

Everyone, is equally a son-of-a-bitch. 

But some are more equal than others. 

That idea of a game with no good guy really struck me as interesting. Everyone who has played my past work knows I love to mess with themes of moral grayness, where a Mob Don is ironically the best choice for peace and prosperity in a corrupt bureaucracy not because he's a good guy compared to the stalwart General, but because the situation just happens to fall that way. 

This game is very much that.

The Rebels are just as much terrorists and power hungry psychos as the Regime, who are just as much power-for-power-sake as the Opposition Party, who are hell bent on exterminating the original human species to replace them with genetic clones born in vats.

It has the Sci-fi themes I love, mixing current events with horrifically historic realities, all wrapped up in a dark-humored comic book style reminiscent of old Soviet and American propaganda posters from the 1940s-1980s.

This is my first time posting about it on Patreon because I took two weeks of nights and weekends to do the art for it this August, using my Beta access of Dall-E 2. 

Before this, it was just a sketch on a 5 page outline I'd played only in a simulation.

About half the art is me, and half is the AI. 

Every image required significant amounts of retouching and editing, as well as custom paint-overs and unique art assets. Together with the robot as my co-pilot, I spent several feverish nights after work on Morningstar whipping this up as fast as I could. I wanted to see how this new tool could be used to accelerate my own efforts and produce a realistic product that looks good and feels good as a game, and PROPAGANDA's pitch document I wrote last March was a perfect candidate. 

Some of these cards were quite tortured, compositing many images together to arrive at a conclusion.

The game revolves around adding and subtracting points on a scorecard 0-20.

One of the Win Conditions is to max out Trust, Defense, Economy, Population, while eliminating all Fear and Rebellion.  

If the Rebellion is ever at 20, and you can't defend yourself, it's game over.

At the start of every turn you draw an EVENT and an ACTION.

An Event could be the Revelation of an Official's Corruption, or...

An Economic Downturn.

Your Dear Leader's job is to turn these negative events into positive ones.

Raja here can add to his Defense the more of his Figureheads are corrupt! 

WE WILL ROOT OUT THE ENEMY is a card you can use to harness Fear and convince the people to fight the Rebellion for you!

And if Fear is greater than or equal to your trust, you can deploy Fearmongering to flip that script on its head.

And losing trust can become a gain instead.

Or you can blame the circumstances! Especially the War, Opposition, or those pesky Rebels!

And just to raise the stakes, there is a Doomsday Clock counting down to midnight every 4 turns. You need to beat the clock to victory at all 20s before Midnight, or it's game over. (In Multiplayer, this is also when you determine who "wins," by hurling your Defense at each other to reduce each other's scores, and try to preserve as much population and economy as possible for a highest score.)

I've been playing this game every night for the last week since printing it. 

Printing at Kinkos and a local print shop, and cutting all these manually, cost us about 84$. There are almost 200 cards (I wanted to leave room for reactivity while balancing so it's currently only 138 cards). Four boards, and a set of tokens. 

Plus a big 16 page Rule-book, which I'm still getting feedback on and refining as non-obvious rules emerge while playtesting.

It's actually going really, really good.

The game is fun, even in this initial test build with limited Events & actions.

Single player a full game takes just about an hour, which is to me the perfect playtime for a game of this type. Single player was the main test case, so if you want to play a board game by yourself, this is actually very fun solo.

Multiplayer it's a little rough around the edge-cases but it's still pretty easy to rule-lawyer in a positive way, it's competitive and can be cooperative if you form alliances, "just one more round" kind of addictive fun. Lots of room for drama in these events and backstabbing betrayals, alliances of convenience, and setting up grand schemes to try to get one up on the table. 

It feels like the setting. The paranoia, wondering if that was a bluff or a real threat, or if your allies are going to set you up -- it has the vibe of this 1984, us vs them, propaganda campaign of cold war brinkmanship. You almost want to cheer for your Dear Leader and nation, before realizing, "wow, so that's how this bullshit happens in real life. This is how people fall for it!"

I've had a lot of fun with it! 

I think in the near future we'll probably start looking to partner with a publisher to settle some legal questions and begin looking at how to market a game like this and deliver it from manufacterers to the public. 

It's not a silly complicated game, but it's not simple either. The complexities come from the combination of events and actions, and player opportunities for creativity. It doesn't need much more to push it over the edge.

No ridiculous min-figs to inflate the pricetag and no need for bullshit expansions. Everything fits in one box for one price, just like a good board game should. We can maybe stretch goal for a set of nicer brass tokens or more ornate 3d printed pins instead of simple plastic rods, but that's just fun extras, nothing that makes the game less-than-fun if you miss out on some expensive add-on. 

I'd love to hear feedback from you guys and see what you think!

I'll publish another update on this experiment with Dall-E this weekend, but I've got some Morningstar work to fit in also. 

I'll keep everybody updated as I find time!