Caveat: I'm breaking my own rule by writing this after having played the game only once. That's because, at the time of this writing, there's almost no information on BGG about this game. Since I don't own it myself, I may not get to play it more any time soon, but meanwhile, I'm hoping my first-impression review will be more useful than nothing.

Different versions of game: The game comes in both basic and deluxe versions. I believe the basic version consists of just the question cards, while the deluxe adds the board, pieces, and an additional level of strategic gameplay. Everything I say here should be taken to apply to the deluxe version, since that is all I have played.

Number/age of players: The rules say 2-8 adults. There are playing pieces and equipment for four, but the idea of saying eight is that they could play in teams of two. Really, you could play in teams of more than two, much as one can in Trivial Pursuit or any similar game. The maximum number on a team, and whether teams would have to have equal numbers of players, would be up to the players. The game is certainly intended for adults, but would be fine for older teenagers, or anyone old enough to take an interest in the issues involved.

Components: This is a self-published game, in other words homemade by the game author. The components looked homemade, rather than looking like what you'd expect from a commercial publisher, but they were well done and high-quality homemade. The game comes in a sturdy, attractive corrugated cardboard box that will stand up to having plenty of other games stacked on top of it. Here's what you find inside:
* Gameboard. The board is folded over once and unfolds to about 12" x 18". It's made of a paper insert under clear vinyl with a hard backing, and looks as if it would be quite durable. The board represents the Senate Chamber and has brightly colored spaces corresponding to the five question categories.
* Instructions. A single sheet of letter-sized paper. One side has an overview of the game and list of the pieces and how to deploy them; the other has the full rules. The rules are clear and well-written.
* Player mats. There are four of these, and they're very nicely done in full color on glossy cardstock. Each one shows a committee table with five chairs around it, one for each of the five question categories (which also represent Senate committees). As you answer questions correctly, you'll move counters onto this mat to show your progress.
* Question cards. These are the heart of the game. There are five decks of 100 cards each, with a different color for each category: Commerce (blue), War (red), State (yellow), Environment (green, of course), and Domestic Policy (white cards, but the corresponding pieces are black). The cards are a lightweight cardstock, about the size of Monopoly money, and each deck came neatly rubber-banded onto a cardboard base, and with a top card saying the name of the category (and hiding the top question card). The cards aren't as sturdy as, say, a Trivial Pursuit card, but they don't receive a great deal of handling in the course of the game. If I could improve anything about the components it would be to make the cards of tougher stuff, but I don't see them as a significant flaw.
* Playing pieces. The playing pieces are very good colored wooden pieces; they and the die come in a nice cloth drawstring bag. There are star-shaped pieces that move around on the board, and two kinds of counters that are used on the player mats: small round disks that represent committee seats, and larger round pieces (shaped a bit like a mushroom or a thatched-roof hut) that represent committee chairs.

Colorblind-friendly? Not so much, I'm afraid. The playing pieces, the spaces on the board, and the cards are all differentiated by color alone. It doesn't matter so much for the cards, because each deck has a top card with the category name on it, and you'd never have reason to take the cards out of their different decks and mix them up together. And it wouldn't matter much about the player mats and their counters either; although you are supposed to put on a green piece when you get an Environment question right, as long as you put it on the chair marked Environment, it wouldn't really matter whether you kept to the color scheme. The part that would really be problematic for a colorblind person would be moving your piece around on the board. However, I see at least two solutions to this. (1) A colorblind player could have the other players help him move his piece to the desired color. This would undoubtedly be annoying, but not impossible. There's not a tremendous amount of strategic information on the board that you need to visually assess, so I think it would be doable. Or better yet, (2) I think you could remove the paper insert from the vinyl gameboard, have someone with color vision mark a different symbol on the spaces of each color (sort of like the later editions of Ticket to Ride), and then reinsert it. If I had a colorblind person in my household, game group, or whatever, this is what I would do, and I think it would work very well.

Setup: Neither the physical setup nor the rules are complicated. A group can start playing within five minutes of opening the box. We managed to confuse ourselves by leaping to the conclusion that each player should have all the pieces of one color, but when we realized this wasn't working and resorted to actually reading the instructions, we found it all explained as lucidly as one could possibly wish. Each player/Senator gets a star-shaped playing piece to move around the board; the fact that these are in four colors that correspond to four of the five committee colors is totally coincidental and meaningless. Each person also gets two small round pieces (committee seats) and one large round piece (committee chair) in each of the five category colors; all these pieces are deployed onto the player mat over the course of the game as questions are answered correctly. In addition to distributing the pieces, before beginning you must choose a scorekeeper (who will need paper and pencil) and party names (these are just flavor and could be dispensed with if a group prefers). If one person takes a few minutes to read the one-page rules, they'll be ready to guide things along, as it's not complicated.

Objective/victory conditions: You are trying to do two things simultaneously: accumulate committee seats till you have one of each, and accumulate votes toward your reelection. (Both are achieved by answering questions correctly.) When you have a seat on each of the five committees, and more votes than any of the other players, you immediately win. However, if you have a seat on each committee, but aren't the leader in votes, then you still have a chance to win. In that situation, you can either choose to simply continue playing, in the hope of being able to take the lead in votes, or else you can try for a Trivial Pursuit-style victory: the other players decide among themselves on a category, and you have to answer one final question to win. If you fail, you are penalized ten votes, and play goes on.

