Class Struggle Meets Game Night

In ‘Hegemony,’ board-gamers take on the role of wage workers and plutocrats fighting for societal supremacy.

Cover art for the board game Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, published by Hegemonic Project Games.

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 45^th most popular title on the widely followed BoardGameGeek web site. Earlier this month, I sat down and played it for the first time.

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 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.