by Nicolas Cardona
Hi, I’m
Nico Cardona, a board game designer and publisher based in Barcelona, where I also run my small label,
Too Bad Games. Today I want to share the design journey behind
President, which is probably my first larger design outside the filler space, after titles like
Rudolph,
Mala Suerte and
Panots. More than just telling the story of where the idea came from, I want to focus on the design problems behind it, the systems that failed, and the decisions that finally made the game click.
The Initial SparkThe first seed of President came from a somewhat unusual place: my master’s degree in organizational engineering.
One of the topics that stayed with me the most was game theory. I think it is fascinating for any designer, because at its core it is about incentives, prediction, trust, and decision-making under uncertainty. I was also very interested in graph structures, and at some point those two ideas clicked together in my head.
I started imagining a hierarchy represented almost like a graph or an organizational chart, where your position in that structure would determine how much power you had, and therefore how strong or relevant your actions would be. That was the first real idea behind President. I knew very early that I wanted a game with three levels of hierarchy. Everything else was still unclear.
What I did know from the beginning was the type of experience I wanted. I wanted a game for many players, one where trust mattered, where people had to negotiate, whisper in each other’s ears, make promises, read intentions, and sometimes betray each other. The political theme came later as the perfect frame for those dynamics, but the real starting point was not theme, it was structure and interaction.
The Core Design ProblemThe real design challenge was this: how do you make a game for large groups that feels socially alive and interactive, but still has enough weight to feel like a proper game?
I love social games, but many games for large groups tend to fall into one of two extremes. Either they become hidden role games, where the entire experience depends on secret identities, or they become very broad party games, where the interaction is loud and fun but mechanically light. I wanted something in between.
I wanted a game that could handle a big player count, but where the interaction came from timing, hierarchy, negotiation, reading people, and managing risk, not just from shouting or acting.
That ambition created a lot of problems immediately. Early versions were much bigger, with more systems, more layers, more moving parts. In theory, some of those ideas were interesting. In practice, players got lost. The more I added, the more the game drifted away from the fast, readable, socially sharp experience I was actually trying to build.
At some point I had to be honest with myself. If I wanted President to work for a broader audience, and if I wanted the emotions to be immediate, fast, and easy to read at the table, I had to cut aggressively.
That became the real design process of the game: not adding the right things, but removing the wrong ones.
The Versions That Had to DieOne of the earliest versions looked nothing like the final game. At that stage, I was still exploring hierarchy in a much more literal and structural way.President went through a huge number of prototypes. Some ideas lasted much longer than they should have, simply because I liked them too much.
One of the earliest concepts was that there would be two sides, blue and red, and at some point players could switch allegiances. The idea was that you would push for your side in order to earn bonuses, but maybe change camps when it became convenient. On paper, it sounded politically rich and full of tension. In practice, it was too much. It added another strategic layer, but not the kind of layer the game actually needed. It made the system heavier without making the experience sharper.
There was also an early version where players did not all have the same card set. Instead, cards were drawn, and your position in the hierarchy influenced whether you got stronger or weaker options. Again, this sounded exciting in theory. Higher status could give access to better tools, and the game could reflect power in a more literal way. But it quickly created too much volatility, too much information to track, and too much friction for a game that needed to stay readable, especially at high player counts.
Another difficult thing to abandon was the idea that being President should simply give better rewards than being Vice President or Secretary. At first, that was the direct logic: the higher your office, the bigger your reward. But this created all kinds of problems. It made the hierarchy too obviously dominant, flattened some of the interesting decision-making, and pushed the game toward a more static reward structure.
What finally worked was not giving the top position a directly better reward, but creating situations where being higher in the hierarchy became advantageous depending on what everyone else had played. That shift was crucial. The hierarchy stopped being a blunt reward ladder and became something much more interesting: a system of timing, initiative, leverage, and opportunity.
I also explored versions with more modules, more accumulation systems, and more phases. Some of them were individually fun. But the more I tested, the more I understood that President did not need more content. It needed more precision.
The Breakthrough
At this stage, the game was already much closer to its final identity, but I was still testing which actions deserved to stay and which ones had to disappear.The real turning point came when I found a cleaner hand system.
Once I moved toward the idea that everyone should share the same set of cards, the whole game began to make sense. From there, I iterated many times, around twenty or thirty meaningful iterations, just to find the final seven cards. I was looking for a very specific combination: cards that worked mechanically, fit the theme, were easy enough to understand, and most importantly created strong interaction, replayability, tension, and memorable moments.
The other big breakthrough was the retrieval structure. Players use cards and lose access to them temporarily, then recover them through specific effects. That gave the system rhythm. It made timing matter. It made players pay attention not only to what others were doing now, but also to what options they might regain later.
At that point, I also realized something essential: if I wanted the game to scale to very high player counts, it could not be turn-by-turn in the traditional sense. The game needed simultaneous action selection. That was one of the decisions that truly made large groups possible.
But I did not want pure simultaneous chaos either. So the solution was subtle: players choose actions simultaneously, but they do not all resolve simultaneously. Resolution unfolds in order, shaped by the hierarchy. That gave the game speed without losing tension. It also made the hierarchy feel meaningful, because it effectively became a shifting initiative system.
