Workshop

The Workshop is where players write scenarios for each other. A pack defines a whole world for the presidency game. It starts from a reference scenario, from which it inherits its institutions and its voters. It has a premise, which shapes how the game responds on every turn. Its president is either created by the player, taken over from a real scenario, or handed to the player by the pack's author. It also sets a Congress, a set of starting conditions, a constitution, a list of modes that are forced on or off, and a pool of events. Packs are drafted in a studio, published to a gallery, and then played as a custom presidency with the pack applied on top.

The gallery

The Workshop screen has two views. The Browse view lists published packs, twenty at a time, with a title search and three sort options: Newest, Most played and Top rated. Each card in the list shows the title, the blurb, the author, the reference world, the number of events, who the player will play as if the president is pinned, the star rating, and the play count.

Opening a pack shows its facts: the reference world, the start month and year, the president, the Congress, the event count, and whether it is a first term or a second-term legacy run. It also shows anything the pack locks or pre-loads, such as a custom government, modes that are always on or disabled, a constitution, and any wars already running. From this screen, a pack can be rated from one to five stars, reported with a reason, or played. A player can rate a pack once, and can change that rating later, but cannot rate their own pack.

The My Packs view lists the account's own packs, both drafts and published ones, each with a status badge and buttons for Edit, Export, Publish or Unpublish, and Delete. This view also has New Scenario Pack and Import backup buttons. The Export button saves a pack as a file, and Import restores a pack from such a file. An account can hold at most 20 packs.

The studio

The Scenario Studio autosaves a draft as it is edited and has seven tabs.

• Overview sets the title, the author name shown on the gallery card, the gallery blurb, and the premise, which is required before the pack can be published. It also has six optional backstory fields covering what the administration promised, how this world got here, the election that led here, key figures, skeletons, and defining fights. The premise is the only piece of pack text that shapes the game's responses on every turn. The backstory fields instead feed the event generator and the end-of-term Wikipedia article.
• President sets how the player's president is chosen. The player can create their own president through the normal builder. Alternatively, the player can take over a real president, chosen from the scenario presets that ship with a full profile. Or the player can inherit a president that the pack's author has written, complete with a name, a party, a profile and a biography; this option can be started from one of the author's own saved presidents.
• World sets the reference world, one of sixteen worlds grouped by era, from Truman 1949 to Trump 2025. The reference world supplies the court, Congress, cabinet, agencies, diplomatic map, era rules and voters. The calendar is set separately from the reference world, and can be any start year and month. The Congress can be left as it was in the reference year, or set to one of six tiers ranging from a generational supermajority to a deep minority. The starting conditions cover approval, government stability and party stability, the economy, the diplomacy scores, the social statistics, the 1960s civil rights slider, and the stakeholders' opening opinions. The pack can also be set to be a first term or a second-term legacy run.
• Government allows the reference world's real Supreme Court, cabinet and agency heads to each be replaced. A custom bench can have up to 15 justices, of whom exactly one must be Chief Justice. A custom cabinet arrives already sworn in, so the normal cabinet-building step is skipped. Custom agency heads are merged into the game post by post. If a Vice President is pinned by the pack, the normal Vice President pick is skipped.
• Rules and Modes sets several game modes to be left to the player, always on, or always off: economy simulation, social engineering, checks and balances, the war room, dynamic events, the Tweeter feed in modern worlds, national-vote elections, the Red Scare in 1950s worlds, covert operations, and the post-9/11 mood, which applies automatically to 1990s and 2000s worlds unless the pack turns it off. The Fourth Estate mode is not available in the studio. Two of the mode dials shown here, Dirty Tricks and Expanded Congress, currently have no effect; the player's own settings control them instead, as they also do for Difficulty, Persona Mode, Weekly Pacing and the debates toggle. The same tab sets the constitution on day one, covering the repeal of the 22nd Amendment, the repeal of the 19th Amendment, suffrage restricted to women, abolition of the filibuster, D.C. statehood and Puerto Rico statehood. It also sets the opening state of Expanded Congress, including its six leaders, and up to four wars that are already running when the pack starts, which require the war room to be switched on.
• Events allows up to 150 events to be added, either written by hand or generated in batches from the premise. Each event is a situation, a crisis or an open floor, and the tab has a filter and a count for each of these kinds. The source of events during play can be the base pool plus the pack, which is the default, the pack alone, or the base pool alone. Consequence events can be switched off. The odds of a quiet month, a situation and a crisis can be changed from their defaults. Quiet months can be drawn from both pools, from the base pool only, or from the pack's own repeatable open events only. An event that was generated for a different reference world than the pack's current one is flagged.
• Publish shows a summary of the pack, a checklist of problems, such as a missing blurb, no events, or wars set up without the war room switched on, and the buttons Publish to the Workshop and Save as draft. Until it is published, a pack is a private draft that only its author can see and test-play. Publishing a pack requires at least a title and a premise.

Playing a pack

A pack run is a custom run of the presidency game. The player passes through the normal character builder, with the pack's reference world already set. If the pack pins a president, that fills in and locks the identity fields; if it pins a Congress tier, that hides the composition picker. When the game starts, the pack applies the start year and month, the government block, the forced modes, the amendments, the starting conditions and any wars. The pack's events seed the run's event deck, and the premise shapes every turn from then on. Everything else about the run, including saves and the free-tier rules, follows the ordinary rules of the presidency game. The play count on the pack rises by one each time a career is created from it.

Moderation

Publishing a pack checks its title, blurb, author name and every other piece of text in the pack against the game's content rules. A banned word blocks the publish and names the field where it was found; the list used here allows words for demographics and for the violence that ordinary political fiction needs, but still bans slurs, sexual content and everything else the game's general rules ban. A published pack that is later edited is checked again. Three separate reports from different players flag a pack for review, but nothing is hidden automatically when this happens. An administrator can hide a pack, which removes it from every public listing; clear a flag from a pack; or bar an account from saving or publishing packs.

Access

Creating and playing packs both require a premium account. The gallery itself is visible to any signed-in account, but opening a pack from it shows a free account the upgrade prompt instead. The Workshop is marked as being in beta, on its own button and on both of its screens.