SchoolHouse Review Crew: The Presidential Game

You would think that something called The Presidential Game would be a game about the presidents... right? Well, that's what we thought when the game came in the mail.  We soon realized exactly how wrong we were... 

Much to our disappointment, we learned nothing about the actual presidents with this game.  However, we did learn more than we ever thought we could about how the electoral votes work!  To play the game you need two people or two teams.  The choices are being Democrat or Republican.  Each turn, your team gets to choose if it wants to campaign or fundraise.  There are only a few states you can do fundraising in.  They are the key states and when the kiddos played against each other, they battled it out for those few states.  Once when I played with Sam, she realized that you could still get the points by grabbing all of the other states.  
Fundraising, you only roll two dice, and you have to commit at least half of your votes to the state you commit to.  When you are campaign, you roll all three of the dice and pick three different state you can claim with your chips. Hopefully, on your opponents turn, they won't take your state from you!  Ry figured out how many tokens you would need to have on CA so his opponent couldn't take it from him and that was his goal one of the games - although, as soon as she figured out that's what he was doing, she targeted CA also...talk about a LONG game!  Technically, it wasn't any longer that any other game - just seemed that way.  Score sheet gives you 30 weeks on the trail. The instructions say that a 30 week game should take you about an hour-- maybe eventually we will be able to play it in an hour - but for now, playing 10 or 15 weeks at a time takes us that long.

Riley said that he thought it was fun (remember, he's my math whiz) but it was pretty confusing until we figured it out.  

Samantha liked playing, but it was confusing and doesn't want to have to keep score. You can see (below) that we attempted to use the website scoreboard (on my phone) and I thought that using this made it a bit harder... it may have been because it was on the phone and small?  But even still, I think having the extra component of one more place to take score made it hard to keep up with - it was certainly an extra -and one we didn't care for.

The scoring for this game is the part where it gets confusing.  Gaining votes/losing votes - there was a lot of math!  This game is definitely for the older kiddos.  I think that even at 8th grade, (even though it is labeled for ages 11 and up) Samantha and Riley would need me to be close by for them to play. At least for scorekeeping for a little bit longer.  

So, while there were no Presidential information and all I have is just the first few names in a song I memorized in school, this ended up being one of the games they ask to play repeatedly.  The game is available at The Presidential Game website for $35.00. You can check out how well others played the game by checking out the link: