Home › Clacton Decides! › How to play
HOW TO PLAY
You have ten minutes, twelve questions and one increasingly damp crowd to win over. Here is everything the game will not stop to explain.
THE BASIC LOOP
A question comes in from the floor. Both candidates answer, one after the other, and each of you gets a hand of four possible answers to choose from. You do not write anything: you pick which prepared line comes out of your mouth, exactly like real politics. The crowd reacts, the acclaim meters move, and the show rolls on to the next question. After the closing statements, the returning officer declares the result.
CONTROLS
| Input | Does what |
|---|---|
| 1 2 3 4 | Answer straight away with that card. The fastest way to play. |
| Arrow keys / WASD | Move the highlight between the four answers. |
| Enter or Space | Commit to the highlighted answer. Also skips a reaction you have finished reading. |
| Tap a card | On a phone or tablet, just tap the answer you want. |
| Gamepad | D-pad or stick to move, A to confirm, Start to advance. |
| M | Mute or unmute everything. |
The game is landscape. On a phone it will ask you to turn the handset sideways, which is the correct orientation for a gameshow and for most of British public life.
THE ACCLAIM METERS
Those two fairground strongman columns on either side of the stage are the score. Every answer moves yours, and the crowd's approval is a finite resource, so a big moment for one candidate quietly drains the other.
- Bingo answer (+18): one per hand. The room erupts, the bell rings, the bingo caller shouts a number and the other candidate loses five points of support.
- Cheer (+10): a good, popular, sensible answer. Well played, nobody will remember it.
- Mixed (+2): the room is unsure. Sometimes they laugh at you rather than with you.
- Boo (-10): the mask slipped. Expect chips.
- Timeout (-8): say nothing and you get a slow handclap and a cough.
Two things stop this becoming a runaway. Cheers earn less the fuller your meter already is, because a crowd that already loves you is harder to impress. Boos, however, always cost full price. Nobody coasts to a draw.
THE THREE ROUNDS
- Part One: Local Matters. The pier, the buses, the chippy, the donkey. Warm up here.
- Part Two: The Big Issues. Housing, migration, the cost of living, the sea.
- Part Three: Quickfire. Half the time, double the points. This is where the seat is won and lost, so save your nerve for it.
TACTICS THAT ACTUALLY WORK
Read the room, not the policy. The bingo answer is not the most sensible answer. It is the one this particular hall wants to hear tonight. A question from the woman who runs the B&B wants a different register from a question asked by the BBC.
Binface wins on specifics. His strongest answers are the absurdly small, absurdly concrete ones: capping a 99 Flake at 99p, moving a hand dryer to a more sensible position, one affordable house. Grand visions tend to get a murmur.
Do not panic in quickfire. Everything is worth double, including the boos. One catastrophic answer in the finale can undo three good rounds.
Deny, do not just score. Because bingo answers pull support off your opponent, hitting one late is worth more than the number suggests.
The daily is a fair fight. In Daily Hustings everybody gets the same questions on the same day, so it is the honest way to compare margins with a friend.
WINNING
The result is worked out from your final acclaim plus a bonus for each bingo answer landed, converted into a vote share. Ranks run from Recount Territory, through A Narrow Squeak and Comfortable Majority, all the way to a Total Binslide. Your best ever margin is saved in your browser. A genuine dead heat is settled on raw acclaim, then bingo count, then the returning officer's coin, and the game will admit that is what happened.