That was when the game stopped feeling like a collection of ideas and started feeling like an actual design.
Defamation and the Social EngineIf there is one mechanism that made the whole design click, it was Defame.
Defame allows you to predict another player’s action, either in the current turn or even the next one. If you are right, you steal a victory point from them.
That may sound simple, but in play it changed everything.
The moment this mechanic entered the game, negotiation, promises, and public table talk became much more dangerous and much more interesting. Suddenly you could not afford to become too predictable. If you openly signaled your intentions, someone could exploit that. If you lied too often, people would learn to read you differently. Every deal, every bluff, every political speech at the table became part of the real game state.
In other words, Defame did not just create a fun effect. It connected the social layer to the scoring layer.
That mattered a lot. Many social games have plenty of table talk, but the conversation exists somewhat outside the formal system. Here I wanted the opposite. I wanted the game to reward reading people, misdirecting them, and choosing when to be transparent and when to manipulate. Defame was the mechanism that turned all of that into something tangible.
It is probably the hardest card to explain in the game. I know that. But I made a conscious design decision to keep it anyway. Sometimes you remove complexity because it is unnecessary. Sometimes you keep a little complexity because the payoff is worth it. For me, Defame was absolutely worth it.
Simplifying Without Hollowing It OutOne of the hardest lessons of President was learning that “simpler” does not automatically mean “better”, but it often means “clearer”, and clarity is essential when you want a socially dense game to work with many people.
There were moments when I tried to make the game deeper in a more conventional, gamer-friendly sense. More sub-actions, more differentiation, more layered effects. At one point, even with a smaller set of cards, each card could contain multiple sub-actions depending on hierarchy and context. The result was exactly what you would expect: too much information to retain for a game that was meant to sit somewhere between family game and social strategy game.
The issue was not that players could not understand it eventually. The issue was that every extra rule took energy away from the real experience: reading the table, making alliances, lying convincingly, spotting opportunities, and reacting quickly.
That became my filter for every design decision: does this rule improve the social engine of the game, or does it merely make the system denser?
If it only made the system denser, it had to go.
Scaling to Ten PlayersFrom the beginning, I wanted a game that could work in big groups. Part of that came from watching large groups play games like
Secret Hitler and thinking: I want that social energy, but I do not want to rely entirely on hidden roles.
Getting there was not easy. A game that works at eight, nine, or ten players can easily become too flat at three or four. The reverse is also true. Many systems that feel rich at smaller counts become painfully slow or unreadable at larger counts.
What made
President viable at ten was not one single trick, but a combination of constraints. Simultaneous action selection reduced downtime. Shared card sets reduced rules overhead. Ordered resolution kept tension and readability. And then the “day cards” added just enough variety to keep the table alive from round to round.
Those day cards were another area where I learned the value of cutting. Early on, I had more than twenty. Eventually I realized that I did not need that much variety. What I needed were six or seven that were truly excellent, cards that created conversation, forced commitment, or encouraged bluffing in a clean and memorable way.
One of my favorites asks players to declare at the start of the round which action they will play. They may lie, of course, but if they actually do what they said, they recover a card. It is a tiny rule, but it creates exactly the kind of moment I wanted from the beginning: table talk with real consequences.
What the Game Taught MeMore than anything else, President taught me how games are really designed.
Theory matters. Studying systems matters. Understanding incentives matters. But at some point you are no longer dealing with theory. You are dealing with a living system that resists you. A prototype is not an idea. It is an argument with reality.
This game forced me to learn through repetition, through failed versions, through mechanics I loved and had to cut, through moments where I thought I was close and then realized I was still too far away.
It also reinforced something I believe very strongly as a designer: interaction is not decoration. It is not just a bonus layer you hope players bring themselves. If you want a game to be socially memorable, you have to build that social energy into the mechanics themselves.
For me, the best moments in games often come from looking at another player and thinking: what are you about to do, and can I trust you? That tension is alive. It creates stories. It creates laughter. It creates the kinds of memories that survive long after the rules are forgotten.
That is what I was chasing with
President.
Looking Back
After all the cuts, failed systems, and repeated testing, this was the final form the game took.People sometimes ask what I would do differently today. The honest answer is complicated.
Of course there are always details one could revisit. Every design contains a thousand possible alternative paths. But in a deeper sense, I would not undo the mistakes, because those mistakes are exactly how I learned what this game needed to be.
I am the designer of
President, but I also handled the art direction and published it myself together with
Zacatrus, a well-established publisher in Spain that supported the project. By the time the game was already quite advanced, I also showed it to other publishers and saw strong interest there too. That was reassuring, but more importantly, it confirmed something I had started to feel during testing: the long process of cutting, refining, and insisting on the core idea had paid off.
To this day,
President is the game of mine I feel strongest about. Not only because of the final product, but because of what it demanded from me as a designer.
It taught me that when a game is trying to do something unusual, especially for large groups, you cannot afford to protect every idea you love. You have to protect the experience instead.
And sometimes, if you keep doing that for long enough, the game finally starts telling you what it wants to be.
Anmelden
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