Mr. President: The American Presidency 2000-2020 is a game about being the American president.
Based on a tabletop game, this title built by Exia Labs and adapted from GMT Games tabletop version, is unique in that it’s not about elections or running a campaign. You’ve already won the election and must now govern. Likewise, most games in which you get to lead America focus on a narrow slice of that leadership.
In Mr. President, you have to take on the entire presidential portfolio: running the war on terror, dealing with domestic crises, managing your cabinet, working with U.S. allies and rivals, passing your domestic agenda through Congress, confirming Supreme Court justices if a seat comes open, and every other responsibility that comes with sitting in the Oval Office.
The game is coming in July to Steam for $25, with discounts as low as $20.
The game is an adaptation of the tabletop version, the result of a nine-year design and research process. It has a vast amount of content, ensuring tons of replayability — hundreds of crises and events, dozens of actions for the player to choose from, and subsystems capturing the whole range of presidential opportunities and challenges.
Players can opt for the sandbox scenario, which puts them at the start of a four-year term that encompasses a general variety of trends and events of the early 21st century. Or, if a player wants to see if he or she can do better than an actual president, there’s a scenario for each presidential term.
Want to see if you can navigate the financial crisis, pass health care reform, and contain Iran better than President Barack Obama did? Do you think you can deal with 9/11 better than President George W. Bush did, perhaps even also achieving Bush’s objective of Social Security reform? Mr. President lets you take your shot.
The tabletop version is a monster game; one of the most common player comments about it is “I would love to buy and play this game, but I don’t have the table space” or “I can’t leave a game like this set up for days and days.” Another common comment is “I spend a lot of time finding the right tables to roll on and the right rules to apply.”
Exia’s adaptation will remove all of that player pain and present players with a tightened but entirely faithful Mr. President experience.
But we know there are pitfalls with translating a game like Mr. President to the PC screen. Part of what’s compelling about Mr. President, and other open-ended sandbox simulation style games, is that by reading the rules and pushing the counters, the player gains a deeper understanding of the choices the game offers and how to play towards and around them.
A system that automates everything and simply presents the player with results fails in two ways: it denies the player a moment to imagine what’s happening, and it forgoes an opportunity to understand what impacted the chance of success.
Exia has an experienced game dev team. It includes Ananda Gupta, one of the most experienced and successful game designers in both digital and tabletop spaces.
Like any game about politics and governing, Mr. President expresses a particular creative vision. It portrays the American presidency as a great institution and America as a force for good in the world – but whose potential is strongest when people of different parties and views come together, and when America works well with its allies. Like any creative vision, people will disagree – but in today’s political atmosphere, many players may find Mr. President to be a breath of fresh air.
The game is an adaptation of the tabletop game, Mr. President: The American Presidency 2000-2020, which was created and designed by Gene Billingsley, the cofounder and CEO of GMT Games, the leading commercial wargame publisher (their games range from deep simulations with hundreds of parameters, such as their Next War: Taiwan, to accessible “entry level” games like Commands and Colors).
Jonathan Pan, CEO of Exia, acknowledged that a lot of people would see this as a political game at first glance. But he said in an email to GamesBeat, “It was designed to be very politically neutral but it’ll take playing the game for people to describe it that way. In terms of timing for the game, we had a Presidential election only a few months ago, and regardless of what you think of President Trump, the role of the US President is constantly in the news. This game let’s players play as the US President.”
He added, “When we started our company, we thought we’d focus primarily on military war games. But to work on the most impactful scenarios, we needed security clearances that we don’t have just yet. There are four instruments of national power described with the acronym DIME: diplomacy, information, military, and economic. If we need to wait for tracking military, we thought let’s focus on something unclassified: diplomacy or economics. Lots of overlap between diplomacy and politics so that’s how we ended up finding this game and turning it to digital, which isn’t as simple as a direct port.”
Exia has recruited a team of experienced triple-A developers that brings a powerful combination of success in game development and enthusiasm for history to the project.
They include Ananda Gupta, of Twilight Struggle, Imperial Struggle, and Teamfight Tactics fame. Twilight Struggle (GMT Games), is a board game about the Cold War; it has won six awards and held the No. 1 spot on Boardgamegeek.com for five years, and in 2024 it was inducted into the GAMA Hall of Fame. Imperial Struggle, the spiritual successor to Twilight Struggle, won the Golden Geek award for Best Wargame of 2020. Gupta is Exia’s game designer focused on translating the tabletop game to a digital experience.
Aaron Rutledge is an experience designer from League of Legends, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends. Designing the interaction, animations and user interface systems are crucial to evoke the playing the board game’s feel and keeping the player squarely in the President’s chair, even as they eliminate piece management and rules lookup.
Joshua Balcaceres is the art director. He has a 27-year art career in film, games, and VFX. He has worked for Industrial Light & Magic, 2K, EA, Ubisoft, Disney Imagineering, Obsidian and others studios.
Connor Walsh is leading game engineering. He has spent the last eight years at Riot Games working on Valorant and an unannounced title.
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