Democracy 2 has been released. It's really only recommended to people interested in politics (like me), but for those who are it's pretty fun seeing how the author of the game arranged politics into this neural net of interacting cells each feeding into other cells. It's a very deep game.

The author of the game is from the UK so some of the terms might not be familiar to people in the US (for instance, Pensions instead of Social Security). As in most of the author's other games I tend to think a few of the ways the system interacted is a bit unrealistic -- for instance, in this game, having no tax on cars almost always leads to an asthma epidemic, which makes all parents vote for someone else. But those don't detract too much from the play experience.

One feature which I would have preferred the game have (and which was in similar games such as Balance of the Planet by Chris Crawford) would be a worldview editor -- where the assumptions of the strengths and directions between each of the nodes in the network would be made adjustable, so that the player could build in his own assumptions into the game (for instance, anarcho-capitalists have different assumptions about how the different political issues relate to each other than socialists or environmentalists and so on).

Name: Democracy 2
Developer: Cliffski / Positech Games
Category: Political Strategy
Type: Shareware
Size: 30.5 MB
Direct download: Click Here