Glossary

The game has a vocabulary of its own, some of it on screen and some of it only in the way the systems are described. This glossary defines the terms a player meets, in the presidency game first and then in Career Mode.

The presidency

• Approval - the president's national standing, shown on the dashboard as a percentage and on the dashboard graph as net approval. It is the only figure an election uses when National-Vote Elections is on.
• Checks and balances - the toggle under which Congress, the courts and the executive branch can block or weaken a policy. Each returns a verdict of passed, modified or blocked; after a self-coup an adverse court ruling returns defied instead.
• Civil service - the analysis that runs at the start of every turn, producing a summary of what happened, how the policy is classified, how extreme it is judged to be, its category, the three papers' front pages and a line for the timeline.
• Consequence - in classic event mode, an event that arrives a few months after a policy as its direct result.
• Dampening - the reduction applied to a persona's approving reaction during a governing month before it counts towards the next election. How much of the approval counts depends on how closely the persona leans towards the president's party. The president's own strong supporters count in full, swing voters count for less, and the other party's strong supporters barely count at all. Disapproval always counts in full. Campaign events apply a stricter version of the same reduction.
• Deployment - a war or troop commitment under the Deployments and War toggle, with a theatre, a type, a force and a running cost that is shown under the fiscal balance card and charged against the budget.
• Difficulty - easy, medium or hard; it sets the filibuster's behaviour in Congress and the structural drag on the president's party at elections.
• Dynamic event - under Hybrid or Dynamic event generation, an event written to fit the situation, in place of one drawn from the pre-written pool.
• Era - the decade a game is set in, which selects the cast of personas and stakeholders, the diplomacy keys and the event files. See Eras.
• Era shifting - a game crossing from one era's cast to the next as the calendar moves. See Era shifting.
• Event - the situation put in front of the president each month. The main tiers are crisis, situation and open; an open event describes a lull in the news and lets the player choose freely what to do. See Canon events.
• Extremism - the civil service's reading of how far a policy departs from routine government: mild, moderate, radical or unconstitutional. The more extreme a policy is judged to be, the more likely each check is to intervene. A policy that one check modifies is treated as less extreme by the next check.
• Favour - a reward from a stakeholder whose support is high enough: an approval bump, a diplomatic win, a war chest, cover in Congress and the like, in strong, medium and weak tiers.
• The Fourth Estate - the media mode, in which the focus group reacts to the coverage it saw rather than to the policy itself. It plays alone and switches the other high-cost modes off. The setup screen does not offer it while it is being built.
• Implementation rate - how much of a policy is actually carried out, based on how competent and how willing the responsible cabinet members are, adjusted by the Chief of Staff and lifted by a matching Vice President portfolio or a Full Muscle favour. It is zero for a blocked policy. Economy and social effects are scaled by it; diplomacy is not.
• Jim Crow rates - the reduced weight given to the Black personas in the segregationist states when the state map is drawn, reflecting the denial of the vote under Jim Crow. It applies throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s until the civil rights slider has risen far enough.
• Lineage - the line of personas that represent the same voter across the eras. See Lineage.
• Mandate - a field of a custom president's profile: a landslide, a comfortable win, a razor-thin margin or the Electoral College only, each setting the opening approval.
• Mechanism - how the president is acting, as the civil service classifies it: legislation, executive order, diplomatic, military, statement or manage. It decides which checks run and in what order; a statement and a manage skip them.
• Persona - one of the voters in an era's focus group, each asked to score every policy from 1 to 100 in their own voice. See Personas.
• Persona Mode - the setup switch between realistic personas, Whacko personas and the Tweeter Is Not Real Life pool.
• Premium - the paid tier. Persona Mode, Social Engineering, Event Generation, Deployments and War, the Red Scare, Covert Operations, Dirty Tricks, Expanded Congress, Weekly Pacing and the Fourth Estate require it, as do several scenarios and the workshop.
• Scenario - a preset presidency with its own profile, party, Congress, court, cabinet, election schedule and starting conditions; a custom president is built by hand instead. See Scenarios.
• Stakeholder - an organised interest whose score is a weighted average of persona scores, with its own passive effects and favours. See Stakeholders.
• Turn - one month of the presidency, or one week under Weekly Pacing; each turn advances the game and applies the results.
• War chest - the campaign fund accumulated from stakeholders, and one of the favours they can grant.

