Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory

Readiness

draft-ready (confidence=0.67, rules=0.65, fun=0.70). BGG rank: 41; year: 2023; weight: 4.25; playtime: 180 min

Core Loop

Hegemony is an asymmetric 2-4 player political-economic simulation where each player runs one class faction in a modern nation: Working Class, Middle Class, Capitalist Class, and the State. Each class has completely different actions, victory conditions, and resources. The game proceeds in rounds with a turn-by-turn action phase: on your turn you take ONE action from your faction's menu (e.g. workers can strike, demonstrate, vote, take a job; capitalists can build companies, hire workers, set wage policy; state can pass policies, tax, deploy budget; middle class straddles).

Between rounds, an Election may occur: each class votes (votes weighted by population/influence), determining which policies pass on five legislative axes (taxation, labor laws, healthcare, education, foreign trade). The policy state then constrains everyone's actions in the next round.

Turn Structure and State

• No manual/BGA/transcript source is present; card relies on memory plus BGG context.
• BGG description anchor: Extended edition includes Crisis & Control expansion. The Nation is in disarray and a war is waging between the classes. The working class faces a dismantled welfare system, the capitalists are losing their hard-earned profits, the middle class is gradually fading and the state is sinking into a deep deficit. Amidst all this chaos, the only person who can provide guidance is... you. Will you take the side of [...]

Win Condition and Arc

Each faction has its own VP track with class-specific scoring conditions: workers score from population, public services, wages; capitalists from wealth/profits; middle class from prosperity; state from policy stability and treasury. Game ends after a fixed number of rounds (5 typically). Highest VP on your own track wins (compared via a normalization). Arc: early-game establish economic footing (jobs, companies, wages), mid-game elections shift policy axes, late-game push your dominant scoring lever.

Decision Primitives

BGG mechanisms: Action / Event, Hand Management, Simulation, Variable Player Powers, Voting, Worker Placement, Different Worker Types

Memory-derived primitives:

• asymmetric factions (radically different rule sets per class)
• area-of-influence on policy axes (5 sliders)
• worker-placement / action-selection
• voting / political-bloc resolution
• variable economy (companies, wages, prices)
• multiple scoring tracks per faction

Why It Is Fun

Heavy asymmetry done with thematic precision — playing the working class FEELS different from playing the capitalist class because the available verbs are different, not because numbers vary. Direct ideological/political interaction (workers strike to hurt capitalists; state passes laws to constrain everyone) is rare in heavy euros. Generates real table arguments rooted in mechanics, not just diplomacy.

Friction and Failure Modes

• Treat Sonnet-memory edge rules as draft until confirmed by manual, BGA, or transcript.
• Needs at least one stronger rules authority before final extraction use.

Translation and Design Hooks

• Use this card to ask: which primitive carries the fun if theme/licensing is removed?
• For iOS, look for short-session compression, clear state visualization, and a digital-only twist.
• For new tabletop design, look for the tension source and decide whether to preserve or invert it.

Edge Rules and Gotchas

• Companies have wage levels set by the capitalist; workers can refuse jobs below a wage threshold based on policy
• Strike action: workers can shut down a company, denying the capitalist income that round
• Storage/import/export: foreign-trade policy axis controls which goods come in cheaply
• Population pyramid: each class has a worker pool; recruiting/firing moves workers between classes (working class can lose population to middle class via prosperity, etc.)
• Election trigger: not every round has an election — there's a specific phase trigger; players must time policy pushes
• I'm uncertain on the exact action-economy budget per class per round — I believe it's a fixed action count, but factions may have different budgets
• The state's treasury constrains its actions — if depleted, the state can't pass certain budget-dependent policies

Sources Used

[
  {
    "kind": "llm_memory",
    "path": "data/llm_memory_sonnet/321608.md",
    "quality": 0.65,
    "note": "sonnet-self-rated-7"
  },
  {
    "kind": "tabletopia_overview",
    "path": "data/tabletopia_overviews/321608.md",
    "quality": 0.3,
    "note": "Tabletopia overview; not a rules authority"
  }
]