Election Simulator: Campaign

You are not a senator. You are not a governor. A year from now you could be President, if more than half the country says your name.

Election Simulator: Campaign is a story game about running for the highest office in the country, from the night you decide to run to the night the networks call it. Every choice you make changes your poll number, your bank balance, and who is still willing to take your call.

BUILD THE CAMPAIGN
Choose who you were before this: a self-made business mogul, a professor, a small-town mayor, or a retired general. Pick why you are running. Then hire the people who actually win elections: a campaign manager, a PR manager, a social media manager, a speechwriter, a pollster, and when things go wrong, a lawyer. Every hire has real stats. Skill wins debates. Loyalty keeps you out of the papers. The cheap one is cheap for a reason.

FIND THE MONEY
Your own savings last a few weeks. After that, somebody else pays, and everybody who pays wants something. Take the billionaire's plane, sit in the back room with a man and a gym bag, sign with the party, or run a real crowdfunding campaign and live with what it raises. Each door opens a different story and closes another.

WIN THE ROOM
Stand at the podium in televised debates and answer questions on the things people actually argue about: jobs lost to machines, rent, healthcare, guns, the border, taxes on the rich, and a foreign tariff that hits your first primary state. Give two-minute answers where every word you pick moves the audience meter. Your pollster whispers what the room wants to hear. Whether the whisper is right depends on who you hired.

SURVIVE THE YEAR
A deepfake of you insulting voters. A leak inside your own office. Your servers hacked the night the President attacks you on television, and four thousand pages of your campaign online by morning. The police, twice. A live hour with the country's most respected interviewer. A summit with the founders who own your phone, a plane you are pulled off at the last minute, and a helicopter that lands with the President and three old men who would like a word.

Then the final stretch: a town hall where the questions come from citizens, not journalists; debate prep with your whole staff; the last debate, two podiums, you and the senator; and election night, state by state, until the number lands.

THREE ENDINGS
Win with 51% and walk out