Die Macher

This post will be about my group's first real experience with the boardgame Die Macher. Yes Limpy, you're excused.

First of all, it's a German game so the first word in the title is pronounced "dee" with a long e, not "die" with a long i. The "Macher" part is pronounced like you'd expect: mach, like the speed of sound, and er, like, well, er. Say it with me, "dee MAH-ker". Excellent. As Scott Nicholson of Boardgames with Scott fame will tell you, this pronunciation lesson is especially important when playing the game Die Fugger. It is pronounced dee FOO-ger. Not DIE FUCKER!

In Die Macher each player takes on the role of a political party in Germany. They attempt to gain votes and thereby seats in the government by having their party platforms match the public opinion of individual German states along with the nation as a whole. When played by people who are familiar with it, a full, 7 round game of Die Macher will last about 5 hours.

Ummm, what?

5 HOURS? Like 300 minutes? Are you serious? And it's about German politics? How in the world do you talk anyone into such crap? Me? I started by offering to make breakfast including my world famous homefries. Zoe was convinced. I had played 3/4 of the "short" version with Larry and some others once before. We both liked it a lot and wanted to try the real deal. That made 3 of us. Sylvia is married to me and is therefore trapped wonderful and willing to try anything if I ask her and tell her I think she'll enjoy it and that it's important to me and how would she like to cook her own damn dinner all next week? She was in. I hit Markus over the head with a brick and, viola, we had 5 players.

Everyone got to our house around 9:30 for the promised breakfast and by 10:30 we were ready to start a practice round. I taught the game to Sylvia a couple days earlier and Zoe and Markus watched the review/tutorial on Boardgames with Scott but I knew a trial run would be needed to clear up any rules questions. And there were definitely questions. Like a lot of the heavier euro-games the rules are pretty easy, there are just a lot of them. So we got through that, reset the board, and were ready to start in earnest by about noon.

Each round is split up into 14 phases, some of which take 30 seconds, some take 15 minutes. I'm not going to go into too much detail (yeah. right.) but here's the jist:

The game board is divided into 4 sections, each representing one German region or state. Each round of the game represents the voting in one region. During each round you can also do things that will influence the scoring in the next 3 rounds. So in the first round you can only see and affect things in states 1-4. After state #1 is scored that board is cleared off and is then reset as state #5. State #2 then becomes the current state and states 2-5 can be affected etc.

Each player has 5 party platform cards that show how the party feels about the 7 critical voting issues. Stuff like social security, minimum wage, nuclear power etc. Each party will be for, against, or neutral toward each of these issues. Each German state is also for, against or neutral on each issue. The more issues you match with a state the more votes you're likely to get in that state and therefore more seats in the government.

