Eight years to design a game. Eight hours to live it

In 1990, three guys from central California decided to found a wargame publishing house. Their names were Gene, Mike, and Terry. They used their initials. They called it GMT. Mike and Terry left early, Gene remained. Over the next thirty-five years, he published about ten games a year, becoming the most prolific wargame publisher in the world, personally signing some of the genre's most beloved series, including the long-running Next War saga on contemporary conflicts.

Then, at some point, he stopped designing wars and sat down to design the presidency.

In 2015, Billingsley was already sixty years old and had a publishing house to manage. He had nothing to prove. But in that article, he wrote a sentence that explains everything else. He said that Mr. President is "the game I always wanted to design." Anyone who has spent their life doing one thing understands the weight of that sentence. It means that for thirty years he had done other things. It means that at some point, he decided to stop postponing it.

The first edition is from 2023. The second is from 2026, and it's not a reprint with a few errata corrections. It's a director's cut: rewritten manuals, revised balancing, scenarios recalibrated based on thousands of games played online and the criticisms the first round had garnered. A man who waited thirty years to make a game, two years after publishing it, went back to the drawing board and remade it better.

When you open the box, the first thing you find isn't the board. It's an object Billingsley calls a Flipbook. A booklet that takes your hand and guides you through each single phase of the turn, one page at a time. It doesn't exist in any other wargame. And it's the solution to the problem that cost Billingsley eight years: how do you simulate the US presidency without the average player giving up on the third paragraph of the manual?

Because Mr. President is a huge game. The box is almost thirteen centimeters high. Inside there's a 56 by 86 centimeter board, six distinct rulebooks, 180 crisis cards, six hundred markers. Four years of presidency are played in four one-year phases, each year divided into two semesters. One game turn is six months of governing. A complete game takes four to eight hours.

You are never sitting in front of Mr. President thinking "now I'll make the winning move." You are sitting in front of thirty simultaneous decisions. Do you raise taxes or lower them? Do you send an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait? Do you push for healthcare reform that will burn your popularity? Do you answer the Israeli prime minister's call or let the Secretary of State handle it? In half an hour Congress votes, in an hour there's an attack in Paris, in a year there are midterm elections.

Billingsley called it a tribute to the monster games of the seventies, those from SPI and Avalon Hill, which occupied the dining room table for weeks. But those games simulated battles. Mr. President simulates a profession. And it does so with a precision that makes you forget you're playing a game.

There's one thing that happens to those who play Mr. President, and you find it in almost all serious reviews. After five, six, eight hours of play, the player doesn't talk about the game as a game. They talk about their presidency. They say "when Putin invaded Moldova, I didn't have the votes in the Senate to respond" or "I had to let healthcare reform die to save the alliance with Taiwan." They tell a story in the first person, with precise emotional memory, as if they had lived it.

Psychology

Narrative Transportation In 2000, two psychologists, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that was destined to become a classic. They demonstrated that when a person is deeply immersed in a narrative, critical distance dissolves. Those transported into a story no longer evaluate the information they receive: they absorb it. They change opinions, form memories, build beliefs, without even realizing it. Narrative transportation is what makes you cry at the movies for someone who doesn't exist. It's what makes you leave a book feeling like you've lost a friend. And it's what Mr. President has elevated to the level of a game system: it doesn't ask you to win, it asks you to become someone for eight hours. Green & Brock, The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.

Billingsley took eight years not because he was balancing numbers. He took eight years because he was building a transportation mechanism. Every detail of the Flipbook, every branching of the Cascading Events, every separate rulebook for Russia, China, allies, and internal crises, serves one purpose: to keep you inside. To prevent you from seeing the game. To make you see, for eight hours, the world from the Resolute Desk.

The criticisms of the first edition almost all talked about the same thing. Too random, too dependent on dice, too unbalanced. Billingsley tweaked the balancing in the second edition, but he didn't really respond to that criticism. He couldn't. Because randomness is not a bug in the game: it's part of the transportation. Real presidents don't play under conditions of perfect information. And anyone who leaves a game of Mr. President knows it, even if they didn't know it when they started.

You don't play Mr. President. For eight hours, you are him.