Every action in the war room is a tradeoff. There is no button that just makes you win, and no move that is always wrong. A canvass that dominates one week is wasted the next. An attack that breaks a front-runner can stain the person who threw it. This is the operative's guide to all of it: what each move does, what it costs, and how to know when it's the right one. Read it before your next game, or after one that got away from you.
Your bread and butter. It costs no money, so you can run it every week without draining the war chest, and it builds real support that sticks.
Canvass rewards turnout, not persuasion. It works hardest where you already have a base to mobilize, which makes it the natural tool for locking down your strong neighborhoods.
It's slow. One canvass moves a neighborhood a little, not a lot. If you're behind and need to swing a ward fast, doors won't do it in time.
Piling canvass after canvass into the same neighborhood hits diminishing returns. The first one lands; the fourth barely registers.
Free, and it plays to your strength: it firms up the neighborhoods where you're already ahead, deepening a lead rather than chasing new ground.
A clean way to spend a turn when you're comfortable and just want to consolidate.
It does almost nothing where you're weak. If you need to break into hostile or contested turf, a town hall is the wrong tool.
The boost is small. It reinforces; it doesn't transform.
Like canvass, it's a free turnout play you aim at a specific neighborhood, and it stacks with your ground operation.
Good for showing presence in a ward you're contesting without spending a dime.
Small effect, and like all turnout actions it rewards existing strength more than fresh ground. It won't flip a neighborhood that isn't already leaning your way.
The fastest mover in the game. When you need to swing a neighborhood now -- a contested ward late, a rival surging -- ads do in one week what canvass takes three to do.
Ads reward persuasion: they work best on fresh ground, the not-yet-decided, which makes them your tool for breaking into new turf rather than just deepening your base.
Money, and a lot of it at the high tier. A heavy buy is real war chest that's now gone, so it lives and dies on whether you can refill.
Repeating ads burns cash fast and hits diminishing returns. Three heavy buys is not three times one buy.
The engine behind every paid move. No fundraising, no ads, no attacks. It's the turn that pays for the next three.
Momentum multiplies it. When you're the one surging, donors pile in and a single call brings in far more. Riding a wave? Cash in on it.
It moves no votes. A week spent fundraising is a week your rivals spent campaigning. You're buying future power at the price of present ground.
When you're falling, donors get cold feet and the take shrinks -- exactly when you're most desperate for it.
The only action with a spillover. Signs get seen from the road, so they nudge the target ward and leak a little into every neighborhood that borders it. Plant them on the seam between two wards you're contesting and you touch both at once.
Dirt cheap. At this price the spillover is close to free ground, and it rewards reading the map.
Small. The direct bump is modest and the spillover is smaller still, so signs are dominated by real ads and canvassing every time those are an option.
A turn on signs is a turn not spent on a move that shifts a ward decisively.
A targeted strike: it dents a rival in a specific ward and plants suppression that bites their turnout there the following week. Hitting a front-runner in their base is how you slow a runaway.
It hits soft support hardest. A rival whose lead is shallow and unconsolidated bleeds far more than one whose base is locked in.
Real money, and it stains you. Going negative once is fine; a pattern of attacks backfires on you, and the penalty scales sharply the more you throw.
Everyone can see it's you. Unlike a whisper, an attack ad has your name on it.
Cheaper than an attack ad and anonymous -- it isn't obviously traceable to you, so it dodges the stain that open attacks carry.
A citywide nick at a rival rather than a single-ward strike. Good for shaving a point off a leader without declaring open war.
Softer effect than a full ad -- it nicks, it doesn't gut.
It can blow back. A whisper that gets traced or backfires costs you instead, and you don't control which way it breaks.
Plants a scandal on a rival that then drips -- it costs them support every week until they spend a turn on damage control. A devastating scandal bleeds them hard and forces them to react on your timing.
It takes initiative. You make the rival spend a turn digging out instead of campaigning.
It moves nothing the week you play it -- the payoff is the drip that follows, so it's an investment, not an instant hit.
Costs money, and a rival who immediately plays damage control blunts much of it.
Stops the drip. An uncontrolled scandal keeps costing you support every single week -- damage control shuts down the worst one now and forces it to expire.
Certain and automatic: it targets your most damaging scandal first, so you never waste it on a minor problem while a devastating one bleeds.
Purely reactive. With no active scandal, it does nothing -- you've burned a whole turn to sit still.
It's a tempo-for-safety trade: a week spent digging back to neutral is a week not spent gaining ground. And it only handles one scandal at a time.
Free information in a game built on hidden information. Knowing a rival's war chest tells you whether they can afford a heavy ad war. Knowing their momentum tells you who's about to surge.
It turns guesses into reads. The whole game is about acting on what you can see -- scout lets you see more.
It moves no votes. Information only pays off if you act on it -- scouting a rival and then doing nothing different was a wasted turn.
Early, when nothing has diverged yet, there may be little worth knowing.
Not all support is equal. A neighborhood where you're barely ahead is soft -- attacks, scandals, and erosion hit it hard. A neighborhood where you've built a real, deep lead is fired base -- it shields against damage, absorbing only a fraction of the same hit. The takeaway: a shallow lead spread thin is fragile; a deep lead in fewer wards is armor. And when you attack, aim at rivals whose support is soft, not locked.
One attack is free of consequence. A pattern of them is not. The backfire on negative campaigning grows sharply the more you throw -- two attacks cost you more than twice one, three more than that. The takeaway: attacks are a scalpel, not a hammer. Pick the one rival, the one moment, and don't turn your whole campaign negative or the room turns on you.
Canvass and community events are turnout -- they pay off most where you already have a base to mobilize. Ads are persuasion -- they pay off most on the not-yet-decided. The takeaway: use free ground game to deepen what you own, and paid media to break into what you don't. Running ads in your locked base, or canvassing a ward full of strangers, spends the wrong tool on the job.
Momentum isn't just flavor. When you're rising, fundraising brings in more and late-deciding voters break your way on election night. When you're falling, donors pull back and the undecideds drift elsewhere. The takeaway: a surge is worth pressing -- fundraise into it, and it compounds. A slide is worth arresting fast, before it feeds itself.
The same move into the same neighborhood, week after week, hits diminishing returns. The first canvass or ad buy in a ward lands full; each repeat does less. The takeaway: spread your effort, or vary it. Three different moves across three wards beats hammering one ward three times.
The playbook is the theory. The table is where it's tested. Gather three to six people, one screen, and find out who actually reads the room.