This new card game makes fun out of Portland’s city council election

Portlander Sean Sweat has gamified our bewildering city council election. His new Rose City Hall card game lands just in time to help voters make sense out of dozens of viable candidates for local office. Sean is an MIT grad, supply chain expert at Intel, an urbanist, former vice chair of the Portland Bureau of Transportation Bureau Budget Advisory Committee, and an active member of the Pearl District Neighborhood Association.

I’ve bumped into Sean at several events in recent years (we first met at the first fundraising party for Just Crossing Alliance in 2022) as he’s settled into our community from his former hometown of Phoenix. When he said he created a card game based on the council election, I invited him over to the Shed for a closer look.

Here’s the short description of game play Sean posted on the Rose City Hall website:

Each player represents an influential figurehead in one of Portland’s four council districts. The districts will elect three councilors and the mayor, and then you will try to pass policies that your district’s voters favor. In the process, you can help your councilors gain and wield political capital to influence the outcome and shape the Portland you want to see!

The feature of the game that excites me most are the candidate cards. There are 68 council and 7 mayoral candidate cards. Sean included cards of all candidates who have a campaign website, have earned at least 100 donations, and who answered and returned his questionnaire. He used the questionnaire and his own survey of available information to give every candidate a score between one and four on four key issues: enforcement of homeless camping, housing, transportation, and taxes. The score is presented on a spectrum between two poles of thought. For example, on the transportation line, “Car” is on the left of the spectrum and “Bike/Transit” is on the right (he flipped this purposely to move away from the traditional left/right political thinking). For housing, the left is “Preservation” and the right is “YIMBY” and so on. Candidate cards also include the district the person is running in, their job or background, and the neighborhood they live in.

The cards are really fun to flip through and make good conversation starters over coffee or tea with a friend.

There are also 38 “Policy” cards that have values on them the correspond to how much political capital it takes to pass them, what minimum value on the issue spectrum a candidate needs to pass them, and which districts tend to favor the policy. Examples of these cards include “Expand Portland Street Response,” “Remove the Rose Lanes,” “Eliminate the Arts Tax,” etc…

The stack of 19 “News” are another fun element that can shake up the game. They read like headlines and come with various consequences that impact the game. For example, the card titled, “Councilor caught pushing PBOT to secretly remove popular bike lane,” results in the candidate in your stable with the highest “Car” position losing all of their political capital points.

Each player represents a different council district whose three members are determined after a vote that combines “preference tokens” and a roll of the dice. The game play consists of reading News cards and trying to pass policy — which players can choose to support or influence. You can choose to play a competitive or collaborative game. In the competitive version, you win when three or more policies that favor your district have been passed and are effective. In the collaborative game, the council wins together once three effective policies are in place for each district.

This is peak Portland civic nerdery and I’m here for it! I’ll try to bring decks — or maybe Sean himself — to Bike Happy Hour soon. And if/when he or I make a video of the game play instructions, I’ll embed it here in this post and on our various platforms. I highly recommend taking time to get a set of these cards, and I hope Sean will offer booster packs for future elections.

The game is $35 for a high-quality, professionally printed version. You can also print the entire deck via a PDF on the game’s website for an estimated cost of $25 at a local print/copy shop. Read full instructions and find out more at RoseCityHall.com.