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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.
Thirty years 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.
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.
You never flip flop. The audience changes and the record does not. The things that were most efficient at the homeowners association are the ones most likely to end you in a Senate primary, and the interface will not warn you, because a warning would give away the argument.
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, they cost the same and curve the same, and nothing in the game finds that remarkable.
Early build - seven offices, six endings, about two hours. Progress saves in your browser; your save carries forward as the build is polished.