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Higher Office

Somebody resigned from the board over a garden gnome, and you have their seat. There are four items on the agenda, none of them costs more than sixty dollars, and one of them is the gnome.

Six offices later a paint colour is a constitutional matter, and nothing in between explains how you got from one to the other, because nothing needs to.

Filed the garden gnome under outbuildings. Clean.

Free  ·  No account  ·  About two hours  ·  Saves in your browser

What it is

Higher Office is a turn based political career game played entirely in text and figures. The turn is a meeting and nothing ticks while you read it: no countdown moves, no money accrues, nothing expires. You close the meeting when you are ready, and that is the only thing in the game that makes time pass.

Every action you take appends one line to the record, permanently. The record has no delete control, and the game says so on the screen. What it does have is a colour, and the colour is not fixed: each office you reach applies a stricter reading to your entire history, so an entry written in a cul de sac about a basketball hoop is unremarkable at the board, worth noting at the council, and a liability at the nomination, without one word of it changing.

Nothing in the record is ever revised. The office reading it is a different office every time. The things that were most efficient at the homeowners association are the ones most likely to end you in a Senate primary, and nothing warns you.

Every fourth meeting is a campaign finance disclosure. You choose the categories, you choose the amounts, and the receipt threshold is printed on the form as a number. Nothing stops you filing just under it. The true total and the filed total print side by side, and the game does not remark on the difference.

There are no real people in it and no real parties. The two parties are the Party of the First Part and the Party of the Second Part. You pick one at the second office, from twelve nouns printed side by side against twelve others, and they cost the same and curve the same: the primary of one reads what a thing was about and the primary of the other reads what it cost. Nothing else about them differs.

Early build. Seven offices, seven endings, about two hours. Progress saves in your browser; your save carries forward as the build is polished.