Election Race – The First Social Game with Political Themes in Croatia

Election Race is the first social game with political themes in Croatia. It is intended for politicians for education, and for voters for rehabilitation, perhaps even more the other way around than its author Predrag Boljkovac from Karlovac thinks.

Although it was released these days, just before the official start of the campaign for parliamentary elections, Boljkovac says that “Election Race” is universal and applicable to all elections, although during its creation he primarily had local elections in mind.

– Regardless of the fact that it was created within the framework of local elections, “Election Race” explains and shows the path of a politician from their entry into the party to the overthrow of the party leader and their appointment as the party leader and candidacy in local elections. This hierarchical advancement can be nicely followed and experienced during the game through activities such as making coffee, putting up posters for their party, tearing down posters of political opponents, and similar activities, and by earning points in the game, the player climbs the hierarchical levels – explains Boljkovac.

Election Race was created on the platform of the well-known and accepted Monopoly, moving along the path with a bit of luck brought by rolling the dice, and the funniest are the special cards drawn when landing on special fields in the game. Cards from the category “Theory and Practice of Electoral Engineering” give the player, somewhat in an Alan Ford style, advice to politicians on what means they should use on their ambitious path to taking over the local branch of the party. From another pile of cards, free electoral slogans are distributed that cannot miss and which have their references in the previous practice since democracy and multi-party system have existed in sovereign Croatia.

– The game was created on the idea that we start playing with politics, that we educate ourselves through the game, and that we do not allow politics to play with us. Part of that mission is also to separate people from television, media, and the internet at least while they are having fun with this game, to relax in that way, but also to distance themselves from the propaganda flood to which they are constantly exposed, behind which lies the imposition of certain opinions and attitudes. Many people, not realizing it, fall into the jaws of that ubiquitous engineering. Political games are divided into serious and sarcastic, and in America, similar political-themed games have been present and popular for a long time, and compared to my initial one, theirs are very sharp and ruthless towards politicians – says Boljkovac.

The publisher of “Election Race” is Boljkovac’s company “Factory of Stupidity”, and he has more political games in preparation, the launch of which will depend, says Boljkovac, on the market response to this first “Election Race”, and participation in the event “Buy Croatian” is the first such test.