How to Play Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory

hey folks my name is Shaye Parker and this is rtfm the show where I teach you how to play a game whether that game puts you in the role of a captain of industry an entire government or just a family of four trying to make it through payday and today it's all the above see today we're learning hegemony leads your class to Victory a highly asymmetric economic game where you will take on one of four entire social classes trying to make sure that the world works the way you want it to one of the best things about this game is that it strongly and immediately puts you in the mindset of your class be it the downtrodden working class work 80 hours a week the ever Vanishing middle class the wealthier than necessary capitalist class oh these or the state who's not your friend vote for me you jerk and the one thing they all have in common the one thing that each class knows for sure they're all out to get me so let's put on a lot of different hats and learn how to play hegemony all right so before we begin I do have two important things to mention first off is that while I don't expect to get anything wrong in this video sometimes an error Finds Its way in I post Corrections using the Klingon subtitles channel so please turn that on or check the description box below and second this game was voted on by my patreon backers if you want me to teach something specific or just want to support the channel joining the patreon is the best way to do that okay now let's dive in hegemony models the internal affairs of an entire nation and it puts you in charge of different social social classes within that Society or as the government itself your goal throughout the game is to improve the lives of your class but of course as usually happens in society this involves working with other people gross I know over the course of five rounds You'll Play cards to take actions with each class playing very different games but all with the ultimate aim of scoring points whichever class scored the most points at the end will be the dominant force in the nation but getting there is going to be tricky you have to make deals with other players manipulate the economy and literally and figuratively play your cards right so let's set things up now I'm going to Breeze through most of this because even though there's a lot of setup the instructions are pretty straightforward just know that there are some differences based on player count including which classes you can play a two-player game is capitalists versus working class with three players you add the middle class and with four you add the state I'm going to be teaching a four player game so here we see the board set up for four players this side of the board is mostly the domain of the state with things like their treasury the Public Services they can provide and a number of public sector jobs that the middle class and working class can send their workers to the state player should sit here the capitalist player will sit opposite them and their domain is the private sector where you'll have a forign market to trade and make deals with and an area below with a few private companies already set out and room for plenty more the middle class player will sit to the capitalist right and will have a similar area for starting small businesses the working class class will sit opposite them and both players will be utilizing the unemployed workers and immigration areas yes the working class has the least space to work with owning property is tough these days anyway there's also this area on the board which is all to do with government policies everyone wants to influence it in their favor and will have the opportunity to do so each player will also have individual player boards with all kinds of tracks and tokens but they're all pretty different so I'll cover that more when I focus on each class for now let's talk about how the game actually plays as I said the game takes place over five rounds and each round will have five phases first is preparation where we will all do some admin steps like drawing cards and paying interest on loans this can be pretty much done simultaneously but it is skipped on the first round next you'll have the action phase where you'll start with a workingclass player and moving clockwise everyone will take one action at a time until you've all taken five actions taking actions always involves playing a card so at the end you'll have two cards left in your hand to save for the next round once you've all taken your five actions you'll move on to the production phase which has four steps first the companies produce goods and or services and the workers who staff them are paid wages next the players who need to eat will cover those needs by buying and spending food you'll check IMF which is something I'm going to say for the end of the video and lastly players will pay taxes which no one except the state will be happy about during production each player will go through each step before moving to the next one and the turn order is reversed so it'll go State corporate middle and then working class after production is the elections phase where you'll pull votes from a bag to see if any of the policies change but you only do this if new bills have been proposed more on that in a bit and lastly you'll have a scoring phase where each class will score in their own unique ways I'll be covering how each class scores during their sections but broadly speaking the capitalist earn points by making lots of money Shocker the working class will earn points for creating trade unions as well as advancing this Prosperity track during the actions phase the middle class is kind of a hybrid of the working in capitalist so they also have a Prosperity track and will gain prosperity for having lots of small businesses among other things and the state will score for being legitimate in the eyes of the other classes and by manipulating the policies to match the current political agenda now I want to jump into how each class works but first let's talk about the action phase a bit more since that's where most of the game takes place every fact action will have player AIDS both big and small that you will be pretty much glued to in your first couple rounds that's okay these AIDS will tell you all the different actions you can take as well as everything else you do in the game you'll also have a hand of cards and in order to take an action you have to play a card you can either discard it and take any basic action you like or you can use the effect that's written on the card this will often be a slightly different version of one of your basic actions and it may require a specific policy to be in effect you'll also be able to take one free action either before or after your basic action and these will also be different between the various classes the one action that everyone has access to however is proposing a bill looking back at the policy section on the board the position of each of these tokens will have powerful effects for each player so you'll want to manipulate them in your favor fiscal policy affects how many public sector jobs there are the labor market affects the minimum wage taxation affects taxation among other things the welfare state policies deter how much healthare and education cost when buying them from the state foreign trade affects the foreign market and immigration determines how many new workers come in each round the working class wants the policies to go left capitalists want them to go right and the middle class thinks that we'd all get along if everything moved towards the center these policies might shift during an election but in order for an election to happen a player will need to propose a bill when you take this action Place one of your bill markers on a policy you want to change you have to place your marker adjacent to where it already is so going from a to c or vice versa is not allowed and you can't place on a policy that another player has already proposed a bill for now I'll talk more about the actual election process at the end of the video but like I mentioned earlier that happens after the production phase however you can kick the vote off early by spending an influence influence is one of the six resources of the game the others being money food luxury health care and education each faction will utilize them differently but influence is always important for elections and again if you spend one influence you'll have an immediate vote but only on the bill you just proposed now I think that's enough to get us started so I'm going to move on to the different classes now starting with the working [Music] class look everyone knows that without the little guy nothing gets done so I guess you could say we're the most important ones here of course we got an uphill battle ahead of us so let's take a look at the workingclass board and get started and no I'm not going to do that voice for the whole section so the most important thing about the working class is the people you want to make sure your people are happy but the more people you have the harder it is to support them you can take care of yourself to some extent but you're going to have to rely on others to provide some basic needs your main concern is increasing your prosperity for which you'll need health care education and luxuries but you also need to feed your people and for that you need food but more importantly money you start with 10 workers some of which will be placed on these companies and this will be a little different in a two-player game you'll have one gray worker in the unemployed area and then you'll draw two immigration cards to determine the rest matching the workingclass workers and ignoring the middle class workers they'll do the step on their own and as you can see their workers look a little different we are quite literally the little guy also gray workers are unskilled but if they've got some color to them that means they're skilled workers which will be needed to fill specialized company slots you'll also have some cash and influence a hand of cards and a few other bits and Bobs nearby now that we're set up let's look at the preparation phase there are four steps here though again you'll skip this phase on the first round anyway if you have a loan you'll pay the interest which is $5 you'll draw five cards bring your hand up to seven if you have any Prosperity you'll lower it by one gaining Prosperity earns you points but you don't lose anything when it lowers and then you get new workers and adjust your population accordingly you always add two unskilled workers and then you check the immigration policy and either draw zero one or two cards and add workingclass workers to match ignoring the middle- class workers after this you'll adjust your population track which always matches the number of workers you have on the board and tells you what your current population is once that's done you'll start taking actions as we talked about in order to take an action you need to play a card either for its effect or to fuel a basic action as with all classes you can propose a bill and optionally spend an influence to vote on it immediately you can also apply political pressure to gain three voting cubes to the bag simple as that the rest of the actions are a bit more involved let's start with assigning workers there are a few unstaffed companies at the start of the game and more will definitely be added as it goes on so with this action you can choose up to three of your workers and place them into available jobs after you do so these workers become committed which means you lie them down and they're basically locked into that job for for the rest of the round now there are a few caveats when it comes to assigning workers as we've mentioned workers are either skilled or unskilled any worker can do an unskilled job but you'll need to match the colors for the skilled worker positions next you can move workers from anywhere on the board including other companies but you can only move workingclass workers and you can't move committed workers and lastly companies can either be operational meaning they have all the workers they need or they are completely unst sted and thus non-operational unlike every job I've ever worked at in this game big companies can't be understaffed and stay open which means that when you assign workers you have to be able to fill each slot and if you move just one worker from one company to another the rest become unemployed that is unless you were able to assign another worker into that slot in addition to the companies you'll also have five trade unions and if you have at least four workers attached to companies of their industry you you can assign a worker to the corresponding Trade union these workers are employed and always committed however if you drop below four active workers in that industry the union dissolves and that worker becomes unemployed unions will give you points and influence but we'll get to that later next up you can buy goods and services you'll need all of the resources for various things and this action lets you buy one type at a time choose a good or service and then buy it from up to two sources the maximum you can buy from each source is equal to your population so three from each at the start of the game the sources are the state the foreign market and the