Vox Populi: Spain 2023

I went into this one expecting a glorified trivia widget dressed up as a strategy game. What I found instead is a surprisingly structured political sim that, for its price tier, has more moving parts than it has any right to. You pick a political figure, real or fully custom-built, then spend a campaign trying to shift regional voting intentions across Spain's autonomous communities before election day arrives. The core loop is turn-based and card-driven: each action you take, whether targeting a demographic group, recruiting a campaign staffer based on their ideology or character traits, or placing obstacles in rival candidates' paths, costs resources and feeds into a regional poll tracker that updates as opponents react. It is not a complex system by grand-strategy standards, but the feedback loop is legible and the decision space is real. The Spain-specific wrinkle that lifts this above the series' generic template is the independence and annexation mechanic. You can choose to fight for national unity or actively push for Catalan, Basque, or other autonomous community separatism, and that choice reshapes which demographic groups you can reliably court and which you are locked out of. That is a meaningful design fork. The scenario selection also deserves a mention: beyond the 2023 general election, the game offers alternate historical and fictional setups placed across different dates, which extends replay value considerably for anyone who wants to test counterfactuals rather than just re-run the same race. Where the game struggles is at the edges of its ambition. The AI opposition is reactive rather than strategic; it will place obstacles and contest regions, but it does not feel like it is running a coherent campaign doctrine the way a stronger sim would. The stat tracking dashboards, while detailed on paper, are presented in a 2D pixel interface that takes some patience to parse on a first run. There is no in-game tutorial to speak of, which is a meaningful gap for newcomers to the genre. If you have never touched a political sim before, expect to spend your first session losing badly and reading the community discussions to understand why. That said, the game is short enough per run that failure is cheap, and the scenario variety means you will probably want to retry rather than quit. Context matters here: this is part of a growing series from solo developer Velsin, which has already expanded to cover Brazil, Poland, the USA, Europe, Germany, Canada, and Australia. The Spain entry is the one where the series-specific mechanics, particularly the independence system and the character trait recruitment layer, feel most thematically grounded. Players who find value in this entry will have an obvious upgrade path through the rest of the catalogue. For the price point and the niche it is targeting, it is a reasonable bet if you have any interest in the intersection of political science and light strategy gaming. Go in with calibrated expectations, not AAA ones, and you will get your sessions' worth. Diego, Scout Team

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