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The thing about Hegemony is, in a game with 4 players playing multiplayer solitaire, the working class is heavily advantaged and will likely win- it's generally incumbent on the middle class and capitalists to prevent this natural runaway win, often with actions that will be unprofitable for their own side. For example, the capitalists will sometimes need to shut down businesses to prevent union formation, and favor less profitable industries that use unskilled labor in order to check the working class. There's a lot of interlocking mechanisms and way to interact, though ultimately the main framework is an economic eurogame so it will come off as kinda dry and anodyne - union formation is based on the number of skilled workers of a particular type out, for example. Twilight Struggle works well because the Dulles vision of the Cold War is a very good 2-player game. I don't think it's some big endorsement of that historical viewpoint, and indeed some of the cards almost feel parodic to emphasize that (WarGames being one of the defining cards of the Late War era, moreso than say, Perestroika for example)
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Oct 7, 2023 13:52
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 07:07 |
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Halloween Jack posted:I find that they have an inherently pessimistic view of civilization, yes. Generally games with one winner will have that. That's inherent to games.
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Oct 7, 2023 15:10
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FMguru posted:They tried the same trick with the follow-up game (Labyrinth) about the GW Bush-era War On Terror, with much less success. Turns out that Kissinger/Kennan/RAND/NSC-68 was a much stronger base to build a game on than the op-ed columns of Thomas Friedman. Yeah the asymmetry in Labyrinth really does it no favors as a game- the approaches are very hemmed in and a lot of the basic mechanisms of what the jihadist and US players are trying to do come down to die rolling in a way Twilight Struggle handles better. Even Imperial Struggle is better than Labyrinth, though it is also much more abstract. IS is a more interesting game than Labyrinth, though, as a game itself, though I don't think it quite has the juice Twilight Struggle does. Mr. President's take on politics is i think more a function of the domestic politics being a somewhat half-baked addendum to the foreign policy board. Actually capturing US domestic politics in a detailed way would involve an entire game of its own I think, and the design there has a lot more going on in the world side, though as the game says, if you want to do what it calls winning, you need to win on the domestic side and not lose on the foreign policy side. I did a playthrough of it, and I think it suffers from the same thing most solo games have in that they're more experience generators than interesting decision generators, though it does try to have more decisions than most other solo games.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:48
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I think it'd be really hard to make something like hegemony able to just, have radically different structures of how money goes around the board and still be much of a game. I kinda feel like the nod to communism is basically the Working Class having an advantage in a 'multiplayer solitaire' style of play. Your mileage may vary.
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Oct 7, 2023 17:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:Is that the game that came with a balaclava for the terrorist player? At least that's funny if nothing else. Nah, GMT doesn't have that kind of panache.
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Oct 8, 2023 00:52
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Randalor posted:I mean, the full title of the game is "Triumph and Tragedy: European Balance of Power 1936-1945" so that may explain some omissions. There's a pacific game called Conquest and Consequence which handles the Pacific side of things, though the linking rules are still a wip. This bifurcation in ww2 games is pretty common- Advanced Third Reich got a pacific expansion called Empire of the Rising Sun in the 90s to finally handle the Pacific side. Axis Empires had Totaler Krieg based on Krieg! from the 90s, and updated through the years, and Dai Senso first dropped in 2011 (with some serious balance issues) before being revised for Axis Empires Ultimate. The main reason is basically it is very difficult to make a map that works for both and is generally acceptable with the level of detail these grog games expect. A3R in fact uses different movement costs and ranges to accomodate an entirely different hex scale in the Pacific, and Dai Senso just has entirely different land units for each theater with different movement allowances to handle that. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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Jan 2, 2024 20:36
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 07:07 |
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I foud Hegemony as a game to be kinda boring, but i think it'd be more interesting to play in a group that got through it a few times and actually knew the dynamics well enough to play against each other than play multiplayer solitaire (which i find to usually be worker-favored). Which itself is an interesting statement. I do think the lack of violence in its political economy is telling but i can't imagine getting it anywhere near right at a reasonable level of complexity- the logic of war and violence in general works differently from the sociological ant farm that is the systems in Hegemony.
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Feb 23, 2024 13:21
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