capitalist and middle class players though for middle class they'll have a storage and a personal Supply and you can only buy from the storage the costs for each resource will be openly displayed some are affected by policies and others will be determined by the players that provide them though none of the sources will carry all of the goods and services all of the time and note that if you buy from the foreign market most of the money goes to the General Supply but any tariffs will be paid to the state's treasury everything you buy will go into your goods and services area and there's no limit on how much you can hold now this has all been friendly and Cooperative but sometimes you're going to get pushed around and one of the main ways you have a pushing back is by striking this is a way to encourage a player to increase wages but it could also backfire and then you just don't get paid at all when you take this action place a strike token on one or two companies where you have workers none of those workers are committed and the wage is not at level three this can be a public company but only in a four-player game where someone is controlling the state when a company is on strike and the production phase rolls around they will be completely skipped and you will gain one influence that is unless the owner has increased the wages to level three in which case the workers are happy and production moves ahead as normal either way once that's done discard the strike token now middleclass companies can have both both middle and workingclass workers and Strikes in these companies will only partially affect them but I'll cover that in the middle class section of this video also it's important to note that striking companies cannot produce in any way there are cards that produce during the action phase but these won't work on striking companies so a strike is a good way to increase wages but what if there just aren't enough jobs to go around in that case it's time for a demonstration if you have at least two more unemployed workers than the number of available workingclass jobs you can hold a demonstration you're marching on the streets and now it's everyone's problem if the demonstration token is still in play When the production phase comes up discard it and gain one influence and then the other players lose an amount of points equal to the number of your unemployed workers plus trade unions you can distribute the points lost between players as you like but the maximum each player can lose is equal to the number of empty company spaces on their part of the board of course another way it could go down is that one of these players will create some jobs if anyone builds a new company and assigns your workers there making it so that you no longer meet the criteria for the demonstration then the token is removed and the demonstration ends now those are all the basic actions but you also have free actions and as a reminder you can take one free action per turn either before or after your main action for the workingclass player these are mostly about spending resources to gain prosperity and when you gain prosper erity you also gain victory points equal to the new value you can use Healthcare by spending Hearts equal to your population this bumps up your Prosperity by one but it also gives you two bonus VPS and adds a new unskilled worker to the unemployed area and a reminder this also increases your population you can use education in the exact same way increasing your Prosperity but this doesn't give any bonus VPS or new workers instead you can upgrade any one of your workers even a committed one to a skilled work of your choice this will usually mean replacing unskilled workers but there's nothing wrong with going back to school and changing careers however if upgrading a skilled worker it has to be unemployed and the third way to gain Prosperity is to spend luxury the cost in prosperity bonus is the same but there's no other effect another free action you can do is to swap workers this allows you to reorganize your workers by taking a skilled worker in an unskilled position and swapping it with an unemployed unskilled worker this way your skilled worker can more easily be placed in a skilled position later on you can do this as many times as you like during this action and you can even swap committed workers however the new worker will become committed next up you can receive benefits from the government this only occurs in a four-player game but if that's the case the state player will occasionally provide benefits to the various classes you can take these benefits but if you do the state player will gain a point so make sure it's worth it and lastly you can pay 50 bucks to pay off a loan so that's all for actions up next is production during this phase you'll get paid for your work you'll cover your needs and you'll pay taxes for each company where you have workers you'll gain the wages they provide and note that these numbers aren't what each worker makes they're what you make for Staffing the company you might also have a co-op farmer too which will provide two food each and each trade Union will earn you one influence after the companies have produced stand up all of your committed workers next you cover need s which means you'll need to spend food equal to your population you might have some already and you'll spend that first but any leftover needs you'll cover by buying from the sources like we did during the buy goods and services action the differences here are that you can buy from more than two sources and you only buy the food that you need can't stock up for later if you don't have enough money to buy the food you need you have to take a loan which will give you 50 bucks to work with and lastly you'll pay taxes this uses the labor market and taxation policies to find a specific amount as shown here the amount is what you will pay per population so if the total is four bucks and you have three population you'll owe $12 in taxes which you will pay to the state's treasury once production is over you'll have the elections phase but we're going to talk about that later because it involves everybody and for now we'll move on to the scoring phase where you'll earn two points for each trade Union you have and that's it but you'll be earning most of your points through Prosperity anyway though at at the end of the game you'll also earn points for each of the first five policies that are on the Socialist side of the track the more you've affected the political landscape the more points you'll earn as shown here of course the other players will be gunning for this too so don't think it'll be easy and lastly if you've scraped together a little Nest