This offers a more detailed reply to the question on selecting a strategic focus as well as comments on the purpose of the game. People Power is not like other games, even strategy games. When you first play any game, you’ll play poorly, until you learn the tools and features. With most games, the goal is to play efficiently—to win in the least number of turns.
People Power is not just about winning – it encourages experimentation. We want you to make mistakes and ‘play poorly’ because the fun in People Power comes from building and managing a nonviolent movement and learning from experience what are the best actions to take and when. What’s best in one scenario may not be in another. Results will be different even in multiple plays of the same scenario. As in the real world, a bad decision or a major setback doesn’t mean you’ve ‘lost.’ You can recover from mistakes and still achieve a positive result for your movement. We expect that such experiences will be the most satisfying part of playing People Power.
We could tell you upfront what specific tactics will work well in specific situations; we could even explain how the game math is engineered – which would guarantee that you’d play ‘better’ from day one. But if we did that, we’d be cheating you – depriving you of the learning experience which is the purpose of the game. People Power is built on the idea that people learn certain skills more effectively through personal, trial-and-error experiences than they do when they are simply given information.
We assume that players in our online community will use the Forum to share knowledge and compare notes, or even write their own strategy guides. But we hope you’ll take some time to play on your own, not trying to ‘beat’ each scenario quickly, but experimenting to see what happens. There’s a lot to be learned from winning, losing and everything in between.
At the start of each scenario, you’ll see news items which tell you about core issues and conflicts. Your job is to assess the situation, choose a goal and chart a course of action that will achieve it. The central issues are listed in the Movement Manifesto notebook (on the bookshelf). For each issue, the movement has a position: neutral, for, or against. You’re allowed to change these positions, and you may want to. Each issue implies a goal to achieve in the scenario. Also on the bookshelf, look in the Country Information notebook, for important background information that will help you understand the context of the issues.
Issues may imply ‘victory conditions.’ For example, if you succeed in compelling the government to create an Anti-Corruption Commission, the game will recognize it a victory for the movement. Even if you achieve a victory condition, you can continue playing, to see what else you can accomplish. There are also ‘supporting issues,’ which won’t give you an outright victory, but will probably boost the movement’s Momentum and win new allies. Some issues may not be important to the movement per se, but they can be important to other characters or groups. The movement may consider making a devil’s bargain, supporting an issue they don’t like or don’t care about as the price of support from other influential people – while risking the loss of support from others who have already joined the movement!
You are challenged to decide which issues to emphasize, and then see what happens when you start performing tactics toward those goals. We think you’ll will find as much fun in this experimentation as in ‘beating’ each scenario. Please come back here and post your play experiences so we can see how you’re doing and so other players can compare notes!