Gameplay/mechanics:
Movement on the board: The board/Senate chamber consists of an interconnected network of colored spaces. You roll and move on these, and the color you land on indicates the deck from which you answer a question. There are a few Roll Again spaces, and two Filibuster spaces, which cause everyone but you to lose five votes. There's also a Censure Room space, from which it will take you at least a turn to move back into the Senate chamber. I thought this was the most hilarious part of the game: when you land on the same space as an opponent's piece, you may dispatch them to the Censure Room, "where they will be besieged by journalists." The layout is such that very often you have more than two choices of where to move with your roll. Given also that every color is almost always useful to you, we experienced virtually none of the typical roll-and-move annoyance of "space X is the only one I need, but I can't land on it, so I'm just walking back and forth around it."

Answering questions: Each question card is worth some number of votes between 1 and 5, and this is indicated in the corner of the card. If you answer correctly, you get that many votes; there is no vote penalty for an incorrect answer. As in Trivial Pursuit, if you get one right you can roll again, and continue until you answer one wrong. On multiple-choice questions, you have two options: you can try to answer without hearing the multiple choices, and if successful win double votes (this option can be quite powerful), or you can go ahead and have the choices read, then try to answer for the regular amount of votes. Most of the cards are questions, but there are occasional cards that are just random reward/penalty (with some flavor text). For instance, you might gain an additional committee seat of your choice, or have to give up a committee seat. The only question we had that was not made explicit in the rules was whether you got another turn after a reward/penalty card; we decided not.

Committee seats: Each time you answer a question correctly, you put one of the small round disks for that color/category onto the matching space of your player mat, showing you have a seat on that committee. If you have both the small disks on there already, and answer another question correctly in that category, you exchange them for the large disk, which makes you chair of that committee (more than one person can be chair of the same committee). Is this category now useless for you? No indeed, because there is another thing you can alternatively do when you answer correctly, which is to take a committee seat of that color away from another player. Once you get the chair disk, though, it cannot be taken away from you; this gives you incentive to go beyond just one seat of each color and try to answer additional questions to make your seats secure by turning them into chairs.

Overall assessment of gameplay: Good. If you're looking for a serious strategy game, of course this is not it. But if you take it for what it is--a trivia game enhanced by some strategic gameplay--then I think it's well done. As I've already said, there are enough opportunities that the game doesn't tend to drag or degenerate into the tedium of trying to land on the right space. There are a few opportunities to smite other players, but this definitely isn't a game that's all about aggression and attacking the other players. I think many groups would agree with ours that there was just enough of a screwage factor to spice things up a little, but if you preferred to have no interplayer conflict, those elements could even be removed and the game would still work. Overall, I'd say the mechanics are not deep, but they run smoothly. Also, I think I'm glad we chose the deluxe version, as it made things a bit more entertaining and "gamier" than just straight, undiluted political trivia.

Sample questions: Here are a few examples to give you the idea.
Commerce: What is the average percentage difference between the cost of patented drugs in the U.S. and in other industrialized countries? [Multiple choice.]
Domestic Policy: In 2004, what percentage of all U.S. homes had guns?
Environment: How many gallons of oil does it take to burn one 75-watt light bulb for one year? [Multiple choice.]
State: What global policy group considers the "regulatory rights of governments" to be a possible trade barrier?
War: In 2001, what prominent American worked as a consultant to the bin Laden family? [Multiple choice.]

Who might enjoy this game? This is definitely not a "gamer's game." It's a trivia game, and as such could appeal to gamers or nongamers. Although it made a very successful gift for someone with a keen interest in politics, I don't think that would be necessary; the game deals with matters that should be of interest to the average American. Although the game clearly comes from a particular political perspective, it is a game of factual trivia; for the game to be a success, I think it would be more important for your group to be open-minded and somewhat interested in American society and politics than for them to have political sympathies identical to those of the game's creator. However, it's certainly possible that right-wing Americans would not find this game appealing.

This is probably a good place to point out that all information in the game is sourced. Each question card has a footnote citation giving the source of the information for the question. Many are secondary sources, which is not ideal, but at least the sources are cited. This allows anyone who's interested to look up the information, and may also tend to prevent the game from degenerating into a dispute over the facts. Does this game have the potential to cause unpleasant political arguments and hostilities among the participants? Probably, in the right (or maybe I should say wrong) group. I think it also has the potential to generate interesting and civil political discussion. But if you have a group where you'd avoid any discussion of politics, this is not the game you want to bring out.

This game is about American politics; it's made by and largely for Americans. Would it be of interest to anyone else? That's an interesting question that I feel somewhat unqualified to answer. Given the U.S. role in the world today, I don't think anyone in the world is totally unaffected by American politics or can afford to be totally uninterested in them. But whether people from other countries would find this game fun or interesting would probably depend on their level of knowledge & interest. There are quite a few questions dealing with other countries or with international matters, though; it isn't strictly domestic American politics.

Replayability: In one 4-player game, I think we used about a tenth of the cards. As with all trivia games, if you play too many times too often with the same people, you'll get to know the cards. (Shuffling the decks helps a bit at that point.) This game is subject to those limitations, but depending on your circumstances, you could get a good few plays out of it. Another factor here is the timeliness of the information. The game was made in 2005, and obviously it will go gradually out of date. Since the source citations on each card give the date, that will be helpful as the game ages--if the question is about a fact that has probably changed, you can look at the citation and specify that you're asking what the correct answer was in 2004, or whenever it says. Overall, I think the replayability and value for money are pretty good within the natural limitations of the type of game it is. And it could certainly be expanded/updated with fresh question cards.

Possible variants/house rules: Several come immediately to mind. I don't think anything about the game is broken and needs to be fixed, but I can envision some ways to customize it to better suit a particular group. To even the playing field a bit, you could play in teams of varying strength and number. Another leveling technique would be to eliminate the rule where you can roll again each time you answer one correctly; that restrains the people who know a lot from being able to run away with the game. If you wanted to reduce the luck element/focus more on the questions, you could remove the automatic reward/penalty cards and play without them.