After playing the golf game for a while (see recent posts), it dawned on me that dice aren't always evil.  I thought about other designs where I could just use a simple, easy to remember chart to do things.  I thought about the other designs I had where things were abstracted out and away without the dice and finally had an idea about a simuulation where it all makes sense.

The campaign game that I can never finish seems to be a design that works well for this kind of thing.  I have moved around with Pocket-Civ styled mechanics and a few other mechanics over the years, but it was too complicated for what I wanted to do.  I have also always wanted to make a solitaire election game as well because, as you can guess, I can't always find people to game with.  Anyhow, I had always wanted a game where you abstracted the game out into "days" on the campaign trail going week by week.  

The ideas from Pocket Pro Golf involve using a die from each day and allowing campaigning and advertizing based on rolls similar to the shot charts in that game.  I am tinkering with the idea of issues in my head leading to further decisions.  The notion of polling +/-3 points of error also plays into this game where anything that is within that error would also get rolled either way to figure out if you had won a state at the end.  The idea of using dice also makes things sufficiently variable for a smaller game and keeps the component requirements to a minimum.

Admittedly, it's still a little vague in terms of how this will all come together, but I have a good feeling about this particular design and it should come together pretty quickly.  More details as it comes together.