Political board games can come about in a few different ways. There are those that seek to simulate political events, like an election campaign, and others that are about building a character’s influence to manipulate polices and decisions. Today, we will try to look a little at both. Setting is also quite important in these style board games as it helps define the politics, whether you are in the Roman senate, or a war torn Europe.
Table of Contents
- Hegemony
- Diplomacy
- Trajan
- The King is Dead
- Shasn
- Road to the White House
- Die Macher
- Concluding Political Board Games
Hegemony
Hegemony is a contemporary board game that focuses on the management of a whole state. Players may take the role of one of four political and socio-economic groups:
- The Working Class – who control the workers
- The Capitalist Class – who control the companies
- The Middle Class – who control a mixture of the Working and Capitalist class
- The State – provide benefits and subsidies to promote business, but aim to keep a cash flow through taxes.
Immediately, the middle class may seem like the best of both worlds, its workers can work for Capitalist companies and some members can even make companies of their own. It is important to point out thought that the companies they create can never be as large as the Capitalist Class’ companies.
The aims and victory conditions for the various classes differ as well. The Working Class seeks increase the prosperity of their workers ensuring food, health, and education are available for their citizens. The Capitalist Class seeks to make the most possible profit by producing goods and services. The middle class, again, seeks a balance of the above two objectives. Lastly, the State is attempting to increase its legitimacy by keeping all the other groups balanced and in check.
While players have their own goals these are dictated by policies such as Taxation, Foreign Trade, Labour Market, and more. Voting and changing these policies will be the key to your success. Balancing political elements in this board game will see you winning the class war.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy and Politics are closely interlinked and this board game exemplifies that marriage perfectly. Players represent one of the seven great European nations before the beginning of World War I: Great Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, or Austria-Hungary.
The game is heavily negotiation focused as many political events and actions are. Your aim is to control 18 of the 34 supply centres in Europe, but this is almost impossible to do without the help of other players on the table. You must make, break, and maintain alliances to ensure victory for your nation.
The combat is relatively simple as you can only have armies or fleets. Players secretly write down what they want their units to do and simultaneously reveal this at the end of the order phase. An example of this might be moving an army from Spain to Marseille.
Trajan
We actually made a list dedicated to Roman Board Games, but we had not heard about the board game Trajan when making it and this definitely would have earnt itself a spot. In Trajan players will build, trade, visit the forum, influence the Senate, and use the military.
In a Political sense, two of these actions are most important: the forum and the Senate. In the forum, players will try to fulfil the demands of the public to gain victory points. In the Senate, players will try to shift legislature to fit their long term plans.
The other actions also give your character victory points and that is the most important thing to consider – there are many paths to victory in this game. Do you build a trade and shipping empire or become a legendary general? Even though these decisions are less politically motivated, negotiation, forward thinking, and long term strategy all play a major role in this board game.
The King is Dead
As we ventured back in time with Trajan it seemed fitting to stay there, if only temporarily, but this time to Medieval Britain. The Second Edition of this game is most appealing with its updated artwork, graphic design, and additional optional game rules. In the game, Britain has been split into three distinct factions: Scottish, Welsh, and the English. However, you are not part of any of thems.
Instead, you act as an independent lord who is seeking to snatch the throne under everyone else’s nose. In the game you must, influence, spy, and garner support from the factions, often pitting themselves against each other.
Interestingly, the game can be as much about being patient as making things happen. You are of course acting as an independent lord, independently of your fellow players. As much as you are twisting the British landscape, they are too. Therefore, sometimes the best action is no action at all and instead try to understand what your rivals are planning.
Shasn
Shasn is a political area control board game focused on ideology. These are broken down into four Ideologues: The Capitalist, whose focus is making money; the Showstopper, who seeks to gather public support; the Supremo, who acts as a totalitarian leader; and the idealist, who focuses on social benefits.
Voters translate to currency in this game and earning them is a mechanic that separates Shasn from many of its peers. At the beginning of each turn each player answers a yes or no question, based on your answer you get different resources: fund, clout, media, and trust. An example of question from the USA 2019-20 deck might be “should crypto currencies be considered legal tender?”
If you answer according to your real life beliefs, the character in game will become an extension of yourself within the game. However, like many politicians, you might just say the answer that gets you what you need. Certain buffs are awarded to players for fulfilling conditions, like 3 questions answered as an idealist and so on. It is a really interesting game, with many different routes to success.
Road to the White House
Road to the White House is just about as political as you can get in a board game. Each player choses a candidate which have varying stats such as charisma, war chest, political positions, and surrogate pawns. In addition, the character’s home state is important, as they get more votes, and some characters start with +/- votes in other states.
Each turn you may roll your dice for each surrogate pawn you own. The dice rolls determines which movement route you may take, blue, red, or yellow across the US map to a new city, as well as the event card you draw. Moving to new cities gives you votes in that city and players may play event cards, like energy, to give you bonuses based on location and your characters political positions (yes political board games are complicated!).
As many know, money is the key to a political campaign. In this game, with it, you can buy surrogate pawns, organisations (which double your vote count in their state), and more. The game is all about playing to your character’s strength and coupling his with event card you have drawn.
Die Macher
Similar to the game we have just discussed Die Macher focuses on a political campaign, this time in Germany. The first point that is interesting is that it briefly touches on the German style of parliamentary politics, which is proportional representation – it is something that the other games on this list do not really discuss and so was worth mentioning.
The aim of the game is to accumulate the most votes over seven rounds, but the point is that you are stretched and cannot fulfil all the goals you set out to achieve – a bit like a real politician. Players will promote various policies to garner regional support and ultimately be voted as the German President.
Concluding Political Board Games
Typically Political board games game be quite complex and layered. In many cases there are multiple paths to victory, just like in real life politics. They may not be suited for casual board game players because of their difficulty, but due to this complexity the games often have very good replay ability too. This being said, anyone who has an interest in politics or strategy should try giving these a go!
