4/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of Democratic Socialism Simulator.

Democratic Socialism Simulator is a game built on the bones of games like Reigns, where you’re presented with a series of cards and have to swipe left or right to either deny or approve decisions. It’s very US-centric in design - the game explicitly takes ideals from Bernie Sanders, a politician that is considered left-wing in the USA, and applies it to a potential win state you need to reach at the end of your presidential term. Which leads me to the premise of the game - you’re cast as a US president following a successful election, and you have to navigate their bureaucracy and walk a fine line between the public’s apparent wants and needs as you enact a series of public reforms. What’s interesting about this is that, even as an explicitly left-wing game, it depicts how there are enough barriers to social change, many institutional as well as public, that anyone dedicated to the cause will inevitably find themselves compromising with the right on many issues, or find themselves making populist decisions that ingratiate themselves with the public for the short term, if only to focus on trying to get enough support on your side that you can make unpopular decisions with the focus on the long-term. I’ve kept this game high on the list because it’s made me think of the way I usually view party leaders and democracy, since democracy itself leads to populism, and populism isn’t necessarily good for the public in the long term - but the ideal of giving power to the people means empowering them, even if they might resist changes that do give them that power. This is a complex topic, of course - it can be argued that this resistance comes about because the empowerment of disempowered sections of society becomes the real sticking point, and the people in power use news channels and cults of personality to gather support against such issues. Whatever your stance on it, though, this is a game that uses its mechanics to make you think and confront those ideas, and I admire it for that.