President Elect - 1988 Edition

President Elect is a turn-based, Political simulation game, first released by Strategic Simulations in 1981.

President Elect gives the player the ability to play as various real historical, potential historical, or completely fictional Presidential candidates during the Presidential campaigns from 1960 to 1984 (most versions also included the 1988 campaign). Players were given the option of playing a "Historical" or "Ahistorical" scenario for each of the given years. Under the "Historical" option, the candidates, as well as economic and foreign policy conditions, and the status of the incumbent, were fixed. During an "Ahistorical" session, all those variables could be determined by the player (for example, the player could choose a 1980 race between an incumbent Republican President Ronald Reagan, versus a Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in the midst of an unpopular war and an economic boom). Alternatively, players could select the option of creating a fictional Presidential candidate, through the selection of various political, personal, and geographic attributes (somewhat in the manner of creating an RPG player character). In addition, there was the option of selecting an "Ahistorical" set of candidates within the otherwise "Historical" conditions of the selected year. The game came preset with not only all the major candidates of the elections covered by the span of the game, but also a number of hypothetical candidates from across the time frame, such as Jerry Brown, George Romney, Gary Hart, and Howard Baker.

The game could be played with either two or three candidates (for example, the "Historical" scenarios for 1968 and 1980 included third party candidates George C. Wallace and John Anderson, respectively, and "Ahistorical" scenarios for any year could include the addition of a third party candidate), and the computer could control any or all of the candidates (thus allowing for the possibility of a non-player, straight simulation of an electoral scenario), meaning the game could be played by one, two, or three players.

Gameplay centered on the activity of dispersing PAPs ("Political Action Points"), which were approximately equivalent to campaign funds, in terms of their relationship to real life Presidential campaigning, as well as scheduling personal, campaign visits to various states. Additionally, at the end of each of the nine, week-long, post-Labor Day game turns, there was a potential debate phase.

The role of the Vice-Presidential running mate was extremely limited, in that the running mate's identity was never given, but rather was simply represented by his or her being from a particular state, thus giving the ticket an electoral advantage in that particular state, and possibly other states within the region of the running mate's home state (for purposes of the game, the country was broken up into seven different regions, corresponding to general understandings of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Industrial Midwest, the Great Plains, the Mountain States, and the Pacific Coastal States), although the Vice-Presidential running-mate's role in any state other than his own was never made explicit.

President Elect was first published for the Apple ][ in 1981, and was subsequently published for the Commodore 64 in 1984. A subsequent "1988 Edition" was released in 1987 for both those systems, as well as for the Atari ST and DOS computers.