I know The Landlord’s Game/Monopoly and Class Struggle, are there any others?
I looked it up on reddit, and there were some interesting games, but the usual cringe.
Spirit Island is a cooperative game of settler-destruction.
Each player plays a different spirit who lives on an island being invaded by European settlers and works together and with the indigenous people to kill all the settlers or at least enough that they fuck off forever.
I really enjoy Spirit Island (you can play it solo fairly well if you don’t mind playing two-handed). It’s one of the few board games that I feel the theme is something that actually aligns with my beliefs fairly well.
It’s…probably not something I would recommend to a newer board gamer though, because it is very heavy in execution.
Fair warning, it is a heavy co-op Ameritrash style game, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
Although it’s kind of designed to play it only once.
I’ve seen reviews and discussions of Hegemony: Lead your class to victory stating and implying that it gets a lot of things about various policies and their economical consequences surprisingly right.
I was curious about Hegemony. I know you can play as the worker class in it, though I am not sure if something like a class revolution is a mechanic or not.
I have found that a lot (most?) of the board game space is very traditionally liberal though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the game reflected those kinds of economic ideas too.
That’s the curious thing - reviews stating that the game gets a lot of it right despite the widespread (and, quite possibly, still present in the game itself) liberalism. One player mentioned feeling defenseless as the workers when the capitalists sell everything abroad and gain so many influence dice as to make engaging in elections and policy-making against them pointless, then, following the workers’ attemps at striking, decide to buy abroad as well; his coplayer referred to a two-months-old argument among them about protectionist policies, then asked whether player 1 sees now, taking a simplified model that is the game as an example, that reliance on consumer imports is pretty harmful for the majority of the population in the long run.
What about Root?
Some of the COIN games have cool settings, like Cuba Libre. I have to admit that they’re a bit too complex for me to justify buying - Root seems like the happy medium for this style of asymmetrical war games
I have a regular board game group who I play some pretty heavy games. We once played On a Distant Plain, the Afghanistan COIN game. By the end of it, the Coalition Forces player and the US player were legit at each other’s throats and tearing their hair out.
9.5/10 simulation of Afghanistan
2/10 if you actually want to have fun and retain friends
Red Outpost is a cool concept but not the best gameplay.
Not sure if I’d call it based as such but the cooperative aspect of Pandemic and the Legacy versions is really refreshing. Most games these days are competitive and based on some liberal economic aspect.
