Boardgames
Class Struggle Meets Game Night
In ‘Hegemony,’ board-gamers take on the role of wage workers and plutocrats fighting for societal supremacy.
In 2017, a Greek Cypriot policy wonk named Varnavas Timotheou got the idea to create an “educational board game based on the academic principles of political sciences, political economy, and economics.” As elevator pitches go, it sounds like a complete dud. And yet, the game he ultimately produced in 2023, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, has been a huge commercial success, and now ranks as the 45th most popular title on the widely followed BoardGameGeek web site. Earlier this month, I sat down and played it for the first time.
Jonathan Kay
This wasn’t a game I’d been especially eager to try, having been put off by its explicitly “educational” premise. As I’ve written here at Quillette, it’s absolutely true that a good board game can teach players a lot about the world—including the history of Norse-Indigenous warfare (Greenland), the physics of space travel (High Frontier), and the art of brinksmanship (Chinatown, No Thanks). But in these artfully produced games, the learning happens by accident. It’s very different when a game creator earnestly announces that education (or, worse yet, moral improvement) will be his game’s mission.
Put another way: Peas taste great when they’re embedded in samosas. They’re much less appealing when someone invites you to eat a whole bowl of them.
Hegemony distinguishes itself from most mainstream board games not just because of its public-policy theme, but also because its structure is—in the idiom of gaming typology—“asymmetric.” This means it’s different from chess, backgammon, checkers, and Scrabble, symmetric games in which players start from the same position, follows the same rules, and pursue the same objectives. If you know how to play the thimble token in Monopoly, you don’t need to read a bunch of new rules to learn how to play the race car or the battleship.
In an asymmetric game, by contrast, the playing experience changes radically depending on your choice of which side you pick. A classic example here is the quirky 2016 title, Vast: The Crystal Caverns, which plays out in a treasure-packed dragon lair. In a multiplayer game, one person plays the dragon, while another plays the knight adventurer who’s been dispatched to slay it. A third player controls a goblin horde roaming the cave and causing stereotypical goblin mayhem. A fourth plays a thief who steals treasure from everyone else. And a fifth plays—and here’s where things get postmodern—the cave itself: His or her role is to keep all the other players in a perpetual state of frustrated limbo, unable to complete their treasure-hoarding and dragon-slaying objectives.
Another aspect of Hegemony that might be disorienting to new players is the highly depersonalised nature of the in-game identities: Each participant represents an entire swathe of a society referred to generically as “The Nation.” (The cover art suggests it’s the United States, but Timotheou was reportedly inspired by the economic travails of his native Cyprus.) Those swathes are: Working Class, Capitalist Class, Middle Class, and State. Each gets its own distinct menu of action options and victory objectives.
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If you’re playing the Working Class in Hegemony, the in-game economy rewards you for getting your little wooden meeple figurines into entry-level jobs at companies and government agencies (these being represented by the cards that carpet the board); gaining access to health care and other basic services; successfully promoting redistributionist government policies; and, if possible, creating labour unions.
By contrast, the Capitalist player doesn’t have any meeples at all. His available actions are instead dedicated to creating and running corporations; and lobbying the state for low taxes, lean budgets, and laissez-faire policies more generally.
Then there’s the State, which can start up its own entities—such as schools, hospitals, and public media outlets—while also managing the overall national finances. There are five game turns, and at the end of each, the State has to balance the books. As described in more detail below, failure to do so can have cataclysmic scoring effects.
In physical terms, Hegemony is a big game—a riot of tokens, markers, and individual player boards that can easily fill up a dining-room table. Sitting in the middle of it all is a central oversized game board, which contains sliding-scale macro indicators that define the economic environment within the fictional Nation—such as taxation levels, public health-care benefits, education subsidies, tariff levels, and immigration. All of these go up or down based on the ersatz-legislative votes that are regularly held throughout the game.
This whole political subplot within Hegemony is highly abstracted—as there are no political parties, much less any pretense of modelling different branches (or levels) of government. Policy changes are driven by the accumulation and expenditure of “influence cubes,” which players use to swing votes in their preferred direction.
If you’re hoping for game-play mechanics that simulate the substance of political fights over, say, race relations, abortion, DEI, gender, criminal law, or any of the other culture-war issues that monopolise social media, you’ll come away disappointed. None of those issues play any role in the game. Hegemony is solidly rooted in the traditional materialist presumption that class warfare is about money and what money buys.
