Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
No matter where you land on the American political spectrum, I think you’d agree that the first few months of 2025 have been interesting. For some people, that might mean interesting in a good way; others might have a different perspective. But reading the news each day brings new revelations that are often shocking in a world that recently acknowledged the fifth anniversary of the most shocking world event of my lifetime, the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, with the word “shocking” as our frame of reference, let’s pivot for a second. The game DerrocAr: The Week of Five Presidents (2024, Ion Game Design) places players into the real-world events of December 2001 in Argentina. Now we can talk about real chaos for a moment—what if your country had five different presidents over the course of just 14 days?
It’s wild here in America right now, but not “five presidents in 14 days” wild. Argentina found itself in such a precarious economic position back then. For many Argentines, it is clearly a period that is still shocking, in part because Argentina found a way to pull through a massive mess. DerrocAr tries to distill the events of this period into a board game that may sometimes last as little as an hour.
If anything, DerrocAr’s main issue is that it is not nearly as chaotic as its subject matter.
Get to the Chopper
DerrocAr is a 1-5 player political and economical chaos game. Yes, a chaos game. I know chaos is the desired intent of Bruss Brussco, the Argentinean designer of DerrocAr who talks about his personal history with the game’s subject matter in the game’s manual. The manual leads off with this statement: “DerrocAr is a game of chaos and strategy.”
Got it. CHAOS!!!
DerrocAr is trying hard to instill its real-world history into its gameplay. Just imagine living in Argentina in December of 2001, especially after listening to a brief nine-minute primer of the period that I found on the BBC website. Argentina was in a deep recession. The finance minister, some joker named Cavallo, limited residents to withdrawing just 250 pesos (about $250 US dollars at the time) each time they visited a bank, after a “bank run” forced institutions into a deep financial crisis.
The president, De La Rua, was forced out of office by his own party after violence led to countless deaths, rioting and protests in and around the area near the presidential palace. De La Rua had to flee from the roof of the palace by helicopter, leading to a succession of politicians taking office over a matter of days.
One local politician took on the presidency, gave it up after just three days, then was placed back into power after a third guy bailed on the job. Remember the recent controversies after the president of South Korea tried to declare martial law near the end of 2024? That’s mere child’s play compared to the Argentine crisis!
In game form, the goal of DerrocAr is simple: convince the fine people of Argentina that you (playing one of the five presidential candidates who really did hold office during this period) are the least bad politician available. This becomes an exercise in a simple form of support gathering. In-game token form by gathering the general support of the people, or entity support through local unions, the International Monetary Fund, agricultural producers, and more.
The first player to gather 10 support points, or the player with the most support when someone has to take a chopper out of town, will win immediately. (In a 4-5 player game, the end condition is even wilder: the first person who has to take a chopper out of town loses all their support points, then has to work with the player with the lowest score to try and win the game. If they do, both of those players win instead!!)
In DerrocAr, it’s all about the journey, as long as you can keep the playtime in that 60-90 minute range with four or five of the right kinds of players. That was the break point in my plays (for this review, I did three plays: one solo, one with three players, and one with four players). When you have people in your group who love negotiation games, or political and economic systems in games like Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory or even shorter, shouty, resource negotiation games such as Sidereal Confluence, you will probably have a good time with DerrocAr.
If you don’t have the right playgroup, things take a left-hand turn without being quite crazy enough to be called chaotic.
Shady is the Name of the Game
Mechanically, DerrocAr is a card game. Between two distinct phases, the Board Phase and the Card Phase, players will alternate between round formats, with the current President acting as the first player. (In DerrocAr, the player who has the most support points is the President). In the Board Phase, players must take “board” actions in Congreso (Congress), the Ministerio de Economia (the Ministry of Economy), and Casa Rosada to affect government policy or pay off debts to partners foreign and domestic. They might also use a once-per-game player power or pass before buying cards from a market that will be played during the Card phase.
In the Card Phase, players play cards to gather support points or mess with their neighbors. I loved how the Card phases played out because they were the main opportunities for negotiation, backstabbing, table talk and general interaction. Blackmail cards were a standout. You could choose to turn in a three-card set of Lobby action cards, to gather support from the local media or another entity. Doing that also wipes any issues a player might have with one of those entities.
Funding offers a cash injection. Making a TV appearance might lead to a loss of support, or maybe a boost, depending on the 50/50 toss-up option you select from the hands of an opposing player. (Yes, DerrocAr is so random that a player might win the game with a virtual coin flip by appearing on Argentine national television.)
While both phases offered interesting moments, the Card Phase was the winner in my plays, particular when the action was moving quickly. Watching players unleash Promise cards on the current President, sapping points away from them to possibly trigger a change in Presidency, was always funny. Lobbying for points usually leaves players in a new points order, as players jockey to move just off the lead position. Players can negotiate with opponents to trade cards, in order to work together to sink the current president.
Many elements of DerrocAr had a Munchkin feel; how can we, the table, topple the leader? Since the President role is a shifting responsibility, most players have the opportunity (the pleasure, I would argue) to get thematically punched in the eye by a neighbor. With the many benefits of being the President—mainly through the use of decrees—players will sometimes have a chance to be the underdog, seemingly out of the running for President. Then, suddenly, they’re the current leader of an Argentina in shambles.
When the game is rolling, DerrocAr can be a fun time. The four player game was my favorite of the three plays, despite the fact that it took nearly two hours for us to play with that count. Two of my former Hegemony mates were also at the table, so there was a lot more bickering and bantering between players. In DerrocAr, players will occasionally vote on motions that can change the game’s rules. Those are voted on by the dirty money of each politician, so it’s fun to influence the vote by spending cash and not “influence” tokens or something similar.
DerrocAr runs into problems in two main areas. The first is player count. Frankly, I’m surprised there is a solo mode, because it not only feels off (the player and the bot share a hand of five cards, making it hard to plan…anything, really), but there’s no shouting at all when you are the only person at the table. DerrocAr feels like a five-player game with variants that allow for play with lower counts, but I would never table this with less than four players.
The second is the Congreso board action. My findings? It greatly slows play. That’s because a player can get a single support point just for putting most of the available laws up for vote. When players don’t have other interesting actions during the Board Phase, they usually tried to score a point the slowest way possible, by taking the Motion action at Congreso.
In a game where the ending hits at the 10-point threshold, a point could be huge. But it kills momentum when three of the four players in a round all take the Motion action. I would have preferred a rule where only one player could take a Motion action each Board phase, but this is also why I do not design games.
There are a few other minor quibbles—the player “powers” aren’t very powerful, if they exist at all. One character has the ability to take a single Lobby card from the discard pile. This is not the magic dreams are made of, friends. Also, the text on the motion and decree tiles is a bit small for my aging eyeballs.
It’s a Niche Play, But a Blast for the Right Group
DerrocAr: The Week of Five Presidents was a great time at higher player counts. Many games I cover here at Meeple Mountain require “the right group” to really enjoy them, but stabby, interactive card games steeped in real-world politics are a niche of a niche.
If you have the right group for something like this, I highly recommend DerrocAr, particularly if you have players who can move quickly and make decisions while playing along with the game’s theme to debate and fight over a host of different game elements. Even with five players, DerrocAr should be a 90-minute game and offer a host of opportunities to create real memories.
I want to call out one other thing about the DerrocAr production: the Learn to Play booklet included in the box. Many players shun these how-to manuals that give new players a soft landing with a new game, which is a shame. The Learn to Play included here is excellent and rightly limits the access to some of the more advanced mechanics in the game. That made my first multiplayer game very smooth and still very enjoyable, since we were working with all game mechanics by the end of that tutorial.
You won’t play too many games like DerrocAr this year, so check this one out if you are looking for a spicy thriller. Get to the chopper!
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