Wouter & Ymke 
You’ve somehow crash-landed in a parallel version of 21st-century South Korea, and before you’ve even had time to work out what happened, there’s a presidential election coming up. More importantly, you’re one of the candidates. Your opponents are already campaigning across the country, making promises, appearing in the media and occasionally doing things that might be described as politically questionable.
That’s the setting for President Maker, a 2–4 player election game from Pluto Games, which will also be at Spiel Essen 2026. Over two rounds, you’ll campaign across five regions, build support, announce policies and try to get voters engaged. Eventually, though, you’ll have to stop campaigning and actually count the votes. That last part turned out to be rather important, because having plenty of supporters and having those supporters actually show up are two different things.
👥 2-4 players, ages 14+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Bonghwan Ju
🎨 Artwork: Wanjin Gill
🏢 Publisher: Pluto Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
The election takes place across five regional boards, with Seoul-Gyeonggi sitting in the centre. Each region tracks two main things: how much support each candidate has and how engaged its voters are. The four outer regions also have political orientations, while different policy issues are linked to different parts of the country. Alongside all of this is a separate vote count track, where the candidates begin with their core supporters.
The game lasts two rounds. Each consists of a rally phase, political action phase and media phase. After the first round there’s a presidential poll, while the second round is followed by a final rally and the vote count. It sounds like quite a list when written down, but each individual phase is fairly short.
During a normal rally, everyone secretly chooses two regions using their rally cards, then all choices are revealed together. If you’re the only candidate visiting a region, your support there increases by two. If several candidates turn up, they each gain one support instead, and engagement in that region also increases. You get the cards back afterwards, so every region remains available for future rallies.
Next comes the political action phase. Each candidate plays three political cards, one at a time in turn order. These can change support and engagement, interfere with another candidate, affect your position on the vote count track or give you risk cards. Each card also contains a policy, which can increase your support in the two regions connected to that issue or in Seoul-Gyeonggi instead. If a policy would push your support beyond its maximum, engagement increases there instead.
The media phase checks who has become popular in each region. Every candidate who has crossed that region’s popularity threshold increases its engagement, so some regions can gradually produce more votes. Everyone also reveals their accumulated risk cards. Whoever has the highest total loses one core supporter. After round one there’s a presidential poll as well. Regional leaders put additional tokens into the poll bag, five tokens are drawn, and whoever appears most gains a core supporter but also receives another risk card.
After the second round, there’s one final rally. This time everyone chooses only one region, and regions nobody visits lose one engagement. Then it’s time to count the votes. In each region, candidates put vote tokens into the bag according to their support there, along with the minor candidate token. The number drawn depends on the region’s engagement, and every token drawn moves that candidate along the vote count track. If someone has united with the minor candidate, that token can provide a vote for them as well. The regions are counted one after another, with Seoul-Gyeonggi always last. Whoever finishes furthest along the vote count track wins the election.
Artwork & Components
Visually, President Maker looks a little like someone turned an election-night results screen into a board game. There are lots of coloured tracks, symbols, numbers and geometric shapes, with Korean and English appearing side by side throughout. It looks busy at first, but remains fairly easy to read once everything is on the table.
The five regional boards take up most of the table. Each has an engagement track, four coloured support tracks and spaces for its political information. The separate vote count track sits nearby, with policy cards placed between the regions. There’s quite a bit spread around by the time setup is finished, but the individual pieces are small enough that it never became awkward on our table. The colours do most of the work when you’re trying to check the situation quickly.
Most of the components are cards, cardboard boards and wooden tokens. Support and engagement are tracked with cubes, while larger rounded wooden tokens are used for votes. You also get four candidate meeples, which look a bit like tiny politicians marching towards the presidency. The black cloth bag is probably the least interesting component when you first open the box. By the end of a game, everyone is staring at it as though it has personally developed a political agenda.
The cards follow the same fairly simple presentation. Candidate colours are easy to distinguish, policies use recognisable symbols and most effects are communicated with icons. We needed the player aid regularly during our first game, particularly for the political cards, but that reduced quickly. There isn’t much decorative artwork outside the box itself, although I don’t really miss it. Most of what you’re looking at during the game is information, and it’s presented clearly.
Our Experience
Our first game took a little while to settle into. Five regions with several tracks each, policy cards between them, player cards around the outside and another track above everything made the table look busier than the game actually was. We also made the mistake of treating regional leads as if they were victories. Whenever somebody moved ahead somewhere, our first instinct was to stop them. Only when we reached the vote count did it properly sink in that someone sitting behind the leader could still collect several votes from that same region.
