Cliffski's Blog announces Democracy 3: Electioneering, a new expansion in the works at Positech for Democracy 3, their political simulation sequel. As the title implies, this add-on will concentrate more on the election process itself, as the base version of the game focuses on governing. This currently is projected for release "probably" late next month, and the hope is to make this also work with the game's Africa expansion. Here's an overview:

Yay! New stuff! For a long time, the Democracy games have basically been ‘government’ games, not election games. Making electioneering work in the context of Democracy 3 was not easy, because frankly every country has a very different electoral process, and electoral system. The US is NOTHING like the UK (We don’t have primaries or caucuses, for starters), and the way elections are fought is very different over the various countries that Democracy 3 models. (Another example: in the UK we have no political TV advertising). Eventually, I decided to take a few key areas of the election process, the ones that seemed universal, and model those, whilst letting the actual ‘mechanics’ of how an election is fought to remain abstract.