Paul Bass Photo
New Haven’s Patton with his new political-campaign board game.
As voters prepared to hit the polls, the Zombie Neurosurgeon was on his way to victory. Until The Hairpiece unleashed an unforgivable smear.
Who knew that politics could be so … unjust?
So I discovered in an election campaign this week as I played the role of a candidate known as the “Zombie Neurosurgeon.” He bore more than a passing resemblance to a certain real-life neurosurgeon running for president.
Brandon Patton played the role of “The Hairpiece,” a dead ringer for a certain megalomaniacal billionaire who’s also running for president.
This election took place not in New Hampshire, nor anywhere else in the United States. It unfolded in “Humerica,” an alternate country that resembles the U.S. all too much.
Which was the point.
Patton, a 42-year-old East Rocker, put together this election campaign, in the form of a new board game called Super Pac$! The Game of Politics about the Game of Politics.
Nerdrocker
Patton, an avid gamer (“lifelong player of Magic: The Gathering”), grew up in St. Paul, Minn., in a “politically informed household. My parents were always mouthing off about politics or looking at the TV and getting upset.”
He designed Super Pac$! with a friend, Yale social roboticist André Pereira.
Mutual friends introduced Patton and Pereira, who moved here from Portugal. “He was crazy about games. I was crazy about games. We immediately hit it off,” Patton said.
In his day job, Patton works for a medical study-aid and public-policy game-design company. He also plays bass in a band called MC Frontalot. (You can see him and the band in the 2009 documentary called Nerdcore Rising.) At his Yale day job, Pereira works “on the development of social robots that motivate and promote healthier lifestyles in people.”
Pereira showed Patton a game he’d developed with friends back in Portugal. Called Here Comes The Troika, the game lampoons the political reaction to Europe’s financial stresses, tracking the process of luring the support of special interest in the quest for power.
“I thought it was funny, even though a lot of it was over my head. I said, ‘Wow, we have to make an American version of this,’” Patton recalled.
So they did. They enlisted political cartoonists, including Jeff Danziger of The New York Times syndicate and Phil Hands of the Wisconsin State Journal, to illustrate the playing cards. (Checking out the cartoons, along with the card write-ups, is a great part of the game’s pleasure.)
In designing the game, they aimed to enable people to have fun during the wall-to-wall presidential campaign season, a time when otherwise “everyone’s screaming at each other” about terrorism or family values or the economy, Patton said. “Sometimes it’s useful to step back and add a little levity” in the process of thinking about issues and the political system.
Yes, the game contains underlying satirical political points about the influence of money in politics and the way “politicians adapt to serve their personal ambitions.” But it’s all evenhanded and in good fun. Skewered interest groups range from left to right and in between.
“Now you can enjoy the soul-crushing cynicism of big-money politics in your own home!” Patton declares in a promotional video for the game.
The pair also hopes to tap into the popularity for complex board games among millennials.
Late-Breaking Scandal
Patton and Pereira have a Kickstarter campaign running through March 2 to raise the money to manufacture and distribute the campaign in time for the climactic months of the 2016 presidential campaign. In America.
Back in Humerica, Patton, aka The Hairpiece, was guiding yours truly, aka the Zombie Neurosurgeon, through a sample round of the game, on air for an episode of WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
The game is complicated, just like the quest for power in the USA. The object is to amass power by winning votes and embezzling or otherwise “earning” money. Players collect the backing of interest groups from hipsters and marijuana activists and “liberal media” to Big Tobacco, sex workers, climate change deniers, and seniors. They build their coalitions and advance their quests through tactics like hijacking agendas and dishing dirt on opponents during the course of three elections, for the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the White House.
The Zombie Neurosurgeon was sailing toward victory on “Dateline New Haven.” He had the local-news-crushing Media Conglomerate lobby on his side, along with conservative talk radio and small business owners. Not to mention pro-lifers and hackers.
Then The Hairpiece pulled a fast one. He obtained and played a “smear” card. He successfully spread a rumor accusing the Zombie Neurosurgeon of one of the lowest sins in the right-wing Republican universe: planning to … raise taxes.
The Zombie Neurosurgeon didn’t have enough time before the election to bury the rumor. He did have some options left to offset it. And he could strike back: Like all players in the game, the Zombie Neurosurgeon has a “superpower.” In his case it’s the ability to bring people back from the dead (or the “cemetery,” on the game board). So the Zombie Neurosurgeon brought a discarded interest group, bloggers, back to life to harass the Hairpiece by creating a new scandal.
Would it prove enough to win power?
To find out, and to learn more about the game and Patton, click on or download the above sound file to hear the entire episode of “Dateline New Haven.”Here’s the link to the game’s Kickstarter page …
… along with a promotional video Patton made for it.
Want to learn to play the game? We’re thinking of hosting a WNHH/New Haven Independent Super Pac$! tournament at a downtown coffee shop, perhaps on the night of the “Super Tuesday” (March 1). Interested? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to get your name on a sign-up list.