As election season rages on here in the U.S., Cliffski's Blog announces Democracy 4 is now available in Early Access, offering the chance to engage in your own simulated political campaign. If you elect to pick this up, you can do so through GOG.com, the Humble Store*, and Steam (*Blue's News may receive a commission on sales of this item). You can find everything you need to know about Positech's latest installment in the series in this FAQ, which is adorned by the Alpha Trailer they released this summer. Cliff Harris' post on the topic discusses various mistakes made during the process and what was done to straighten them out. Here's an overview of the game:

Democracy 4 lets you take the role of President / Prime minister, govern the country (choosing its policies, laws and other actions), and both transform the country as you see fit, while trying to retain enough popularity to get re-elected...

Built on a custom-built neural network designed to model the opinions, beliefs, thoughts and biases of thousands of virtual citizens, Democracy 4 is the state-of-the-art in political simulation games. A whole new vector-graphics engine gives the game a more adaptable, cleaner user interface, and the fourth in the series builds on the past while adding a host of new features such as media reports, coalition governments, emergency powers, three-party systems and a more sophisticated simulation that handles inflation, corruption and modern policy ideas such as quantitative easing, helicopter money, universal basic income and policies to cover current political topics such as police body cameras, transgender rights and tons more.

Democracy 4 is the ultimate sandbox for testing out your political ideas. We all think our politicians are useless and that we could do a better job ourselves, but is that really true? With one eye on the budget, one-eye on the polls, and somehow finding time to watch out for terrorist attacks at the same time, you will find that staying in power while changing society for the better is a tougher job than you ever imagined.