Playing President

The toy shelves of any large department store these days are stacked high with tactical games of war, sports and business, all with complex rules designed to reduce the element of chance and create opportunities for individual strategy. The latest additions to the list are three new political games with definite election-year appeal. In some ways, their verisimilitude to the realities of real life politics is downright cynical. The best candidate is not always the winner; sometimes it is the candidate with the most money.

WHO CAN BEAT NIXON? (Harrison-Blaine; $7) bears a certain resemblance to that perennial family favorite, Monopoly. Up to seven players choose the names of real candidates, including McGovern, Muskie and Lindsay, and set out to defeat another player, who is Nixon. They throw dice to advance their candidates around the board from Alaska to Florida in pursuit of electoral votes, which are won with money and something called media points. Although the game is deliberately weighted in Nixon's favor --he starts out with more money and media points than the others--the contest can be equalized if he lands on a square that requires him to draw special cards, one of which might send him to the laryngitis ward, similar to Monopoly's jail. Other cards may trigger Cabinet shakeups or a kickback scandal. Play continues until one candidate collects 270 electoral votes. MR. PRESIDENT (3M Co.; $8.95) is a game for two to four players who campaign for popular or electoral votes. According to the directions, each party fields a candidate for President and Vice President and "attempts to win the election by campaigning, advertising and debating throughout the nation." Fictitious names are used. For example, a player might choose Republican Hoyt ("Red") Meredith, a New Hampshire Senator, to run for President against Georgia's Democratic Congressman Frank O'Brien. Each candidate has preassigned numerical ratings for his campaign ability, financial support, fund-raising potential and press backing. Cards provide bonuses or setbacks. By the final tally, players will have suffered--on paper, anyway--all the slings and arrows that a live presidential campaigner must endure.

THE NEXT PRESIDENT (Esoterica; $10) is the most complex of the three and can take anywhere from two hours to three days to finish. It has three separate phases. In the nomination phase, the players --as make-believe campaign managers --are issued strategy sheets, candidate-profile charts and a convention-vote score card. Each must decide which of the 22 state presidential-preference primaries to enter and how much to spend out of a set budget in order to win. At the convention, players jockey for state votes by offering ambassadorships, Cabinet posts or even money to rivals, then ballot to select a candidate. Next comes the election and finally, for advanced players, there are a whole new set of rules that allow them to toy with hypothetical scenarios that can pit Abraham Lincoln, for instance, against George Wallace. Another one: what if Nixon were to decline renomination and the Republicans, with a dark-horse candidate, had to enter the campaign against a Democratic party united behind Teddy Kennedy?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.