An Amateur's Guide to Amateur Voting

Voting is hard guys!  People say it's easy but, be it Presidential, Mid-Term, Mayoral or even you're school's Parents Association, election time sneaks up on us and suddenly we're expected to know a whole bunch of stuff so we can make an informed decision and, for the most part, many of us won't even bother. At best, many of us just rely on popular media and campaign commercials. (Don't argue with me here... if you don't have this problem I'm probably not talking about you.)

I do not wish to (overtly) pass judgement on your mid-term results USicans. We do the same types of things in Canada... heck I'm frequently guilty of it... but maybe it would be better if we got "proactive".

Step 1: Pre-Prepare

Find out what roles you are allowed to vote for right now instead of when it's "too late".

Figure out who holds those roles, what they actually do (or should do in many cases), and when you are next going to have to vote. Collect these basic details in something simple like a Google Drive Document or text-file. I doesn't have to be fancy and you don't have to do it all right away. You've got a couple years in most cases to get this stuff together.

You can even work together on this. It's not about politics at this point, it's about knowing what's out there. Barring some heavily gerrymandered districts, you probably get to vote on the same things as your neighbours so, if there are any of those you get along with, you can share the investigatory load.

Step 2: Don't Get Surprised

For most elections you'll know the date quite a few months (or years in the case of Presidents) in advance. Put these dates in your calendar and then put another date in your calendar a month before saying "election day is next month" and then, maybe, for particularly complicated ones, you put more "it's coming" dates in earlier (like a deadline to finish Step 1).

Once you hit your "warning" day you can think about figuring out who to vote for. Go back to your list and find who is running for the roles you will be voting on. Figure out their track records (if any) and their policies and all that jazz. Then pick who you are going to vote for.

Step 3: Plan to vote

Make sure you are actually going to be able to vote when the time comes. Better yet... plan to visit an early polling station so you have two chances to screw it up instead of just one.

Bonus: Your Extra Votes

You only get one vote for each role but there are other things you can totally do that could impact how other people vote.

Extra Vote 1: Telling people who you are voting for and why. If you are famous they call this "endorsement" but normal people are allowed to do it too. Just knowing what you think might be enough to tip someone onto "your side" of the fence. Unless they hate you, I guess.

Extra Vote 2: Helping people vote. Remind people to vote, help people register and get to polling places, wear your "I voted" button with pride... Google says that only 57% of eligible voters participated in the 2012 mid-terms... that tells me that almost half of all USicans just didn't even bother. Maybe they would have if someone had just been like "Hey, are you planning to vote next month? Need a ride?"

Extra Vote 3: Giving resources. If you actually care about a given role you can totally donate or volunteer for a campaign. There is a lot of "Big Money" in politics right now but grass-roots campaigns still have an impact. Lot's of people hate "Big Money" these days so your support kinda counts double; as actual support and as saying "this guy isn't just about "Big Money"".

Extra Vote 4: Running for office. OK, probably an expensive waste of time but... If an incumbent turd is running unopposed and nobody is stepping up, maybe just run yourself (or find someone to run who you can support). You'll probably lose but every vote you get is a vote he doesn't.

Conclusion

This is all totally basic stuff that you could have figured out yourself if you thought about it. I'm just saying it now so that maybe you will think about it a little bit now and maybe actually be ready the next time you have the opportunity to participate in one of these election things.

[Game Design But Not Really] Munchkin Deck Building Game Rules

This is one of those "rough draft, write it and then post it without too much revision" posts... if later I feel like the idea has merit I'll clean it up and stuff...

I had this notion to create a alternate ruleset for existing munchkin sets that would make them deck-building games.

Starting something along the lines of:

Munchkin Game of Deck Building!

Equipment, 1 or more complete Munchkin game and any expansions you wish to include.

Find all the 100 or less gold treasure and shuffle them and deal 10 to each player and leave the remainder as a separate "junk treasure" supply. [number of players] good treasure cards are flipped to create the shop.

Deal 5 doors to each player.

These 15 cards are shuffled together to form each player's deck.


Flip over 2x[number of players] monsters (keep drawing doors till you reach 4 and then shuffle any non-monster doors back  into the supply) and place them in the centre of the table as the "visible dungeon"
Players start as the "Level 1 Human With No Class" equivalent in the Munchkin set you are playing. Players draw 5 cards from their personal deck and can play any appropriate cards.
On a turn a player flips over a door card:
- If it is a monster, last monster in the visible dungeon is discarded to a central dungeon discard pile and this new monster becomes the first.
- If it is a curse it affects the player who drew it immediately
- If it is some other card it is added to the "dungeon loot" of the most recently drawn monster

If the player drew a monster they must enter combat as normal with any of the monsters in the visible dungeon. If a different card was drawn they may still choose to look for trouble with a monster. Defeated monsters are added to the players discard pile, otherwise they are left in the visible dungeon. Treasures won in combat are drawn from the good treasure deck and any dungeon loot cards attached are also won. They add these cards to their discard pile.

When a player gains their 10th (or 20th for epic) level the game ends immediately after the cards are added to the discard pile.

If combat was successful or there was no combat the player may:
Loot the room: add a card from the dungeon supply to his discard pile
OR
Go shopping:
- player may discard cards from their hand whose value equals or exceeds the price of a treasure to buy cards from the shop (rules relating to the "1000 gold for a level" like the halfling ability apply to these transactions) or in multiples exceeding 1000 to gain levels
- player may buy the next (random) card from the junk treasure pile for 100 gold
- player may permanently discard remove from their deck monsters to claim the number of (random) treasure it is worth from the good treasure deck

(bought or gained cards are added to their discard pile)

Player discards any cards they have in play except race or class cards along with any they wish to from their hand and draws up to their current hand limit (so dwarves get extra etc.) from their own deck.

When the game ends (someone reaches level 10 or there are no more door or treasure cards) players collect all their cards and calculate the winner.

Each level is worth 1 VP
The player with the most total gold gets 1 VP
The player with the most total monster levels gets 1 VP
ties are decided by the player with the least total cards among those tied for most VP

Suggestions? Criticisms? Compliments? Accusations of Plagiarism? Links to someone who did it better? Actual Plays? Please Comment!