Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money - Minimalist Jam 2026 Entry
Yesterday I submitted an entry for Binary Star Games' Minimalist Jam 26, a jam focused on delivering something punchy and playable with an active de-emphasis on production value. I'd kicked around a few different ideas over the last two months with my friend Zak H at Bommyknocker Press but yesterday I just happened to have the exact right mix of inspiration and time on my hands to hammer something into shape.
Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money is a three-player card game that gamifies the 1979 Warren Zevon song (youtube link).The song is a wry romp through the Cold War where some unnamed rapscallion is putting himself in dangerous situations and begging an unknown audience for lawyers, guns, and money to get to safety. I just recently played FIST, a game with similar themes to Metal Gear Solid, and have been on something of a Zevon kick for the past few weeks, so I think a perfect storm had been set.
The rest of this post will be a reflection on my final submission and where I'd like to go with it, so please give it a read and a rating on itch!
My initial idea was to throw together a barebones FIST-like game where players had three stats to resolve issues: lawyers, guns, and money. While the final game does not resemble this description in the slightest, that core concept never really went away. The final ingredient that put me on the right track was my recent readthrough of Reiner Knizia's New Tactical Games with Cards and Dice, which I recently discussed in Historical Reconstruction as Play. One of the games that caught my attention was called "Mr. President."
Reiner Knizia's Mr. President
This is a fairly simple game, but it provides a few neat axes for tactical decision making. Each player is dealt the 13 cards (A-K) of a single suit, and the clubs cards are shuffled separately. Each round, a Clubs card is drawn, corresponding to one of the 13 "districts" belonging to 6 "regions", shown below. Each player plays a card to attempt to gain control of that district, but you do not earn any points until you control the majority of a region.
Interesting Game Design Takeaways
There are a few things I like about this game - it has elements of trick taking and trying to beat your opponents at a minimal cost. Additionally, you know the exact resources that all players have access to, there is a fixed number of rounds to be played, and the main source of variance is the order in which districts will come up for grabs (and in turn the remaining resources that players will have). These are all fun levers to fiddle with. Thematically, the delineation of suits into player suits (Hearts/Spades/Diamonds) and the Districts (Clubs) creates a very friendly space for players to fill in with their ideas about their candidate/political party. Similarly, deploying finite resources of known, relative values carries a lot of thematic and mechanical weight - you can imagine what it means to spend a King trying to win a district rather than deploying a 4.
If you've already read Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money, then you can probably see where some of these ideas came into play! The changes that I introduced to this concept were:
- Specifying the theme of the three played suits
- Mixing the played suits, thereby randomizing the specific cards dealt to each player and creating a new space for players to define their organization by the distribution of Lawyers, Guns, and Money they have at the beginning of play
- Re-imagining the District cards as events/incidents with a target number/difficulty and migrating away from the concept of "Regions." Note: I think it would be really fun in a less-minimalist version of this game to bring the Region concept back into play to engage with the geopolitical component of the premise
- Structuring play as loose cooperation with limited communication between players
When you put it that way it sort of begs how much is left of Mr. President in SLGM, and the answer is almost nothing! But I don't think I would have written this game in a world where I hadn't done a close reading of Knizia's book.
What Comes Next?
Good question! I'm hoping to get the game to the table in the current state to see where some mechanical tweaking is warranted, but I would like to spend some time writing either picklists or prompt tables for things like organization traits and international incidents.
The biggest change I would make for a non-minimalist version of the game is what I mentioned above. A map or mapmaking subsystem could really spice this game up and flesh out the incidents in a fun way. I don't think there's a compelling reason to make this into a longer-form game...I like that it is played out over 9 rounds! But there is probably more space for role play or fleshing out incident resolution with mechanics around interactions of State card suits and the decisions that players make.
This blog post is officially longer than the game itself now, so I'm overstaying my welcome. Please check it out, and check out the Minimalism Jam before it ends November 1st!
Also while I was writing this, Lula won, so cheers to everyone and cheers to the people of Brazil :)