1. A round starts with bidding to see who gets to choose the starting player. You don't have to be the starting player if you win the bid. Many times it's good to go last so you can tell the person to your left to go first.
2. Then you can make one adjustment to your party platform cards. Just one.
3. After that everyone can play some special cards called Shadow Cabinet cards. These can affect the different regions on the board by giving the players votes, making parties more or less popular, increasing a player's influence in the media in a state and things like that. You get 7 Shadow Cabinet cards at the beginning of the game and you can only use each one once. Some of your Shadow Cabinet cards also allow you to form a coalition in a state if you have enough similarities with another player's party policies.
4. Ironically enough the next thing that happens is coalitions are formed if players can and want to form them. Coalitions are very important. Basically it means that 2 players are agreeing to team up in a state and pool their votes. The most votes any one player can get is 50 but a coalition can pool their votes together and get more than that.
5. Players can then purchase media influence. With enough influence in the media a player can actually change the public opinion in a state. Very powerful but rather realistic, no?
6. Election meetings are then held. During this phase the players add Meeting Marker cubes to some or all of the states.
7. The next phase can get expensive. In each of the 4 available states a special card is auctioned off. It's a card that can increase or decrease the popularity of each of the parties. There are 20 cards, each with a different combination of popularity changes. A card may make the green, black, and pink players' popularity increase while making the yellow and red players' decrease, or any other combination you can think of. Whoever wins the auction can activate one or two of the popularity changes if they'd like to do them. One problem: the card is secret when it's auctioned off. So you have no idea if the card is going to help you if you win it or hurt you if you decide to let someone else get it. You can pay a LOT of cash to get a card and have it do nothing for you, but often keeping it out of your competition's hands is worth it. If there's nothing on the card you want to do you can simply increase the number of members in your party a little bit instead.
8. Remember the Meeting Markers we purchased and put on the regions in phase 6? The Meeting Markers are the items that are converted into actual votes. Each Marker is worth a value based on how popular the player's party is and how many of their policies match or contradict the public opinion cards of that state. You can actually gain votes in future states at this time too if you have enough Meeting Markers to convert. If you have more votes in a future region than all the other players added together you can change the public's opinion in that region. Of course reaching this level of influence in a future state means you need to ignore, or at least pay less attention to, the current state. You really gotta pick your battles.
9. Then you take care of the current state. Everyone converts all their Meeting Markers in the current state into votes. The number of seats these votes are worth depends on how valuable the state is. Bigger states will give you larger numbers of seats for the same number of votes.
10. Next you determine which party or coalition won the election in the current state. If there weren't any coalitions it's easy: whoever has the most votes wins. If there were coalitions than the individual with the most votes will still lose to a coalition whose total excedes that individual. Remember how I said the most votes you can get as an individual is 50? Well, after the first round or two there will usually be several parties that reach the 50 marker. Whoever reaches the 50 marker LAST is officially the winner "by a nose". This is a major reason to want to go last and why the auction in phase one can be pricy. At this point the National Opinion board comes into play. The winner of the current state can move a media marker onto the National board and it'll be worth bonus points at the end of the game. The winner can also move Public Opinion card(s) from the current region onto the National Opinion board and those will also be worth bonus points at the end of the game if they don't get bumped in future rounds.
11. If your party's policies match the National Opinion board you also get to increase the number of members in you party. Your number of party members is worth money at some points of the game and is also worth points at the end so increasing that number is a good thing.
12. Then you clear off what was the current region and set it up to be the most future region. So the part of the board that was region 1 would be set up to be region 5, the region that was 2nd in line becomes the current region etc.
13. You then get cash. $1000 per number of seats you won in the last election.
14. And finally there's a bribe phase. I'm sorry, did I say bribe? I meant "Party Contribution" phase. If you accept the bri...errr, contribution, you gain cash but you lose a few party members. If you reject it, you don't get any money but your party membership grows a little.

Then you start all over again! At the end of the game (7 rounds) you get points for the number of seats you won in each election, the media markers you moved onto the National Board, the matches in policies that your party has in relation to the National Board & the size of your party. Biggest number wins.

Including our pizza break, several stops to let the dogs outside, calling spouses who weren't there, getting more beer or whatever our game clocked in at just under 8 hours. That's right, 8. And it was a fantastic way to spend the day. Markus was victorious followed by Larry, myself, Sylvia and Zoe. I may have Zoe and Sylvia backwards, I'm not sure. Sylvia started out very strong but all of us underestimated how big of an effect the last couple rounds would have on the game. And when Zoe backed out of a deal they had made it left Sylvia in deep weeds. If we had it to do over again (and I hope we do!) we'd all have done things differently. We're pretty comfortable with the idea that the next time we play 5 hours will probably be pretty close. The first few rounds of our game took a looong time as we fumbled around with it and tried to get a grasp on how all the different phased affected every other phase.

What did I think? I really, really liked it and I can't wait to try it again. Now that we all "get it" and see how important the final couple rounds are in relation to the National Board I'd love to see what everyone will do next time. I'm sure I'd use my Shadow Cabinet cards differently. Now all we need is to find another day when all 5 of us can set aside 5 hours...