Four players was our preferred way to play. With every candidate controlled by someone at the table, there’s intent behind every rally destination. After a few rounds together, we inevitably started believing we could predict each other. Sometimes we could. More often, two or three of us revealed the same region and discovered that our supposedly brilliant campaign plans were remarkably similar. At three players, the independent candidate acts as an NPC and randomly visits regions during rallies. It works perfectly well and can even win the election. A random card just doesn’t give you the same suspicious look across the table before everyone reveals their choices.
We rarely switched off during somebody else’s turn. More than once, the region we planned to target looked completely different by the time our turn came around. Someone had pushed ahead there, or another part of the game suddenly looked much more tempting. We didn’t all campaign in the same way either. One of us might concentrate heavily on a few regions, with someone else building support across almost the whole country. Somehow, both could keep producing votes.
The political cards probably generated more table talk than anything before the election itself. Their names gave us an excuse to narrate some fairly dubious campaigning, and the risk cards had us watching how badly everyone else was behaving. Taking another risk feels surprisingly reasonable when someone across the table already has a small pile in front of them. At least it did until the media phase proved otherwise. This was, unsurprisingly, not always good political judgement.
And then there was the vote count. That was consistently our favourite part of the game. Once the campaigning was finished, we just went through the regions and watched the tokens come out. Sometimes the result looked roughly like we expected. Other times, someone with a very healthy share of the bag watched almost everything except their colour appear. There was usually some suspicious staring into the bag afterwards, as if we’d suddenly discover the missing votes hiding in a corner. Seoul-Gyeonggi being counted last meant our elections generally stayed undecided until fairly late. Once everyone knew the game, our plays usually came in around half an hour.
Our Thoughts
What stayed with us most is that President Maker isn’t really about collecting regions. You can concentrate support and have a very large share of the votes available somewhere. Or you can spread out and give yourself a chance to pick up votes across the country. Putting six or seven support into one region looks lovely on the board. Those supporters obviously aren’t helping when votes are being drawn somewhere else, though, and being behind another candidate doesn’t mean the support you’ve already put there has been wasted.
Engagement was probably the part we underestimated most. Six support sounds great until you realise hardly any votes are coming out of that region. Somewhere else, three or four support can suddenly look much more useful after everyone has spent the game pushing engagement upwards. Sometimes we helped with that ourselves. Increasing turnout in a region and then watching another candidate benefit more from it isn’t exactly a proud campaign moment.
Halfway through a game, we often couldn’t agree on who was actually in the best position. One candidate might lead several regions. Another had support almost everywhere. Someone else might be doing particularly well in the regions with high engagement, and then there are the core supporters already sitting on the vote count track. We never found ourselves looking at one number and thinking, “Right, they’re winning.” Mostly we were looking at five different boards and coming up with five different arguments.
For all those tracks and symbols, President Maker isn’t particularly difficult to play. The first explanation does need to make clear what support and engagement are eventually going to do. Without that, you’re mostly pushing coloured cubes around and trusting that it’ll all make sense later. Once we understood that part, we weren’t spending much time checking the phase order or wondering what happened next. The political side comes through in the policies, rallies, polls, media attention and political risks. They give the different actions some context, and we always felt like we were working towards an election rather than simply moving cubes across five boards.
The vote draw will probably be the dividing point for some players. You can spend the whole game putting yourself in a better position and still watch someone with worse odds get the nicer draws. We were fine with that, mostly. The bag isn’t completely random because we’ve spent the whole game deciding what goes into it. Still, sometimes the numbers are on your side and the votes aren’t. If you want the person who built the strongest position to reliably finish with the most points, that can be frustrating. For us, the relatively short playing time made it much easier to accept, and we genuinely enjoyed sitting there together to see how the election turned out.
After several plays, four-player President Maker is the version we’d be most likely to put back on the table. Knowing the people you’re playing against becomes part of it. Once we’d seen which regions someone tended to chase and how willing they were to take risks, we started second-guessing even more. We were often wrong, of course. It won’t be for someone who dislikes luck deciding close games, and I wouldn’t choose it for someone looking for a detailed political simulation. For us, though, building a decent campaign while everyone else kept getting in the way was fun, and the uncertainty of the final count usually gave us something to talk about afterwards. We’d happily run for president again.
📝 We received a copy of President Maker from Pluto Games.
Going to Spiel Essen 2026? President Maker is available to preorder for pickup at the show through Playte’s preorder page.
You can also find more games we’ve played ahead of the show in our Spiel Essen 2026 coverage.
