Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, a political simulation style game where each player is trying to advance their agenda in the country.

Hegemony means leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others. Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, as the definition suggests, is all about class struggle. Released in 2023, it has earned many accolades for its design, including nods to innovation, theme, and strategy. It was even featured as the winner of our 2023 Board Game Award for Best Euro/Strategy Game.

Designers Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou have created an economic and educational simulation for the modern day. It features four different class roles in a fictional nation in crisis and asks players to lead their class to victory above all others. It is quite a feat, distilling academic principles such as Socialism, Neoliberalism, and Globalism into game mechanisms. Consider me intrigued.

Hegemony features heavy asymmetry as players take on different classes in a fictional nation all vying to produce the most points. It features a five-round structure that rolls through phases of preparation, actions, production, elections, and then interim scoring. The majority of player agency happens during the action phase where players take turns playing a card for either a basic or card-based action. After each player has played five cards, the action phase ends.

All four class roles are intertwined, and whether the game is played at two, three, or four players, there are specific roles that must be played in each. Ever present are the Working Class and the Capitalist Class, whereas the Middle Class and State appear in three- and four-player games respectively. Each role features its own set of basic and card-based actions, as well as specifics for each phase of the game.

Each role is highlighted below:

Classes must remain flexible within the game’s policy system. There are seven policy agendas that change based on voting