Executive Order Games
We are a recent 2024 startup from southwest Michigan that is dedicated to molding this wonderfully complex mess of a country into a fun, satirical party game that can be enjoyed by the masses. We operate on the basic question, “Does living in America make you want to drink?” We find that for most, the answer is a resounding yes.
Who knows what we’ll go on to build after game launch? (We do, but that’s classified.)
How It All Began
Some time in the mid 2010’s (the exact year is fuzzy—those brain cells have probably been destroyed at this point), Shots Across America started only in name. A simple chant. Then it became a vision. What if there was a party game… where the board was a map of the states, and the states were covered with shots? The map and cards were drawn out on paper, the states loaded with shots, and the first ever players sat down on the floor of a friend’s apartment to play the inaugural game of Shots Across America.
The initial rules were simple: Get to every state in your hand and discard it when you get there. Drink any shots you run into and remove them from the board. When you run out of a cards, you win! Simple enough, but the game was lacking. I needed to raise the stakes. And for the love of God, we needed to lower the number of shots.
Coming out of college with plenty of experience playing drinking party games, one game in particular felt very much on-topic and provided the game with some much needed patriotic flair. In those days,“Presidents and Assholes” was a simple card game played at parties in which players would compete to discard all of their cards first in order to become the President or Vice President. Players had a hierarchy, and the top dog—the President—got to make a rule that had to be followed throughout the next round. There was a lot more to the game that wasn’t borrowed, but overall, that simple card game created a fun power dynamic that could fare well in a game about America with discards and drinks.
Thusly, the roles of President and Vice President were introduced to the game, building out our own power dynamic and giving players something more to shoot for—executive power. The game immediately began to feel a bit more whole, but something key was still missing: player interaction.
Another beloved party game called “Waterfall” made its own spiritual contributions to the game. Drawing various number cards in Waterfall allows a person to pass out drinks to certain groups of people at the table. In spirit, drinking cards are randomly littered about our challenge deck. Players that draw a 10 card in Waterfall get to pick a category and go around the table naming things within that category—this was adapted into face-off challenges in our game. Drawing the king card meant a new rule could be put in place (constitutional amendments), and drawing the queen meant a round of questions should be asked (adapted into U.S. trivia). Each of these ideas fed into what would eventually become the challenge deck in Shots Across America. Draw a card, challenge your opponent. You never know what you’re going to pull, and anything could happen.
Years of design and development later, the first ever mock up was printed in 2017. Since then, the game has been play tested by dozens and dozens of friends and strangers and has been built upon so much that we had to pull heaps of cards out of the base game because the decks were getting way too big. Many of those cards ended up being organized into themed expansion packs, leaving the base decks full of topics that fit America in a more general sense than what you might find in an expansion.
It’s 2024, and this year we’re going hard to get this game finalized and into production. Stay tuned for updates!
—Andy Cullen, President of Executive Order Games
