27th Nov 2025 - Prime Minister

• Recent games

Have you ever heard of the Earl of Rosebery? Probably not. He was one of Victorian Britain's least noteworthy prime ministers. But I drew him as my character card in Prime Minister, so spent quite a long time in his company on Thursday evening. I decided that the game was thematically faithful to his obscurity.

Also keeping me company were far more celebrated prime ministers than mine: Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone, embodied respectively by Michel, Andrew and Paul. The game pitted us 2 against 2, Liberal vs Conservative, encouraging us mostly to work as teams, and also do a bit of infighting to determine a single winner. It is generally very thematically faithful, focussing on the inner workings of government and opposition, as the government tries to pass bills, the opposition tries to bring them down, and we both spend time trying to persuade as much of the electorate as possible to vote for us.

I do like this kind of political game, and I did enjoy the process of this one. There was a cycle of election, followed by regrouping and building and gradual crescendo up to the next election or leadership challenge, which made it feel like we were doing different things all the time. And the many different sets of cards gave it a nice unpredictability and variety, as well as thematic richness. During my stint as PM, I had to deal with the Irish potato famine and various other real 19th-century events.

Unfortunately, the randomness, which is fine for thematic fun, undermines this game quite a lot. Amid all the minor wins and losses between the parties, there are maybe 4 big events in the game which have a vast impact, while everything else is trivial. And those big events are very subject to random interference.

The game is intentionally asymmetric, in that each of the character cards has different strengths and weaknesses. Maybe I just didn't see the light, but it felt like some of their strengths are far more powerful than others, with the result that some cards are much better than others. This is thematically very nice (Gladstone and Disraeli were the most successful prime ministers of the era, and their cards both seem very powerful); but it's not so nice if - in one of those big random events - you draw a crap character card. As I did. The Earl Of Rosebery's key "strength" was called Flattery, which meant I was really good at toadying up to Queen Victoria, and really mediocre at everything else.

That first game-defining random-event out of the way, Paul and I soon realised that it was better for us, as Liberals, to have Gladstone as leader, and the Earl Of Rubbishness removed to the backbenches. But that was made bizarrely difficult by the Standing mechanic. Again thematically accurate, it represents your standing among your parliamentary party. Whenever a new person takes over as party leader or prime minister, their standing goes sky-high, then gradually diminishes as they fail to achieve things; while the backbenchers' standing drops to zero and then creeps back up over time. So we started with the Earl Of Uselessness on very high standing and Gladstone on zero, and couldn't swap them until Gladstone overtook him.

The game was published in 2023, by which time they might plausibly have conceived of a "party during lockdown" or "make stupid economic decisions on the basis of divine right" mechanic to allow the prime minister to self-destruct. But no such mechanic was available to us, so we faced a race to get Gladstone's standing up quicker than our rival, Disraeli's. We were close, but didn't quite manage it. So Disraeli became prime minister and the Liberals, with Gladstone finally at the helm, ran out of time to dislodge him.

The one person who might have dislodged him, in a rare lapse of thematic faith, was Robert Peel, who history tells us had been dead nearly 20 years by the time Disraeli was first prime minister. In another crucial setup event, part random and part due to what looks like careless balancing, Disraeli started as party leader while Gladstone didn't. So Peel was able to spend most of the game building up his own standing while riding on Disraeli's coattails. When a succession of rail disasters and other events finally started to turn the tables against Disraeli, Peel was best-placed to clean up.

And then, again thematically slightly oddly, Queen Victoria stepped in. Disraeli, or more accurately Andrew, had spent the whole game being as rude to her Madge as possible, shunning her birthday and the royal wedding. But, at the very end, he did a bit of flattery. So just when it mattered, she intervened to favour him over Peel. And so he was prime minister at the end of the game, which is how you win. Well done Andrew.

So would I play this game again? Yes - but more because you need to play the entire game according to a strategy conceived at the start, and you need to have played it before to have a clue how to form that strategy. And possibly because I felt like the randomness was against me in this one, and I might stand a better chance by reshuffling the cards and going again.

But these things mean I'm unlikely ever to rate it that highly. It's a good thematic experience, and I really like the richly thematic games - but the best of those have far shorter, sharper ups and downs. The very long, evolving turns of fortune in this game, while thematically apt, leave it lacking something for me.

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