What was the process like for creating your game? How did the limitations influence your design?
The seed of Class President came from a board game idea I had worked on a bit probably 5-6 years ago. One of my personal restrictions was that I wanted to have a non-violent theme, and Class President was one that had been in my ideas folder for a while that fit the bill.
The original idea was much larger and built around a blind-bid mechanic. I thought the idea could probably be simplified a lot and the 18 card limit seemed like a good test for that. The first challenge was how to keep track of the limited number of uses each player had for the Campaign action. Using the four sides of a card is a pretty simple and useful mechanic for that, and each player needed their own, so that was 2 out of my 18 cards.
The original board game idea had 7 different social cliques. Because I knew I wanted to work with a male/female interaction as well as the cliques/interests/classes, and I had 16 cards left, I cut it down to the four classes, and split the 16 student cards down the middle 8 boys/8 girls, so it made for nice and easy combinations. 4 single-class leaders (1 for each class), 12 other students with 2 classes.
From there it was a matter of figuring out the traits and on-play actions of all the student cards. The first thing I try to do is identify all the different mechanical levers that are available to me as a designer. What things do the players or cards do normally that can be made use of in new or slightly different ways to make for unique abilities? Drawing cards, playing cards, using the Campaign action, combining students into cliques, these were the tools I had to work with when designing the abilities.
A few were pretty easy and obvious, others took more work. I did a stream for a couple hours and just sat there with my cards spreadsheet open and spitballed ideas with some people in chat. One concern I had was trying to balance out the strength of a card's passive traits with the strength of its on-play ability, and I think that worked out alright (needs testing).
Once all the abilities were assigned that was pretty much it for the mechanical design. I had originally wanted to have art for all the students but that would have taken a lot of time and abilities beyond what I have, so I just settled for the minimal, icon-only design (for now).
How do you think it turned out?
I think it's playable? My personal goals were something non-violent and simple enough that my wife would play it with me, and I think I achieved those goals. I'm not sure how deep the strategy is, or if there's some really easy and dominant first-order strategy that I didn't think of. It definitely needs some testing. With the way the scoring system works it encourages you to keep building up the size of a clique, but you always run the risk of doing that and then your opponent just takes it on their next turn, so I hope that tension works out well.
Do you have future plans for this game?
Not in the immediate future, but eventually I would like to get some simple art done. I had the idea of trying to get a good bit of diversity included among the students and try to break some stereotypes with the representation there, so hopefully I can do that at some point. It definitely needs more playtesting, I'm not sure how well balanced the scoring system is, or if some of the abilities are too strong.