Power Politics III

Posted on October 21, 2004

This is cool… it’s another entry to the burgeoning field of political games, but this one has a great pedigree — Power Politics III is the latest release from Randy Chase, the designer of the pioneering election simulator Power Politics from back in 1992. I used to be absolutely addicted to that game.

What’s even cooler is that, thanks to the sponsorship of the Christian Science Monitor, Rock the Vote, and the Gallup Poll, the basic version of Power Politics III (which contains all the candidates who actually ran in the 2004 campaign) is 100% free. If you want to play historic or “what-if” campaigns, you can upgrade for $29.95 to the “Fantasy” edition, which includes 90 additional candidate files and the Candidate Editor so you can create your own match-ups. (Power Politics had a similar ability to let you run modern candidates against historic ones — but you were always stuck in the milieu of the 1992 campaign, which limited the appeal of, say, Richard Nixon somewhat. No word on the site if PP3 models different election years as well as different candidates.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this latest work from a pioneer in this whole field matches up against more recent efforts like The Political Machine and President Forever.