Egg for yourself you'll earn a point for every 10 bucks remaining on your board to a Max of 15 points and that's all for the working class so let's move to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and learn about the capitalists next [Applause] look everyone knows that money makes the world go round and since us capitalists have all the money that must mean that we're the most important ones here of course one has to start somewhere so let's take a look at the capitalist Players Board and starting setup your board is dominated by the desire to hoard wealth and resources you've got a space for Revenue with a modest starting donation from your parents and this is also where you'll keep all the money you earn in a round before tax tax es and usually when you pay costs it'll come out of here as well anyone you have left over becomes capital and during scoring you'll earn money based on your current capital and how much you've increased it you can also store the other five Resources with limits to how much you can hold and you'll be selling these to other players so the prices will start off in the middle spot for each you've also got this free trade zone seven action cards and some other bits and Bobs nearby the most important thing for you though is your companies you start with these four starting companies on the board most of which are already staffed and you'll also have a company Deck with a market of four cards revealed the prep phases first and it has four quick steps first you pay interest on your loans by spending five bucks from your Capital then you draw five action cards you discard any cards in your market and reveal four new ones and lastly you draw business deals and Export cards first discard any cards already shown place a new export card and then the foreign trade policy will tell you how many deals to add 0 1 or two and we'll talk more about deals and exports soon anyway let's move on to actions we've already talked about proposing bills so let's move on to building a company companies will earn you profit and produce resources so building them is pretty vital to do so you take one of the companies in your Market pay its cost shown in the top right and place it into the private sector you'll set the wage for the job and you'll usually want it to be as low as possible but you have to abide by the minimum wage set by the labor market so at the start of the game it's in the middle and don't worry you can adjust these later after setting the wage if there are workers in the unemployed section of the board that can fill all of the slots in your company you may assign them there and commit them however you need to be able to fill all slots with the same class of worker in order to staff a new company also if the company has unskilled jobs you need to fill them with unskilled workers if possible skilled workers can take those jobs if necessary but they won't want to there are also automated companies which don't require workers and don't pay wages but they produce less and cost more so it's not a perfect solution and lastly if you've already filled the private sector with companies you can't build anymore so you'll need to sell one first which happens to be the next action selling a company is easy you simply choose a company that you think is underperforming and discard it any workers on the company are downsized and sent to the unemployment area though you can't sell a company that has committed workers after discarding the company gain money to your Revenue equal to the cost the other thing you can sell is your goods and services and for this we need to go to the foreign market each round will have a new export card so check the current prices and perform any of the available transactions you can make multiple sales but each option can only be used once so you can't just Spam the cheaper one multiple times next to the export card is the business deals and taking a deal action lets you buy large amounts of food and luxuries at a significant discount if there are multiple options choose the deal you want to take pay the cost and earn the goods then discard the deal and do not replace it now the cost is variable depending on the foreign trade policy and how you want to use these Goods if you plan to just sell them back to the foreign market you simply pay the normal cost and add the goods to your free trade zone however if you want to sell them to other players you'll need to add them to your storages instead or you can also split this up if you want putting summon storage and summon free trade but if any goods go to storage you have to pay the Tariff which is determined by the foreign policy the regular cost for the goods goes to the bank but the Tariff goes to the state treasury you usually can't move goods between storage and free trade and if you buy more than you have space for the excess is discarded just two more quick main actions and then we'll talk free actions first you can Lobby where you spend 30 bucks and gain three influence easy as lying and next you can apply political pressure same as the working class all right now for the free actions like we mentioned before you can adjust the wages on your companies you have to stay at or above the minimum wage and you can't adjust wage on companies with committed workers also if you increase the wages that will commit each worker in the company you can also adjust the prices on your goods and services I've heard that people need health care to live or whatever so might as well charge an arm and a leg if they want to you keep those arms and legs if you want to hold more goods and services you can buy storage paying 20 bucks for one of these Nifty storage tiles increasing your storage capacity for that resource next up you can give a bonus to ensure loyalty choose a company with uncommitted workers give that player five bucks and commit those workers you can receive benefits from the state if playing with a state player and lastly you can spend 50 bucks from your Capital to pay off a loan speaking of loans I already mentioned that you usually pay out of Revenue but occasionally you pay out of capital either way if you don't have enough money from the pool you're paying from the excess is taken from the other pool and if you run out of both and still need to pay costs you take on a loan and gain 50 bucks to your Capital with that covered let's move on to the production phase here you'll pay the wages on each staffed company to the corresponding player then gain the listed resources into your storages unstaffed companies don't produce anything and any excess resources are discarded except when it comes to food and luxuries which can be sent to the free trade zone if