Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory Review

Review copy kindly provided by Hegemonic Project Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory might just be one of the best games I’ve ever played. That said, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to most people.

Ooh, the drama and clickbaityness of an opening paragraph like that. Get me, being all cool and edgy. The next 1500ish words will hopefully explain what I mean and by the end of it you’ll know whether it’s a game you should be considering or not.

Pure class

Hegemony is a game about leading your class in society to victory. You play in an unnamed country known as The Nation where things are turbulent. Between the Working Class, the Middle Class, the Capitalists and The State you try to get the nation back on its feet, but with things swung in your favour, so that you prevail at the expense of others. That’s right, it’s a heavy political game, one that’s positively dripping in theme and packed to the brim with substance.

It’s here where you’re likely to find your first sticking point. If you don’t have a group that enjoys heavy, intricately linked games, you won’t have a good time with Hegemony. Even if you do have a group that likes nothing more than the cerebral gymnastics that a good Lacerda game demands, if they avoid politics like the plague, Hegemony can be a hard sell. I speak from experience. I’ve been there.

“Hey guys, I’ve got this amazing game. It’s a game about politics and economics where you play as different classes in a society and try to swing tax, foreign trade and the Labour Market in your favour. Guys… Guys??”

Politics as the theme for a game sounds dry even to folks who like their games drier than a mouthful of cream crackers. This is despite many of us loving negotiation, income planning and trying to sway shared resources in our favour. And that’s what Hegemony boils down to at a mechanical level, but it’s hidden beneath a layer that many people have a strong aversion to.

This game is one of the few where I’ll break my own rule of thumb which says “Never try to force a game on someone if they don’t seem interested”, because when you actually play Hegemony you understand just how electric and dynamic the game truly is.

Not all are created equal

As I stated at the outset, each player chooses a different part of this fictional society to represent. The capitalists want to make money. They open companies to produce goods which can be sold to make money. Who works in those companies though? Well, that’d be the working class, who also want to make sure that they have access to basic essentials like education and healthcare. The middle class sits between the two, seeking employment for its own workers, but also being able to open its own companies where the working class might like to ply their trade.

Sitting above all of this is the faceless State. They want to make money too, and what better way to do it than offering those needs that the working class has. Provided, of course, that the other classes aren’t competing in the private market to offer their own alternatives. Maybe offering tax breaks, or making healthcare and education free might force the working class to love you more, but at what cost?

See, when I explain it like that, you can see where the game lives. It lives and breathes in that competition. In the cracks between the classes, in the balance of what you want against what others need, and how you can best profit from it. Suffice to say then that Hegemony is a highly asymmetric game. In the same way that games like Root (read my review here) and COIN games like All Bridges Burning (another review here) have player roles which all play differently, Hegemony takes this concept and runs with it. If you play a game as the working class for example, you can’t expect to play as the capitalists in the next game without learning how to play all over again. The game’s structure remains the same, but your goals, your motivations, and your actions will be completely different.

Thus, hegemony is a game in which you invest. Not just in terms of the money you pay to buy the game, but in the time you spend learning each of the roles, and in the overall structure of the game. Players’ first games are an undertaking, and you can expect to spend the best part of an hour at least explaining it to someone going in blind. If you want to play a four-player game, clear your calendar for the next 4-5 hours. You’ll need it, I promise. I highly recommend – nay, insist – that you watch the Gaming Rules! tutorial and playthrough. Context truly is king in learning how to play, so you’ll understand the game much better by watching a tutorial.

Fabric

It’s incredible just how well the theme of the game is woven into it. Honestly, it’s just ridiculous. Given that the designers are Post-Grads in Politics and Economics, it shouldn’t be surprising (there’s a book included which explains this much better than me) but it is. Hegemony truly is the epitome of making an educational game fun. You’re playing a game and enjoying it, but the actions you’re taking, the policies you’re proposing and voting on, and the outcomes, all mirror real life. It’s modern society in microcosm, and it’s mind-blowing to me that this game even came into being.

There are little nods to modern games everywhere, which lacquers on some shiny fun to the dry structure that supports it. Take voting for example. At various points in the game, players have opportunities to add cubes of their faction’s colour to the voting bag. At the end of a round (unless immediately triggered) players vote on proposed changes to policy. The more cubes you have in the bag, the higher the likelihood of your colour being drawn and you getting the chance to choose how the vote goes. Then we’ve got cardplay too, not something you might expect to be in a political game. These represent different things happening out in the world, unexpected events, the unseen sucker punches the world likes to throw at society. Each faction has its own deck of cards which can be played for those events and actions on them, or discarded for standard actions.

What I love about Hegemony is how quickly that the assumption of a dry, dour theme evaporates. Once you’re a round into the game, you’ll be roleplaying, whether you expect to or not. I’ve watched the working class player shaking their fist at the middle class player. I’ve smugly sat giggling to myself when playing as the state while the puppets around the table danced to my tune. I’ve played as the capitalists and raked in money hand over fist while the other three squabbled over other things. There’s plenty of kill-the-king gameplay when a player starts stretching the lead and the rest of the table decide among themselves to do something about it. You find yourself so invested in the game that you don’t realise the hours passing, which is a good thing, as there are lots of hours in a game.

Final thoughts

Writing this review makes me want to go ‘Grrrr’ and shake my fists. I love Hegemony. I think it’s a masterpiece of a game. I want to play it more. I want other people to play it. Despite all of that, I can’t recommend it to a good number of the people reading this review. There’s a checklist of things you need to be able to tick before you pull the trigger. The easiest way to know would be to play someone else’s copy, but otherwise, you need to ask yourself these questions:

☑ Does your group love heavy games?
☑ Does your group like politics, or have enough apathy about it that you could talk them around?
☑ Do you have 4-5 hours spare to play?
☑ Do you mind re-learning a lot of the game each time you change factions?

If you can answer yes to all of those questions, then yes. A hundred times yes. You should buy Hegemony. You’ll love it. Considering how much game there is, the cost of around £60 is well worth it. You’d pay twice that for a Vital Lacerda game, and you’re talking about a comparable level of production quality, complexity, and future life in the box. The player aids are amazing, the rulebook does an exceptional job of breaking a complex game and theme down into digestible pieces. You can play it with fewer than four players, but it needs bots to play in place of missing people. Personally I wouldn’t play it with fewer than three, where the State is controlled by the game, but four players is where the game truly shines.

What about the rest of you? Am I saying definitely don’t even think about Hegemony? No, I’m not. I’m saying do some research. Watch the tutorial (or at least some of it) and playthrough I linked to above, read the rulebook, and watch other tutorials. Talk to people who’ve played the game. Even if you think it might be a convention game that you drag with you three or four times a year when Real Life gives you the time you need to play bigger games, you might still decide it’s worth it. Hegemony is an outstanding game, one I’ll hang on to for a very long time, even though there might be big gaps between plays.

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You can buy Hegemony right now from my retail partner, Kienda. Click here to shop and remember to sign-up at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for 5% discount on your first purchase over £60.