Career Mode

• Action points - the month's budget of effort, which depends on the player's age, the hours of their job, any caring responsibilities at home and their health. Every activity on the board shows its own cost in action points.
• Arena - the voters a race is decided among. For a legislative seat these are the district's voters, for governor or senator the state's voters, and for the presidency the voters of the whole country.
• The board - the month's operation: the activities the player has engaged, what they cost, what they raise and the rooms they put the player in front of. It resolves every month for every role but the presidency.
• Brief - the party's current asks, a short list of issues it wants its people to push. Every line the player sets is judged as on-brief or off-brief.
• Desk - the office screen of a governor or a legislator, where the month's event, the docket and the papers live; the hub is the screen of everyone else.
• Elite tick - the monthly change in a party official's opinion of the player once the official knows them. It follows how the official's wing of the party judges the player's lines, however few voters heard them.
• Favourability - how much a persona who knows the player likes them, held per persona per state from 0 to 100, with 50 as the neutral start.
• Field - the candidates in a race, entering over time: the authored bench, roster politicians climbing the ladder, local figures and deadline stragglers.
• Hub - the home screen of a citizen, a candidate or a seat-holder: the job, the money, the board and the scene.
• Line - the sentence the player is carrying into the rooms this month, scored by the whole era pool on the same 1 to 100 scale as a presidential policy.
• Machine - the party as its named people rather than as a single number. Where the game needs one figure for the player's standing with the machine, it combines how many of those people know the player with what they think of the player.
• The network - the named people of the party's chart, each of whom has never heard of the player, knows of them or has met them, and forms an opinion only once he knows them.
• The one book - the single record of how well known and how well liked the player is with each voter in each state. The figures for the player's own party are read from this same record, and there is no separate party record.
• Orders - the monthly consequence of the brief. If every line the player has set during an election cycle ignores the party's asks, every party official who knows the player thinks less of them. Following the brief earns nothing extra.
• Political class - the roster of state legislators, statewide officers and party officials built for the player's state, created fresh from the state's real political landscape rather than kept as a fixed list.
• Primary strength - a candidate's standing in a primary. It combines how well known the candidate is among their own party's voters in the seat with how well those voters like them. Campaigning works only by moving those two figures.
• PVI - a state's or a district's partisan lean. The presidency game uses a table of state leans for each era. In Career Mode, each state's and each seat's lean comes from the real results of the election year being contested, and it draws swing voters towards the party that the seat usually favours.
• Recognition - how many of a persona's group have heard of the player, tracked for each persona in each state from 0 to 100. It rises more slowly the higher it already is.
• Room - the three to six personas, or a whole audience, that an activity puts the player in front of; a line is judged by the people who actually heard it.
• Sandbox - a career in which the game world decides every election the player is not part of from the first month, chosen under World on the start screen. A Historical career follows the real results until the end of 2024. See Career starts.
• Seam - the month the era's cast changes; each incoming persona inherits the stored recognition and favourability of its precursor, state by state, so opinion does not lurch.
• Seat book - the screen of every runnable office: ladder levels, each seat's constituency by persona, its incumbent, the field so far and the door in.
• Swing voters - the groups of voters who lean towards neither party. In a Career Mode general election they divide according to how they see the candidates, drawn towards the party the seat usually favours. See Races and primaries.
• Wing - an ideology within a party, such as progressive or populist, with four in each party in the modern era. Each wing is associated with particular groups of voters, and how those voters see the player decides how the wing's officials see the player.