The Rules of Prince William’s Most Expensive Board Game

Players are broken up into two teams, the Reds and the Blues. They come in different shades ranging from scarlet to pink, baby blue, to midnight. The color of a piece determines the moves the public may expect it to make. They play behind a wooden board called a Dias.

They may switch colors or shades at will. Sometimes they all turn purple.

Like all games, it’s a math problem. It’s more like Chess than Checkers. Graduate level courses on political calculus are necessary to really understand or play the game well.

It takes five votes to get anything done in Prince William County — five votes.

With six red and two blue pieces on the board, one would think that the game always comes to a quick end. That is seldom the case. Imagine those eight pieces constantly changing shades of color. Never changing shades, or never being one of those five votes, makes a piece irrelevant to the game and not worth watching.

Pieces may collect IOU’s for future votes and “trade moves” to win by losing. They keep track of the moves they trade. Every piece needs to win occasionally regardless of color, and those “IOU’s” come in handy when its time to collect.

Like Monopoly, this game is about money.

All of the wealth of Prince William County is like that money and those houses and hotels in the Monopoly box. Last year, the game cost $2.5 billion.

The goal is to get as much of it as you can and spend it on things to improve your position on the Board. While its ok to take a “chance” once and awhile, “going directly to jail” is something you want to avoid.

There are few rules. All of the pieces are kings. They have absolute discretion in the moves they make, however, they are limited to the number of moves available. They only have two choices: yes or no. The pieces make up the rules as they go along, and they all play to their own rules (which may be changed at will).

Score is kept electronically. The public may see who wins or loses individual moves by watching a set of red or green lights record their latest move.

People desiring to influence the game may do so by speaking directly to the players, or by paying campaign contributions.

The cynical suspect that we aren’t really watching the game at all, and that the real moves occur off the board. We wonder who is really playing? Surprise outcomes are not unusual.

Who is really moving the pieces? If you take your eyes off the board for a while and connect a few dots, you can figure it out.

A new set of the game starts every year. We call preparing for a new set of the game called Budget Season, where the players refill the Monopoly box with our money. The goal is to take “just enough” to stay in the game for four more years. “Too much” is a relative value judgment. The Red players differ on what is “too much” while the blue players think in terms of “never enough”.

While the pieces in the game make the moves, we ultimately have the power. We pay for the game. For the Reds and Blues, the tricky part is convincing the public that they are spending it on things that are really part of the game.

The game comes to an end every four years, and then we start over. The goal for a piece is to survive for another game.

Occasionally, a piece stops enjoying the game and drops off the board because the game isn’t as much fun for some as it used to be. In the past the pieces moved around in relative obscurity with little public interest in their moves. Now, many of us watch the game closely these days.

That’s changing the moves on the board, and perhaps the game itself.

Like all games, you can’t win if you don’t play. After all, its our money.