Game review: Majorities

Voting is a finicky thing, the preferences of many are piled together to make a group preference, or so that's the plan. Every voting system as its quirks, and it almost seems like whatever happens, there seem to be blocs that influence the results. Small things can drastically change an election result, and we haven't even touched the real life troubles that might occur at the voting booth.

It's not usual for someone to look at voting phenomena and think "Hey, I could make a game out of this!",  but Bill Taylor did just that with Majorities. The main version is played on a hexagonal board, but variations are possible, even a 3D one.

The set sold at Nestorgames is on a size 7(units per side) board, but this can played on any regular hexagon board with an odd number of cells and two sets of pieces(stones) of different colors or even just pen and paper. The board will have some cells that are unplayable, i.e. no stone can be placed on them. This ensures that every row will have an odd number of playable cells. The pattern of prohibited cells can be generalized to fit other board sizes.

Play begins with one player placing one stone on any allowed cell on the board. Afterwards, players place two of their stones on any allowed cell until the board is filled. 

Once filled, stones are counted per row, and whoever has a majority of stones wins that row. Repeat the process for the wins on the rows in a direction, then the wins per direction to determine the winner.

The downside is that it's a slow game, that with the board filling and manual counting. The upside is it's a rowdy and unpredictable ride from start to finish, just like an actual election. This game also makes a good demonstration that voting systems will always leads to wonky situations, even if it's a simple plurality vote.

Maybe the lesson here is that no voting system is perfect, and each will have pros and cons depending on the situation. I use a ranked vote in my stuff and it leads to weird situations sometimes, what makes any other system not do anything strange?

I've just told you the basic game, but feel free to play with the game, like adding ranked votes or even a third party. Just be democratic about it.