there's space there also this action card can give you Machinery tokens that will enhance certain companies if a staffed company has one of these it will also produce the bonus amount shown on the card after producing the middle and working-class players have the option of buying food from you so hopefully your prices are competitive and their needs are high and the last part of production is paying taxes to the state you have two types of taxes to pay employment and corporate tax employment tax is how many operational companies you own times the current tax multiplier so if you have five working companies and the multiplier is four you'll owe 20 bucks corporate tax is based on your profits from the round and the current taxation policy following the table for this on your small player Aid let's say we had 80 bucks in our revenue and the policy is on B so we would owe $15 and once we've figured all that out we'll have elections but again we're covering that later so let's move on to scoring where our remaining Revenue becomes capital and that will earn us points now having money is good it earns us the amount of points shown on our player board but the real trick is having more money than you did yesterday because what's the point of living if you aren't constantly increasing your profit margin you'll move this tracker to your current amount and for each space you move you'll get three more points this tracker never goes down so you don't lose points but when scoring your current wealth you track what it actually is not where the marker is so let's say in the first round we have 65 bucks in capital we earn three for that amount and then move the marker three spaces earning us nine more next round we lost some money and only have 40 bucks we'll now score two points because we have between 25 and 50 and the marker doesn't move so that's it and it's a sad day for capitalists now we're almost done with capitalism but the last thing to mention is that when the game ends you'll score points for each neoliberal policy in effect and for any leftover resources in your storage and free trade zones all right we've seen some extreme points of view clearly what we need next is something to balance it all out so let's move on to the middle class look everybody knows that small business is the backbone of the economy and since it's the middle class that's keeping small business alive I guess you could say that we are the most important people here even though you could technically play this game without us but let's not worry about that instead let's set things up as I've mentioned before the middle class is a hybrid of the working and capitalist classes so you're going to see a lot of overlap like the working class you've got population and prosperity tracks as well as spaces for your in income and personal resources like the capitalists you've got storage for the resources you produce and sell and a market of companies you can start though you only have three options and like everyone you'll have a few more pieces and some action cards you'll have workers that will start in various positions and you'll start with a skilled worker of your choice and then draw to Immigrant cards for your next two workers now as with a working class your primary means of scoring points is through the prosperity track but because the middle class is always in danger of disappearing that track will drop faster for you during the prep phase you'll pay interest on loans then drop Prosperity by two spaces though you can't go lower than zero and you still don't lose points for doing this you'll drop to seven cards reveal a new market of companies and then get new workers you'll get one unskilled and one skilled worker of your choice and then draw immigration cards based on the current policy you'll also adjust population like how the working class does it and by the way this section will be a bit shorter than the last two because most of the actions of the middle class and take work exactly the same or very similar to the capitalist or working class actions so I'll be breezing right through them if you need to play middle class and have skipped those sections well I'm sorry to say that you've picked the arguably most complex class in the game and we'll need to watch both those other sections first to really understand this one that being said let's talk about those actions like everyone else you can propose a bill and spend an influence to immediately vote on it next you can assign workers just like the working class does it and you can build companies like the capitalist to do but your small businesses are a little different than their enormous chain stores small business will either have space for two middle-class workers that you won't need to pay wages to or it'll hold one middleclass worker and will have space for a workingclass employee these are considered operational without the employee but will produce more resources if you have them of course you'll also have to pay them wages but since it's only ever a single employee the cost for you is pretty reasonable oh and unlike the capitalists you have to have the middleclass worker or workers that you need to staff the company available before building you can also sell a company and sell to the foreign market just like the capitalists do it and you can buy goods and services like the working class does it with one caveat since you have your own companies that produce these goods and services one of your sources can be yourself and if that's the case you'll take the resources without having to pay any cost this is especially important because until you do this you aren't allowed to spend anything in your storage so you'll need to buy it off yourself first if you want to use it and as with buying from other sources the maximum you can take from yourself is equal to your population moving on you can apply political pressure and add three votes to the bag just like the other classes and lastly you do have one unique action working an extra shift when you take this action choose one of your companies with non-committed middle-class workers then pay a workingclass employees wage if there is one and finally commit all workers and produce the company's resources if the company has an employee that's already committed that's fine you can still do this action but you won't pay their wage and they won't contribute to the production and that's also what happens if a working-class employee is striking now it's time for the free actions and we've seen all of these before like the workingclass you can swap workers as well as use healthare education or luxury to gain prosperity and any other benefits those resources provide you can adjust