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Anyone play Hegemony? It's very interesting as it's a game where your four different interest groups with mostly opposed goals trying to bend the countries resources to your benefit (capitalists, middle class, working class, and the state). I'd be interested in seeing write up about the games design because it seems like it has an interesting spin on "politics" but I'm also interested in how the design choices may also have implied "politics".
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Oct 6, 2023 15:55
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:39 |
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We started a new game of Hegemony and it was very interesting seeing the Working class form basically a Socialist State by allying hard with the State (played by me) with the Middle class and Capitalists largely being opposed but with the Middle class sometimes defecting against their class interests (Vanguardists?); the capitalists had exhausted a lot of early influence which let me as the State push through some tax increases in the late game which gathered a massive influx of cash in which to secure the legitimacy of the government despite some mostly passive early rounds due to trying to keep the budget balanced but with the constraint of lower taxes that the middle and upper classes managed to force early on because the state, lacking control of the media, couldn't retain control of the political process. It's a very interesting game.
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Oct 7, 2023 03:24
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I actually disagree a lot with the idea a Socialist version of the game is basically just a cooperative game, because honestly my first thought once I got used to playing the game is you could easily make a Soviet version of the game; the 1:1 substitution with minor differences in gameplay is to make the Capitalists into the abstract representation of major state-owned firms or perhaps the Army, the middle class can be a hodge podge of either the "Outer Party"/Komosols/Military Officers and lower level bureaucrats trying to meet ends meet (aka like the player character in Papers Please with the Working class largely unchanged and the State being well, the State. This thought comes from that my interpretation of what the "State" is in the game is less El Presidente but more like a combination of what people think of as the Deep State, i.e career bureaucrats and also higher level policy makers, like the Cabinet/Department heads who are trying to fiddle with levers to keep things going. This can be pretty easily without much fiddling also represent historical Soviet states i.e USSR/China/Vietnam, where you always have this sort of core of Technocrats, Dengists etc who are trying to "make things work" and then you have other interest groups factions; i.e I can easily see the Working class easily "working" (heh) in this variation of the game; they could be Maoists for instance fighting Dengist technocrats; and then looking at real world examples like North Korea or the USSR in the 30's with the Five Year Plans, the way they just exploit the working class and peasantry to extract their surplus labour to industrialize can easily be represented in the sort of abstract ways Hegemony seeks to model the conflicts and incentives to cooperate between interest groups. Looking at the game less from the lens of "These are different socio-economic classes" and more like Victoria 3-esque "Interest Groups" and my thinking makes a lot of sense to me; and I think you can easily adapt the game to support different socio-economic contexts, whether its a Soviet style Socialist State or something else. You could make a cooperative version of the game where you're trying to all work together to cooperate against external crisises but there still needs I think to be internal contradictions to keep it interesting. Like an event like "INVASION!" where unless its responded to results in losing half of your Dwarves (what I like to call the Short Guy with Hard Hats pieces) but only like 1/4 of your "Middle Class" population and only like 2 Industries for the "Capitalists" and you still create a game of internal policy disagreements and conflict. You don't necessasarily need to eliminate the capitalist player, just kinda shift around their role and abilities. Like historically in Mao's China until most got purged there was a time in which private enterprise was encouraged under Communist rule because it was thought (Mao had argued this as far back as 1934) that they would be indispensable to develop the economy. So in terms of abstractly modeling Socialist governments as they existed I think there's multiple paths you could do to represent it.
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Oct 7, 2023 18:10
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There was a colonialism game I played that just put the players as the natives with the settlers being essentially "AI" controlled via drawing cards from their deck and implementing their "moves" that was kinda neat.
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Oct 7, 2023 18:23
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JMBosch posted:Spirit Island does that too, except that you're spirits of nature instead of native people, so unless the island is truly uninhabited, I guess it still sorta kinda strips agency away from whoever was already living there. Ah, I think this was the game! I assume they were inhabited and we as the spirits were like working through our worshippers though.
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Oct 7, 2023 18:51
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Hegemony with a 4th player to be the State is loads of more fun and creates some really interesting dynamics. Being the Middle class is hilarious because you have both this tendency to punch down because the Working class keeps getting all the free poo poo from the state but you're also side-eyeing the capitalist class because they keep poaching your best workers before you can employ them yourself. Mechanical Ape posted:How many aliens/nonhuman races could be replaced with humans of the same coded culture without losing anything significant? Like, if your setting has dwarves who are basically just Fantasy Scots, you might as well eliminate the middleman and have Fantasy Scots in your setting. Same with Orcs who are Fantasy Huns: just use people with a Hunnish culture and put the extra effort elsewhere. Simple, they're actually Space Humans with sufficiently advanced anti-aging technology. :science101:
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Oct 22, 2023 00:12
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Played some Triumph & Tragedy today and we're finally at the end of 1938. AFTER FIVE HOURS Germany declared war on the West basically in the first turn and I've been chilling in the East as the Soviets trying to industrialize to win via economy collecting peace dividends while using diplomacy actions to try to keep things even between the fascists and the decadent west. 
