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.
The shape of the race: you take a stand on the issues, court the town's endorsers, then run five weeks of three moves a week, with a debate after week two and a mini-competition after week four. About 30 minutes, three to six players.
Each answer wins you ground in some neighborhoods and costs you in others. Take the stand your candidate actually holds and it costs nothing: the base believes it.
An honest record is also armor at the debate. Attacks on a position you really hold mostly bounce off.
A middle answer reaches the contested wards your base answers can't, and you pay for that reach in authenticity. Spend too much and your two strongest wards cool off on the spot.
Low authenticity also makes you easier to wound at the debate.
This is the only place you spend political capital, and every group pays out in its own way: volunteers that make canvassing hit harder, a cash injection, a polling bump, late turnout, or a shield against scandals.
Win the right two or three and the whole race starts tilted your way.
Fit decides it, not money. A group backs the campaign whose answer it believes. Capital only breaks ties between campaigns that fit about equally, and a token bid doesn't count.
Tell a group what it wants to hear against your candidate's nature and you pay in authenticity, which follows you to the debate.
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.
It pays more the bigger your share in a ward, up to about a quarter of the ward. Past that you've already turned out most of your people there, and each new canvass pays less.
Free, and it plays to your strength: it lands in the neighborhood where you're already strongest, deepening a lead rather than chasing new ground.
A clean way to spend a turn when you're comfortable and just want to consolidate.
You can't aim it. It always goes to your best ward, so it can't help you break into hostile or contested turf.
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.
A medium or heavy buy is the fastest mover in the game. When you need to swing a neighborhood now (a contested ward late, a rival surging), nothing else moves it as far in one week. A light buy moves about what a free canvass does.
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.
Ads pay less as your share in a ward grows, because there are fewer persuadable voters left there. Three heavy buys in one ward 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 helps it. When you're the one surging, donors pile in and a call brings in about a quarter 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 a deep base hardest. The bigger a rival's share in the ward you aim at, the more it takes off them, and the voters it suppresses are the exact ones they were counting on.
You can type the line yourself. It airs on the TV between rounds, with your name on it.
Real money, and past a point it stains you. Your first two attack ads of the game cost you nothing extra. From the third on, each one costs you support citywide, and each costs more than the last.
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 doesn't count toward your pattern of attack ads, 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. Nearly one whisper in five gets traced to you, and then it costs you support instead. You don't control which way it breaks.
Plants a scandal on a rival. It costs them support citywide right away, then drips for up to three more weeks unless they spend a move on damage control. A devastating one also knocks their momentum to falling.
It takes initiative. You make the rival spend a move digging out instead of campaigning.
It's a gamble. How big the scandal is isn't yours to choose, some rivals have less to find, and sometimes the research turns up nothing that sticks.
A rival who plays damage control right away cuts the drip short.
Stops the drip. An uncontrolled scandal keeps costing you support every week. Damage control shuts down the worst one now.
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, and you've spent a move and $80k 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, and 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.
Go after one rival's position, or stay above the fray and consolidate your strongest ward. A position they don't really believe lands hardest.
Type a zinger on your phone. It airs on the TV and is in the running for Line of the Night.
Stand on your record and, if your authenticity is still high, you take less than half the hit. Let authenticity slip and the hit lands harder instead.
Pivot and any hit lands at about half strength. Counterpunch and you take the full hit, but more than half of it goes back at whoever threw it. If nobody comes for you, you lose a little for swinging at air.
The money in your war chest does nothing on election night. Week five is the last week it can buy anything, so a heavy buy in your closest ward is almost always better than a balance.
Moves that pay off later. Fundraising refills a wallet you can't spend, and scouting tells you something you can't act on.
Attacks and scandals take support from wherever you have it, and an attack ad takes more from a ward the deeper your base is there. What depth buys you is turnout: on election night, wards where you're at 14% or more turn out stronger, and wards where you're at 6% or less turn out weaker. The debate is the exception: its hits fall mostly on soft support. The takeaway: build real depth where you can, because that's where your votes show up, and expect rivals to aim their attack ads right at it.
Your first two attack ads are free of consequence. A pattern of them is not. From the third on, each one costs you support citywide, and each costs more than the one before. Whispers don't count toward it, but they carry their own risk. 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, your moves convert better, 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, so fundraise into it and it compounds. A slide is worth arresting fast, before it feeds itself.
When several campaigns work the same ward in the same week, the one that put in the most effort takes a bigger share of the voters who move than its effort alone would earn. A little everywhere loses wards to whoever committed. What does fade: ads pay less as your share in a ward grows, and every ward has only so many undecided voters left to win. The takeaway: pick the wards you mean to win and commit to them.
When two or more rivals attack the same campaign in one week, voters recoil and give the target a small sympathy bump. It never cancels the damage, but a gang-up is worth a bit less than it looks.
The playbook is the theory. The table is where it's tested. Gather three to six people and one screen, give it about 30 minutes, and find out who actually reads the room.