prices and wages like the capitalists do you can receive benefits if playing a four-player game and there are benefits available and like everyone you can pay off a loan so the actions were very familiar and the production phase won't be too different you'll produce goods and services like we've seen but again if you have a company with a workingclass employee they'll provide a bonus and you'll have to pay their wage you'll gain the resources you produce into your storages and you have a maximum capacity but unlike the capitalist player you don't have a free trade zone to offload any the Overflow and the only way you build storage is through an action card so make sure to manage your inventory well you don't need to pay your middle class work any wages and the capitalist and State players will have paid you any wages you've earned which is good because you have the same needs that the working class does you'll cover those needs by spending food and at this time only you are allowed to take freely from your own storage but only enough to cover your needs can't pull any extra and lastly you'll pay taxes you've got employment tax which works just like it does for the capitalists you know operational companies times the tax multiplier and then you've got income tax which is similar to the working class but not exactly the same you'll find your position on the income tax grid but then you'll multiply it by the number of non-middle class companies where you have workers after production is elections and then you have your scoring phase at this point if your Prosperity is lower than the number of your fully operational companies you'll gain one prosperity and gain the points that come with that and it's important to note that fully operational means that all worker slots are filled so even though this company would be operational during production it is not fully operational for scoring anyway lastly we have endgame scoring and like others you want the policies to go your way meaning straight down the middle you'll also gain points for leftover resources in your storage as well as for every 15 bucks in your wallet and that's all for the average folks let's wrap up the classes by talking about the [Music] state everyone knows that we literally run this country so it's pretty obvious that we're the most important ones here and since we've got a lot going on that works completely differently from the other players let's take a closer look on the State Board we see these three legitimacy tracks and these are our primary focus see a government only functions by Ascent of the people so in order to be successful they need to see you as legitimate and at the start of the game they barely trust you but we'll be moving these around soon enough of course you also have your own agenda in mind and these agenda cards will determine what those are for you so draw one and place it face up nearby and then you got the other usual stuff but the rest of what you're working with is on the main board you've got some money in the treasury and you've also got event cards so draw two of these face up some aren't suitable for the first round so if you draw one of those Shuffle it back in and keep drawing until you find one that works and lastly place the health welfare tile on the Public Services area and keep the education welfare nearby now before we get started with your turn let's talk about some of the main differences between you and the others first off you've got these public companies three to start out and if the policies change you can put out some more but all of them produce services not Goods when they produce the resources will go to the public services area and the limits for each are equal to how much your companies can produce plus six while your companies never produce food or luxuries some action cards will grant them to you or help you earn them in other ways and if that happens they'll go in your board and the middle and working-class players can buy them from you for the listed price you also have two kinds of influence the influence that your companies make which is called media influence and is purchasable by other players but can't be spent by you and the influence you earn through any other means which is your personal influence you can spend that and the other players can't touch it now let's talk about legitimacy this is the most important thing for you for a lot of reasons but primarily because it's how you gain points all players have action cards with legitimacy symbols on them and whenever one of these cards it's played for its effect you will have to change your legitimacy accordingly legitimacy can also be be affected by your actions the event cards and if someone buys healthare or education from you if the corresponding policies have made these Services free for every three resources they take you'll gain one legitimacy and if the policies are at A or B you'll also gain a point regardless of how much they buy and lastly you have legitimacy tokens which are harder to earn but if you do you immediately gain one in the matching track and will gain a legitimacy income during the scoring phase and one more thing to talk about is benefits sometimes you'll be told to provide something to another player this doesn't mean you give it to them directly instead you place it in their state benefits box and then during their turn they can take everything in the Box as a free action which also earns you a point there are a few caveats though when you place anything into a benefits area if there was already something in that box you discard it before adding the new stuff also you'll usually be pulling the resources from your treasury or the Public Services area but you do have the option of buying resources as part of the action you were taking this can come from other players or the foreign market and when buying from the foreign market you can ignore tariffs the only catch is that if you buy from a player it can't be the player that you're providing to all right now that we know a bit more about how the government works let's talk about your term during the prep phase you'll pay interest on loans reveal two new event cards reveal a new political agenda and draw to seven cards easy enough let's move on to actions you can propose a bill like the other players but the state inter interacts with voting a little differently we'll talk more about that in the next section one of the most common actions you'll be taking is the event action you'll choose an event on the board and perform the task described these will always include a choice and usually affects one or more of the other players you'll then gain the reward listed and discard the event these may