This new card game makes Portland’s city council elections fun – BikePortland

Portlander Sean Sweat gamified our confusing city council elections. His new card game, “Rose City Hall,” arrives just in time to help voters understand dozens of viable candidates for local office. Sean is an MIT graduate, supply chain expert at Intel, urban planner, former vice chair of the Portland Bureau of Transportation Bureau’s Budget Advisory Committee, and active member of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association.

I have met Sean at several events over the past few years (we first met at the first Just Crossing Alliance fundraising party in 2022) as he settled into our community from his former hometown of Phoenix. When he said he had developed a card game based on the local election, I invited him into the shed to take a closer look.

Here is the brief description of the gameplay that Sean posted on the Rose City Hall website:

Each player represents an influential figurehead in one of Portland’s four boroughs. The districts will elect three city councilors and the mayor, and then you will try to pass policies that your district’s voters will approve of. In doing so, you can help your city council members gain and use political capital to influence the outcome and shape the Portland you want to see!

The feature of the game that excites me the most is the candidate cards. There are 68 council and 7 mayoral candidate cards. Sean included cards of all candidates who have a campaign website, have raised at least 100 donations, and who have answered and returned his questionnaire. He used the questionnaire and his own survey of available information to give each candidate a score between one and four on four key issues: homeless camping enforcement, housing, transportation and taxes. The score is presented on a spectrum between two poles of thought. For example, on the traffic line, “car” is on the left of the spectrum and “bicycle/public transport” is on the right (he intentionally flipped this to deviate from traditional left-right political thinking). For housing, it says “Conservation” on the left and “YIMBY” on the right, and so on. Candidate maps also include the district in which the person is running, their job or background, and the neighborhood in which they live.

It’s really fun to leaf through the cards and a great way to start a conversation over coffee or tea with a friend.

There are also 38 “Guidelines” cards, which have values ​​​​based on how much political capital is needed to pass them, what minimum score on the issue spectrum a candidate needs to pass them, and which districts tend to be. to support the directive. Examples of these maps include “Expand the Portland Street Response,” “Remove Rose Lanes,” “Eliminate the Arts Tax,” etc.

The stack of 19 “News” is another fun element that can shake up the game. They read like headlines and have various consequences that affect the game. For example, the card titled “City Council Caught Pushing PBOT to Secretly Remove Popular Bike Path” will cause the candidate in your stable with the highest “Car” position to lose all of their political capital points.

Each player represents a different council district, whose three members are chosen after a vote combining “preference tokens” and a dice roll. The game consists of reading message cards and trying to pass policies – which players either want to support or influence. You can choose whether you want to play a competitive or community game. In the competitive version, you win when three or more policies that favor your district are passed and are in effect. In the cooperative game, the local council wins together as soon as there are three effective guidelines for each district.

This is Portland civic nerdiness at its best and I’m here for it! I’ll try to bring decks – or maybe Sean himself – to bike happy hour soon. And if he or I create a how-to video, I will embed it here in this post and on our various platforms. I highly recommend taking the time to pick up a set of these cards, and I hope Sean will offer booster packs for future elections.

The game costs $35 for a high quality, professionally printed version. You can also print the entire deck as a PDF from the game’s website for an estimated cost of $25 at a local print/copy shop. Read full instructions and learn more at RoseCityHall.com.