While I get reports of good learning experiences from students who play Battle for the Presidency, the game has a strong tendency to proclaim Hillary Clinton as the winner. This reflects the general analysis prior to the election, but when the game is played after the election, it seems a bit odd that the wrong outcome is highly predominant.

When I played the game with one of my Danish upper secondary classes and a Maltese junior college class in March, I made a few modifications.

In the following text, I will sum up the modifications I chose to implement for the game, along with a short motivation for each.

1: Secret Trump Voters and Money for Hillary

Since I wanted Trump to have more than just a fighting chance, I added an extra feature. This illustrates the inability of the polls to foretell the number of Trump voters, and at the same time hints at the superior economic capability of the Hillary campaign.

At the beginning of every turn, beginning at turn two, both campaign managers roll a die. Results can be seen on the following chart:

Die roll	Area	Democrats	Republicans
1	None	No effect	No effect
2	Northeast	Regional office gains 3M$	Republicans gain 1 vote in all states in region
3	South	Regional office gains 3M$	Republicans gain 1 vote in all states in region
4	Great Lakes	Regional office gains 3M$	Republicans gain 1 vote in all states in region
5	Prairie and Desert	Regional office gains 3M$	Republicans gain 1 vote in all states in region
6	North and West	Regional office gains 3M$	Republicans gain 1 vote in all states in region

 

2: Added funds for the regional offices

A group of teachers in a neighboring town ran five games in a row and tweaked the rules a bit every time. They found that the game was faster and had more activities for the regional offices, if they had a budget and funds to work with.

So the regional managers got 5M$ each in their war chest at the beginning of the game and an income of 2M$ each turn.

 

3: Fox and CNN

Since I was running a game for 54 students, there was precious little for each student to do, if we did not add extra activities. Each HQ was enlarged with two extra Communication Experts, so the Campaign Manager had extra eyes and ears, which worked well.

As a more significant game changer, two groups of students were asked to act as news crews for Fox News  and CNN respectively.

 

In order to make the tasks of the news crews more relevant, they were given notice in advance of the upcoming event, and would then interview representatives of the two parties before and after the reading of the event card.

The news crews were instructed to focus on regions with little action, and in that way provided extra activity without slowing down the game.

Some time had to be taken out for short broadcasts at the end of each turn, however.

 

All in all, Trump won a comfortable, but not a landslide victory in Valletta, and the students had something to do while they got to know each other.