More about Hegemony

Hegemony is a fascinating game. 🤩 It closely models real life economics and politics and nicely integrates many aspects into a well functioning euro game. The State, Capitalists, Working and Middle Class are all dependent on each other and player interaction is strong. But how do you actually play?

Well it’s certainly not easy to explain. 🧐 The general game flow isn’t particularly complex - you play for 5 rounds, each consisting of 5 phases. However every faction in the game has their own rules and own mechanics.
1️⃣ In the Prep Phase you all do different “setup” steps.
2️⃣ In the Action Phase everyone has their own deck of cards, and their own basic and free actions to take.
3️⃣ In the Production Phase you could receive your wages or your companies could produce goods - and the taxes you pay are also different; plus the State actually receives the tax money from the others instead of having to pay!
4️⃣ The Election Phase is perhaps the most “symmetrical”.
5️⃣ Finally in the Scoring Phase everyone has different criterias how they get points.

There are 2 main aspects I can highlight:

🃏 Playing cards in the action phase is how you interact with the game. In a round you do 5 actions: each turn you either play a card for its specific action or discard it to do a basic action. Deciding which card to play and which to discard is fun. I like when decisions come with some dilemmas. 🙂 I do feel like some cards are better than others, though it’s often situational.

⚖️ Election is another cool part! Players will put vote cubes into a bag during the game, and can propose bills with certain actions. When the Election Phase comes, people will vote for each bill. You decide whether you are for or against a policy change, then you draw 5 cubes and see which side wins - you can additionally use influence to change the results. It can feel bad if you lose a vote due to randomness, but in that case your cubes go back into the bag.

This distinct asymmetry is what makes the game, but it also makes teaching or learning hard.
And what if you don’t have 4 players? Well, it does work - though you could add Automas if you have the Crisis & Control expansion. But more on that later!