Rose City Hall
a Card Game
In 2024, over 100 candidates campaigned to be our councilors and mayor in Portland’s BRAND NEW style of city government. In this game, elect your City Hall, pass your favorite policies, and build your Portland!
The printed game is sold out, but still available below to download for free via pdf. Sign up here for future updates.
Download specific cards just as voting aids, or download the Rules and full deck to play the game.
Voting Aids
Card Game
If printing yourself, it’s recommended to print on cardstock with color, 2-sided, flip on long edge. We estimate this will cost ~$25 to print at your local print shop. Variability in printer calibrations can result in a minor offset between the front & back sides.
We are always interested in feedback!
contact@rosecityhall.com
anatomy of a candidate card
explaining the policy gradients
The four policy gradients on each card represent four areas that many Portlanders are particularly focused on this election.
Values further to either side indicate positions that are consistently and often strongly in that direction. Values nearer the center indicate positions that are more centrist (or in some cases less consistent). The 41 candidates who answered our 16-question questionnaire have white text in their policy gradients. Candidates who did not answer our questionnaire have black text in their policy gradients that were inferred from their websites. Where their website was silent or unclear, we put simply "indeterminate".
Try not to view these cards through the simplistic Conservative-Liberal paradigm because some of these policy areas don’t have clean partisan lines. Also, since this is all about Portland, expect a bit of a Portland lens. Most people running for office in Portland are left of the national center, so keep that context in mind when considering candidates. (For example, a fervent Law & Order position here probably looks a bit different than a fervent Law & Order position might look in Oklahoma.)
Altogether, the questionnaire answers resulted in a somewhat normal (i.e. bell curve) distribution on each policy gradient.
An area that warrants more context is the Preservation-YIMBY gradient. YIMBY ("Yes In My BackYard") advocates generally want more housing built. YIMBYs nearer the center of this gradient are often interested in more targeted approaches toward this goal (e.g. Inclusionary Zoning where developers are sometimes required to include affordable housing in a building). But YIMBYs further to the end of the gradient view these targeted approaches as not going far enough, and want less regulation overall to make it easier to build more total housing. The approach that has gotten the most traction in Portland has elements of both, but probably moreso the former. We think this is why some candidates have been surprised to see themselves with more centrist positions on this gradient than they expected — there simply isn't as visible of a pure laissez-faire movement in Portland for many folks to benchmark themselves against. But we did find about 10% of candidates in that camp.
who got cards
Some candidates on the ballot have actually withdrawn and others haven’t even made a website. We applied the following criteria to determine who was taking their campaign serious enough that voters should know about them.
contact@rosecityhall.com