Wouter & Ymke 
2-4 players, ages 14+
Playing time: 90-180 minutes
Designers: Vangelis Bagiartakis & Varnavas Timotheou
Artwork: Jakub Skop
Publisher: Hegemonic Project Games
https://hegemonygame.com/
Hegemony is now live on Kickstarter:
In Hegemony, each player takes on the role of one of the four different classes:
The working class sends their workers to work in companies, earning them money which they need to buy things like food, education or health. They can form unions or when they’re unhappy with their wages go to strike to put pressure on the companies.
The capitalist class owns the companies and sells the goods and services being produced with only one goal: maximizing their profit.
The middle class is a combination of both classes mentioned above: it can build their own companies and employ workers both in their own and in the companies of the capitalist class. They need to find a balance between covering their workers’ needs and producing goods.
The state tries to keep their income steady through taxes, avoiding going into debt. But at the same time, they need to provide benefits to the classes to keep them happy.
Each class comes with a different player board and set of action cards, and has different basic actions to choose from, making each class play completely different. Another important part of the game is the Politics Table: by proposing bills and carrying out elections, players try to manipulate this table to match their political agenda. This table affects every aspect of the game such as, for example: minimum wages, immigration, foreign trade and taxation.
Hegemony is a complex game that takes quite some time to learn and play, but for me it was totally worth it. This is easily one of the best games I’ve played this year: it’s thinky, comes with tons of replayability as each class offers different ways to play and it’s thematically very strong: this is politics turned into a board game form in a way I’ve never seen before!
The crowdfunding campaign for Hegemony is now live on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hegemony/hegemony-lead-your-class-to-victory?ref=6okiew
