President no Sentaku

The board of directors of legally-distinct Honda Motors just elected you into the President seat. Starting the game at the third place in the domestic automobile market (meaning Japan) and a little over 40 billion JPY in the company’s reserve, your responsibility is to lead the company to top the domestic market, then expand to NIEs (Newly Industrialized Economies), Europe and finally the USA. Each succeeding market also requires a certain increasing amount of JPY in your reserve to clear the win condition.

The game takes place on a menu interface with the background of the President’s desk. Most of the buttons on the interface are purely informational, the rightmost button being the save button, and the leftmost button bringing you to a sub-menu where all the decisions are made. Your decisions are divided into interactions with your company departments:

• Development: Where you decide how your cars are made based on 4 attributes - performance, fuel efficiency, comfort and design.
• Accounting: Where you can check the company’s book and take out a loan from the bank.
• Human Resources: Where you adjust the size of your staff to balance between payroll expense and having enough workers at both your factories and sales.
• President’s Office: Where you can commission PI firms to research your rival companies.
• General Affairs: Where you can bulk purchase new production materials, production equipment, buy fire and theft insurance and buy warehouse properties.
• Sales: Where you can decide whether to price your cars at market price or at an undercut price.
• Marketing: Where you can decide whether to allocate budget for safe but low-impact advertisements (TV, newspaper, event and ad campaign), or risky but high-impact advertisements (business conference, motor show, celebrity endorsement and Formula 1 team sponsorship).
• Manufacturing: Where you select a production line and allocate budget for quality control.

After ending a turn, a random event will occur and the business simulation underlying the game calculates your decisions. Each fiscal month spans 2 game turns. When a fiscal year ends, your book is settled against annual payroll and business tax.