As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.
The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...
Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!
Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...
The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!
At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!
The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!
But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.
Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?
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