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Jan 2, 2024 03:42
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 11:39 |
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Triskelli posted:Any notable weird politics in the game? A quick glance shows that Japan isn't in the game, which is a big omission It's a very interesting game to think about in terms of history; and its geopolitics, I haven't chewed on it much but there's a lot of interesting design choices. For one, it definitely seems to kinda sorta heavily internalize in its gameplay the Soviet/Russian imperial view of Eastern Europe. You're literally supposed to look at the board from the right side of the board looking towards the opposite side; and a lot of mechanics basically reward you (as well as the other players) for setting up puppets in your near abroad as a tripwire.  Arrows drawn indicating the way you're supposed to look at the board. So if I'm looking at how to defend the USSR, especially from the Germans, they look to be my main thread, which my force posture reflects. From there I'm also setting up friendly neutrals/protectorates so they have to dow me to attack them; and in order to win, I need to dominate enough of the world for resources/population to win by Economic Victory. The game does reward me for staying out of WW2; I gain victory points each turn for staying at peace, the victory points gained are random, between 0 and 2; so no one can know for sure when you might have secretly won the game. However being at war makes it faster to industrialize, so between that and a military victory (you need 2 enemy capitals to win, i.e Germany wants Paris and London or Paris and Leningrad), there's a risk one of the belligerents can win the game before I can. Right now the war (slightly older picture) was very touch and go, Germany struck first, invading the Low Countries and Blitzing into Paris, and then tried to Sea lion Britain a couple of times. Britain was on the backfoot until the US entered the war (Britain got lucky and turn 2 was able to influence the US into their action, I tried lightly contesting it but failed). It being so touch in go made me SUPER CAUTIOUS, full papa stalin roleplaying here of just moving very carefully avoiding even twitching to prevent one side from winning, and interfering with who had the upper hand. This meant 1938 I mostly worked to boot Germany from Scandinavia through diplomacy cards to sabotage their resources (your industry is how you buy action cards, build/upgrade troops, or build new factories and is set to the lowest ticker between resources, population and industry) while UK was still trying to retake the initiative, they abandoned India and quickly won Africa/the Med to threaten Germany in Italy and have enough breathing room to raid Low Countries. Basically if you military invade a neutral country (i.e if I invade Poland), both my rivals gain extra action cards equal to the population of its capital, soPoland gives 3 action cards to both players. I saw that the German player seemed to be constantly burning through action cards so while they were winning I didn't want to fuel their war machine so I instead focused on flipping neutrals with diplomacy. Germany fighting the West super early not only drags out how long the game takes (lol) but also has very interesting effects on the rest of the game; because it potentially hands me the game if one of them can't win decisively, it dragging out is giving me a pretty decent chance to win, but the West is regaining the upper hand (DDay was successful and Paris is liberated and they're now ahead of me in industry and ahead of Axis), so I might have to do something soon, like hopefully flip Persia or maybe I might have to just straight up invade and not gain any other victory points from being at peace. The thing is it kinda seems like you're incentivized to attack whoeever the 3rd faction is, because once theyre dragged in they can't just freely get resources, and need to rely on what they can get from their friendly neutral club. But it does also make building factories cheaper as they switch to a war economy and even more cheaper if they end up at war with both. It kinda seems like as historically you're best off as the USSR doubling down on the Five Year Plan trying to speed run your industry instead of contesting neutrals and also maybe better off ignoring techs because the tech cards are also industry investment cards and I went and picked up two secret techs which while strong, could've maybe gotten me 2-3 more IC which would've been huge by around now. Without context for what the military situation and the economic situation I made some inoptimal buys I think, also when Germany took Paris and had a big army sitting in France I got nervous that they were going to immediately turn on me so I kicked their influence out of Poland and spend some industry building up my military and reinforcing Leningrad as thats all they needed for victory. Which worked, as apparently the German player said it actually deterred them and London looked easier to take. I wonder if its actually better for the Axis to either stay at peace and wait for the West or Soviets to dow first and build up because they have a higher starting industry but lower resources and spend time trying to secure more neutrals, or go East after the Soviets. It kinda seems like there's a sorta incentive for the West and Axis to cooperate on facing the "Bolshevik menance" first because so far it seems like the moment the Fascist Hitlerites and the Decadent Western Democracies fight each other it takes a lot of pressure off the USSR to be ready for an invasion. Not helped by the multiple times one of the Axis or Western players are like, "Heya wanna have a truce to take care of the bigger threat?"  It sure made me deploy some stuff near India just in case haha. Soviet troops also only have a maximum strength of 3 pips but Axis and West can have 4 pips as their max; and start with more troops at or near max; so there's a stronger incentive for the Axis and maybe the West to strike first; while the USSR starts at basically low strength units and isn't in any position to invade anyone. You can also only upgrade a unit once a year, so casualties really heavily erode your combat capability as the war drags on and building up a military from scratch is painfully slow. So there's some stuff that's pretty historical and other stuff that is Very Interesting.
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Jan 2, 2024 17:55
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