President Elect

Strategic Simulations, universally known as SSI, treated games as models of reality. Usually that meant wargames with hex maps and tables; President Elect, from 1981, applied the same thinking to American presidential elections.

The player runs a campaign: allocating time and money between states, taking positions on issues, and trying to assemble a majority of electoral votes. The US system is unusually rewarding material for this, because the national vote total does not decide the outcome — the states you win do. That turns campaigning into an optimisation problem where ignoring safe states and concentrating on uncertain ones is the whole art.

Being a 1981 release meant the game ran entirely as text. There were no animations and no maps in any modern sense; the player read numbers, entered decisions, and watched polling shift. That is precisely what makes this generation of strategy games interesting — with no other layer available, they forced players to think about data.

SSI later reworked and reissued the game, which was not unusual for a successful simulation; election data updates far more easily than an engine does.

For a modern player it is a demanding but instructive exhibit. Anyone interested in American politics will find a working model of a system whose basic mechanics have not changed since 1981. Anyone looking for entertainment in the current sense will most likely find the pace punishing.

On OldGame.cz the title has a profile with release information.