ask you to spend resources or money now unlike when providing them you are limited to what you already have available and will simply put the tokens back in the supply and if an effect tells you to spend up to a certain amount you have to spend something zero is not an option if you can't afford the costs you can't take the action next up let's sell to the foreign market but you can only sell food and luxuries you don't have a way to get those at the start of the game but it might happen through action cards as with how the capitalist and middle-class players do it you can only perform each listed transaction once another quick action you can do is meeting with a players MP which simply involves you giving a player two of your personal influence and bumping up their legitimacy Track by one on the flip side you can squeeze some extra taxes out of everyone gaining 10 bucks from every player however you'll also lose one legitimacy from the two classes that had the lowest legitimacy score with you choosing if they're all tied you can't take this action if any of those trackers are at one and if any players don't have enough cash they'll have to take out a loan lastly you can go campaigning which turns three media influence into personal influence and you only have two free actions so you can pay off a loan or just wages same as how the others do it during production you'll produce goods and services paying wages as we've seen and gaining the resources into your public services other players might buy food from you if you have it and then they'll pay their taxes to you so make sure all that money is going to your Treasury and not the supply next up you have the elections phase which you will preside over I'll talk about elections in the next section but before you reveal the outcomes for the proposed bills you will gain personal influence based on the lowest marker in your influence tracks so here you gain two influence during scoring you'll first look at your remaining event cards if there are any and apply the penalties for not dealing with them before discarding the card then you'll score for your legitimacy tracks by finding the two lowest ones and gaining points for the sum of their values after which you'll reduce all trackers by half rounded up if you have any legitimacy tokens you'll add their bonus here and lastly you'll score based on your current political agenda gaining one point for each policy matching your desired position then discarding the card and at the end of the game you'll gain points based on any leftover resources in your storages not including your personal influence and a point for every 30 bucks in the treasury so with that we've learned how all four different classes play but there are a couple more things to talk about so let's wrap things up with everyone's favorite holiday discussion politics every one of those costumes was uncomfortably warm anyway we're almost done but there are three big things to talk talk about we need to cover what all the policies do how elections work and IMF Intervention which is what happens when the government takes out too many loans let's start with policies because we've actually seen at least some of the effects of each of them already but there are a few more details to cover especially with the first one fiscal policy this determines how many public sector jobs there are as well as how many loans it takes for the state to collapse this has to do with the IMF as you can see but we'll talk about that a little later the main thing here is the public sector so at the start of the game there are only three jobs but when this advances that will open up a few new ones if you don't have someone playing the state you simply build the next row of jobs and you'll take out the cost of these companies from the treasury which will be 60 bucks then if there are workers available to fill the jobs do so with the middle class deciding where to go first which means they might take all the jobs if they can and want to if there aren't enough workers to fill all of them whoever controls the workers can choose which available positions to fill and if the policy moves back to the right those companies are sold just like a private company with the proceeds going back to the treasury and the workers going to unemployment even if they were committed now if you're playing with a state player they'll get to choose which companies open and close when the policy moves as well as which workers to fill the jobs with moving on we have the labor market as we've mentioned this is one/ half of the income tax table that the middle and workingclass cares about and it also sets the minimum wage for each job meaning that the position position on this policy determines the lowest a wage can be set to also whenever this policy changes each player owning a company May immediately change their wages and this can be higher or lower but must still meet the minimum if playing without a state player all public Company wages will always be set to the minimum next up is taxation which sets the other half of the income tax table but it also affects the tax multiplier which is important for the middle and capitalist classes there's a base value set by the policy and then the next two policies Healthcare and education will also add to that but the value that they add is multiplied by 2 one or zero depending on this position so here we have taxation at a healthcare at B and education at C taxation starts us out at three and we're going to double what the other two policies give us Healthcare is a plus one so now it's plus two and education doesn't change the multiplier at all so we've ended up at five the healthcare and ation policies work the same way as each other so let's cover them both next each will determine the cost of purchasing their services from the state as well as increasing the tax burden as we've seen when playing with a state player you'll also place this tile reminding you to give them a point every time you buy from them when the matching policy is at A or B and again if the services are free for every three you take in an action the state player will gain one legitimacy with your class also whenever either of these policies change the capitalist and middle- class players can immediately change the prices on their matching service moving on to the vertical policies we first got foreign trade which sets the tariffs for imports and the number of deals the capitalist player draws during preparation when the policy changes move the Tariff marker to match but do not draw or discard any deals also the middle and capitalist classes can immediately change the prices on their food and luxuries and lastly we have immigration