Being El Presidente is no walk in the park. You start on either a scenario island or an island with size, elevations, minerals, and how your citizens behave that you choose. I recommend the tutorial to everyone, even if you are skilled in sim games. When your island starts, all you have is a palace, a couple guards, and an island full of uneducated people. From that point, whatever events unfold are completely up to you. Your main goal differs if you have chosen a scenario or a custom island. If you have chosen a custom island, (my personal favorite choice.) your only goals pretty much are not to get overthrown. After you choose your personality pros and cons, (yes you MUST choose at least 2 flaws about yourself. After all, nobody is perfect.) you get cracking. Every island starts with a dock, a palace, a teamsters office, and a construction office. Most of your profits are going to come from exporting goods. You can export crops, tobacco, cigars, gold, silver, jewelry, lumber, and more. In order to get these goods though, you must first construct these places of business. After you build something, you must then set wages in order to attract workers. You can also choose to set different work policies in order to please the people. You can however choose not to. You may choose to rule with an iron fist and make everyone work 14 hour days for 4 dollars a day, its totally up to you. The more complicated jobs require educated workers. You can either build high schools and colleges, or you can hire foreign educated workers to come to you. The latter choice starts to get rather expensive though. You can issue edicts, or policies in order to please the many factions on your island. There is even an edict to skim a few dollars from all your construction projects and put them into your own personal Swiss bank account. As time goes on, you may want to start building relations with America or Russia and they may share technology or money with you. You also have the option of building attractions to lure tourists and their fat wallets to your humble island. Every 10 years the people will demand an election, you may choose to allow or deny them an election. You can pretty much guess what might happen if the people are denied an election though. When the election starts, you are given a competitor. You can win against him fairly, or you can have him or her assassinated, arrested, or even bribed if you want them to go away. After 50 years though, your rein as El Presidente will end. You are given a different ending based on all the decisions you made and you can continue to rule longer if you wish. The game gets a little frustrating from time to time though. Sometimes it just seems impossible to get to the bigger and better buildings like the power plant or the college. There is just so many little things that need to be taken care of sometimes that bigger and better things just cant seem to get done. Some things take too long to build. Ive yet to build the airport. It just takes too long and by the time i get to a point where I'm ready to build it, its too late and my 50 years is up. With the few complaints aside, this is definitely an underrated classic. Pick it up if you can find it in a used bin. I'm sure its on amazon as well.
Sitting behind a big desk in a tropical climate, dictating the daily running of an island nation has got to be one of the more enjoyable jobs in life. Look at Fidel Castro: he did a similar job for so long, eventually on... Read Full Review
I can't entirely explain it, but for me at least, this game has INFINITE replayability. There are very, very few games I can play for more than 40-60 hours total and I almost never go back and pick up a game I've finish... Read Full Review