It is in the above-referenced voting interregnums that players are really pushed to express their class interests. As noted, the calculus at the two ends of the socioeconomic spectrum is relatively straightforward: Both the Working Class and Capitalist do their best to tug the macro indicators to (respectively) the left and right sides of the policy spectrum.
For the Middle-Class player, however, the politics of Hegemony are more complicated—because his or her incentives are a mash-up of those of both workers and entrepreneurs.
Like the Working-Class player, the Middle-Class player has meeples spread out all over the board, punching the clock (albeit with higher salaries, because they tend to have more specialised Middle-Class job skills). But the Middle-Class player can also set up businesses of his own, and so shares some common ground with the Capitalist.
In the case of health care, for instance, Middle-Class-run local health clinics might be operating alongside the Capitalist’s national-scale conglomerates (as well as pubic health entities managed by the State player). So when a vote relating to health policy comes up, it isn’t always obvious whether the Middle-Class player will be prioritising his own meeples’ access to cheap medical benefits, or his for-profit health clinics’ access to fee-for-service payouts.
The least that can be said for Hegemony is that it’s not (as I’d originally feared) a dull, eat-your-peas experience. Once I’d mastered the rules, I got swept up in the competitive dynamic—which (for me, at least) is the most reliable indicator of whether a game is worth playing.
That said, if you’re looking for a game that simulates the cut-and-thrust of real-life politics, Hegemony will disappoint you—notwithstanding the clever way that it models the economic tensions existing among different strata within our societies.
In real life, politics is about people, but Hegemony plays out at a level of abstraction many orders of magnitude above the solitary human form. A card will come up instructing players that the labour market has been suddenly deregulated, or there’s a boom in affordable housing, or a massive nationwide labour strike has broken out, or immigration levels have been cut—but no reason is given for these massive policy swings. In real life, such sudden shifts are typically driven by dramatic news developments, or by the emergence of charismatic politicians and new political coalitions. But all of those background factors—which supply the human political narratives that many of us non-wonks find far more fascinating than the resultant policy shifts—are beyond the scope of the game (and, to be fair to Timotheou, probably beyond the scope of any conceivable tabletop game).
Hegemony is similar to more conventionally themed modern “Eurogames” (think Terraforming Mars, Catan, Concordia, Brass, Le Havre) in at least one important respect: again and again, it tempts players to choose immediate dividends (in the form of lump-sum victory points or money) over long-term investments that provide a steady stream of benefits throughout the game (“engine-building,” in Eurogame parlance). In the game of Hegemony I played, the player representing the State succumbed to this temptation in disastrous fashion.
Jonathan Kay
Without getting too much into the weeds of how the scoring works, I’ll simply note that the State player generally gets a lot of points for making other players happy—such as by running up deficits to give away big welfare-state windfalls. The idea here is that the government bolsters its legitimacy and popularity when voters have full pockets.
In our game, the State player came out of the gate spending like crazy—and so my Working-Class meeples initially received lots of cheap health care, tax rebates, and discount “luxury goods” (represented in the game with iPad-shaped tokens). For a while, it was great.
But it didn’t last. The State’s short-sighted populism resulted in the central government going bankrupt—not once, but twice—and so the whole economy was taken over by the International Monetary Fund. Under this new dirigiste regime, our political influence cubes became worthless, and a whole bunch of neoliberal policies were brought in.
The most painful knock-on effect (for me) was that my Working Class meeples’ access to cheap education and job training was cut. This cut me off at the knees, as I hadn’t bothered making my own investments in educating my work force (as indicated by the fact that my meeples were still grey coloured, as opposed to the brighter colours that represent skilled trades). Without continued government support for post-secondary education, most were now stuck in dead-end (and non-unionised) employment.
They languished in that state for literally the entire game. At one point, almost half my workers were unemployed. I’d been caught in a welfare trap.
Meanwhile, the Capitalist player romped to victory by exporting high-tech products that he produced in factories run by robots. Our (unidentified) country had become one of those highly stratified societies you see in dystopian science-fiction movies set in the not-too-distant future, where plutocrats (presumably living in gated communities protected by private security forces) enrich themselves while the proles hustle for scraps.
Did my gaming experience offer a profound lesson in the real-life perils of populism and runaway income inequality—or am I just not particularly good at Hegemony? I don’t know enough about “the academic principles of political sciences, political economy, and economics,” to offer a definitive verdict. But the fact that I’m still turning the question over in my mind several weeks after I played Hegemony speaks well of Timotheou’s creation.
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