which tells you how many immigration cards the working and middle classes draw during the prep phase and as a reminder each player draws separately and ignores the workers of the other class then places the card on the bottom of the deck okay so those are all the policies but they're probably going to change during the election so let's talk about that next see we've got this election bag with cubes from every different class in them and as we've talked about you can add cubes to the bag during the action phase by exerting political pressure during the election phase you'll hold a vote for each proposed bill on the policies board but if no bills have been proposed this phase is is completely skipped if there's at least one bill you'll start the phase by refilling the bag the working class adds cubes equal to half its population rounded up capitalists add cubes equal to half of its operational companies rounded up and the middle class uses whichever those two criteria would give them a higher result the state doesn't have any voting cubes so they add nothing but they gain personal influence based on their lowest legitimacy like we talked about earlier also if playing a two-player game with no middle class you add five yellow cubes anyway next you need to carry out an election for each proposed Bill going from lowest to highest first starting with the working class and going clockwise each player says whether they are for or against the proposed bill you cannot abstain and if you propose the bill you must vote in favor after stating your preference five cubes are drawn from the bag and placed in the corresponding result but we're not done yet players are then given the opportunity to affect the outcome by spending influence each player announces how much they have then secretly places any amount of influence in their hand and you all reveal simultaneously these cubes also go into the results area and count as an additional vote for your side if the in favor section has as many or more votes than against the bill passes you move the marker all policy related changes occur and most importantly the player who proposed The Bill gets three points and all the players who approved of the bill and contributed at least one vote get one point if it didn't pass the bill marker is simply returned and no one scores anything and really quickly in a two-player game if you draw middle class cubes those count towards the five you draw but are discarded without any other effect now after the vote is done discard all influence cubes and then discard all vote cubes from The Winning Side only all votes from the losing side are returned to the bag then move on to the next policy up for election and keep going until you voted on every Bill if you ever run out of voting cubes in the bag and still need to draw perform the re fill bag step twice and then continue and with the elections done there's just one last thing to talk about everyone loves it that's right it's total Financial meltdown as I think we've all suspected the thing that's going to be the downfall of society is loan debt and as a reminder anytime you need to pay for something and can't you must take on a loan and gain 50 bucks and that's the only way you can take out loans you can't just do it to buy yourself something pretty and at the end of the game loans will lose you points and this hits the capitalist player a little bit who must lose five points per loan but the other players could lose a lot more first they get a chance to pay off loans for 55 bucks each if you can't afford that you can pay increments of $5 but for each five you still owe that's one point lost meaning that each loan could net you a maximum of-1 points now the state will be forced to take on loans as well whether you're playing with a state player or not and their concerns aren't just at the end of the game during the production phase one of the steps is to for IMF intervention the IMF or international monetary fund is a real thing and it will bail out the government if it goes too far into debt but there will be some pretty big consequences when you check IMF you see if the state has more loans than the current policy allows if it's at C that means that even a single loan the state can't pay off will trigger this and when IMF comes up each excess loan can be removed for 55 bucks but if you can't afford that the IMF intervenes when when this happens first discard all proposed bills and give one influence to players for each bill that they had proposed then set the policies to this specific chart and apply all effects that come from the changes however you should place a marker on where the labor market policy was because the middle and workingclass players will pay income tax based on the previous labor market not the current labor market after all the changes have applied the state pays off its loans or it pays as much as it can and discards any remaining loans finally the state player reduces each legitimacy marker to half their current value rounded up IMF intervention is a big deal and will have a tremendous impact on the game so if you're playing State and you see that it's on the horizon the designers encourage you to let people know that it might happen after IMF intervention you'll keep playing the game possibly wrecked by the consequences and again after five rounds the game ends you'll do some endgame scoring and whoever has the most points wins if there's a tie whichever tied player has the most most policies matching their agenda wins if it's still tied and the state is one of the Tide players they win otherwise it comes down to whoever has the most voting cubes in the bag and if that's tied as well you've managed to prove that people from all walks of life can in fact get along and share the Victory and with that you now know all you need to know to play hegemony but did you know that there are expansions to this game I've got a second video teaching those expansions which include a solo mode and automated players and my patreon backers can watch that video right now it'll go live for everyone else in a month or so but if you like Early Access or if you want to vote on what games I teach or just support the channel head on over to the patreon and pledge a few bucks either way thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: RTFM

Views: 14,609

Keywords: board, game, rules, explanation, learn, to, play, Shea, Parker, RTFM, gaming, rtfm, rftmshow, show, tabletop, gamer, boardgame, games, tutorial, boardgames, how to play, hejemony, hedgemony, hegemoney, hagemony, root, asymmetric, asymmetry, strategy, economic

Id: jPsGOS3ka1c

Length: 48min 31sec (2911 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024