Sandbox

The Sandbox lets a player use the presidency game's focus group without playing the rest of the game. A player types in a policy, and an era's cast of personas reads it. Each persona returns a score and a reaction, in the same way they would during a turn of the presidency. A Sandbox test has no President, approval rating, Congress or calendar month, so nothing in an ongoing game is affected. The screen itself states that any policy can be tested, that 24 Americans react to it, and that there are no consequences.

The screen

A row of six Focus Group buttons chooses the cast of personas: Modern, 2000s, 1990s, 1970s, 1960s and 1950s. The help line underneath names the size of each pool: 24 modern personas, 30 personas from the 2000s, and 24 personas from each of the other decades. These casts are the same ones described on Eras and Personas.

The policy box takes up to 1,200 characters. Beneath it is a folded section called Add public messaging, which takes up to 500 characters of persuasive framing for the policy. The screen explains that the same policy can be received differently by voters depending on how it is presented. The Test This Policy button sends both pieces of text, and then counts down for 15 seconds before another test is allowed.

How it works

Each persona in the chosen pool is told the period it lives in and its own background, then asked to react, in three or four sentences, to the President's announcement and any accompanying messaging, and to give it a score from 1 to 100. This works the same way as a persona's reaction during a turn of the presidency game, even though no particular President is described. Occasionally a persona's reaction does not come back in time; when that happens, the game shows a neutral score of 50 for that persona with no comment. Every score is kept within the range 1 to 100, and slurs in the reactions are censored before the results are shown.

The Sandbox does not run the rest of the presidency game's turn, so there is no civil service analysis, no checks and balances, no economy simulation and no stakeholder reaction. The policy and its scores are normally saved, and can later turn up as a round in Policy Guesser. The Persona Mode alternate voices are not offered here; every cast speaks in its ordinary, realistic voice.

The results

The results open with two figures. The national average is weighted by population: each state's score is a weighted average of the persona scores for that state, and the states are then weighted by their population. No partisan lean is applied to this figure, because there is no President's party for it to lean towards. The focus group average, by contrast, is the plain average of all the scores. Both figures are coloured to show roughly how well the policy did.

Below the two headline figures, a map shows the state-by-state reaction, coloured from red through orange to green, and lists the five most and five least favourable states. Below the map, every reaction is listed in score order, with each persona's lean and their comment. A share button pairs the warmest and coldest persona's reactions under the game's own line, "Same policy. Two Americas."

One known problem is that the results screen always labels the reactions "24 persona simple average" and "ALL 24 REACTIONS", even when a pool of a different size was used; when the 2000s pool is chosen, these labels undercount its actual 30 personas.

Access

The button and the tester itself both require a premium account. A free account is shown the upgrade prompt instead of the Sandbox screen.