Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory rules refresher

Read the refresher

You are chasing Victory Points, and after five rounds the most points wins. Each role gets there a different way: the Working Class and Middle Class raise Prosperity by healing, educating and entertaining their people, the Capitalist Class piles up Capital, and the State scores Legitimacy from the three Classes. Everyone does it by playing Action cards, moving Workers into jobs, and fighting over the seven Policies on the Politics table.

A reminder on setup. At two players you use only Capitalist and Working Class, at three you add Middle Class, at four you add the State. Return the Public Companies whose diamonds do not match your player count, then put three starting Public Companies face up in the first row and the rest face down in the second and third rows. The four starting Capitalist Companies and, at three or four players, the two starting Middle Class Companies go into the Private Sector, each with a wage marker on Level 2. Policy markers go on the spaces shown in the setup diagram, which means Fiscal Policy starts at C with only three Public Companies open, Taxation at A, Welfare Health at B and Welfare Education at C. Tax Multiplier starts on 5, the State Treasury holds 120, and Public Services get five Health, five Education and three Influence at two players, or six, six and four at three or four. Put eight cubes of each of the three colours into the bag, including Middle Class cubes even when nobody plays them. Every player shuffles their own Action deck and draws seven cards. Working and Middle Class start with ten Workers, Prosperity at zero, and place their starting Workers standing in the listed Companies plus a few in the Unemployed area after drawing Immigration cards. The Capitalist starts with 120 in Revenue, a few goods in storage with price markers set, the Free Trade Zone, and a Market of four revealed Company cards. The Middle Class Market holds three.

Each round has five phases: Preparation, Action, Production, Elections, Scoring. Preparation is skipped in round one. Otherwise everyone pays five per Loan as interest, draws five cards back up to seven, Working and Middle Class drop Prosperity and gain new Workers, the Capitalist refreshes its Market and the Business Deal and Export cards, and the State reveals two Events and a new Political Agenda. In the Action phase play goes Working Class, Middle Class, Capitalist Class, State, and each player takes five turns. On a turn you choose one card from hand and either play it for its effect or discard it to take one of your Basic Actions. You may also take one Free Action, before or after. If a card has a requirement, usually a Policy, and it is not met, you can only discard it for a Basic Action. After five turns everyone keeps two cards for next round. Production reverses the order and runs step by step: Produce Goods and Services, Cover Needs, Check IMF, then Pay Taxes. Then Elections, then Scoring.

Let me flesh out the core mechanisms.

Proposing Bills is how Policies move. Place one of your three Bill markers on a section directly adjacent to the current one, and you cannot propose on a Policy that already has a marker. Right after proposing you may spend 1 Influence to call an Immediate Vote and resolve it on the spot. Otherwise everything resolves in the Elections phase.

Assigning Workers: you may move up to three of your own Workers from anywhere on the board. A Company is all filled or empty, never partly staffed, and skilled slots take only that industry's colour. Newly assigned Workers are turned on their side and are committed, meaning they cannot be reassigned, their wage cannot be lowered, and the Company cannot be sold. They stand back up once they produce. The Working Class may also place skilled Workers in Trade Unions, but only with at least four other Workers already employed in that industry.

Buying goods and services: choose one single resource and buy it from up to two sources, taking up to your Population from each. Prices come from the seller's board, from the Import area plus any Foreign Trade tariffs paid to the State, or from the Welfare Policies for Health and Education. The Middle Class may also buy from itself, moving goods from Storage to Goods and Services for free, and that counts as one of the two sources.

Prosperity is the Working and Middle Class engine. Spending Health, Education or Luxury equal to your Population is a Free Action that gives 1 Prosperity, and each step forward scores Victory Points equal to the new Prosperity number. Healthcare also gives 2 bonus points and a new unskilled Worker; Education upgrades a Worker to a skilled one.

The Capitalist builds Companies from its Market, up to twelve, setting a wage level that respects the Labor Market Policy, and may assign matching unemployed Workers of a single Class immediately. It sells to the Foreign Market using the current Export card, where each listed transaction may be used only once per action, and makes Business Deals for cheap bulk goods, paying tariffs unless the goods go into the Free Trade Zone, which can only ever be sold abroad. The Middle Class builds up to eight smaller Companies run by its own Workers, and gains 1 point per Export transaction it makes.

In Production, Companies pay the listed wage once, not per Worker, then produce into storage, with excess above a storage limit lost. Working and Middle Class must then cover Food equal to their Population, buying it if needed and taking a Loan if they cannot pay. Then the IMF check, then taxes: Income Tax per Population or per outside Company from the Labor Market and Taxation cross-table, and Employment Tax equal to operational Companies times the Tax Multiplier. All tax money goes into the State Treasury.

Elections happen only if a Bill was proposed. First each Class adds cubes to the bag, roughly half its Population or half its operational Companies rounded up, and the State instead gains Influence based on its lowest Legitimacy. Then resolve each Policy in order from one upwards. Everyone states in favour or against, no abstaining, the proposer is in favour automatically. Draw five cubes, then all players simultaneously reveal Influence spent, each Influence being an extra vote for the side they already chose. Ties go to In Favor, so the Bill passes. The proposer scores 3 points, and every other player who contributed at least one vote on the winning side scores 1. Discard the winning cubes and all spent Influence, return the losing cubes to the bag, and apply the Policy change before the next election.

In the Scoring phase each role scores its own way: Working Class takes 2 points per Trade Union, the Capitalist moves Revenue into Capital and scores from the Wealth table plus 3 points per space the Wealth marker advances, the Middle Class may gain a free Prosperity if it has more fully operational Companies than its Prosperity value, and the State applies unresolved Event penalties, scores the sum of its two lowest Legitimacy values, halves all three tracks rounded up, adds Legitimacy token bonuses, then scores its Political Agenda.

After the fifth round the game ends. Everyone except the Capitalist may pay off Loans at 55 each, losing 1 point for every 5 they cannot cover; the Capitalist simply loses 5 points per Loan. Then each role scores its end-game bonus. The three Classes score for Policies in their own ideology among Policies one to five, on a steepening scale from 1 point for one Policy up to 18 for all five, or 15 for the Middle Class; the State gets nothing for Policies here. The Capitalist Class, the Middle Class and the State score points for leftover goods in storage. Leftover money scores one per ten for the Working Class capped at fifteen, one per fifteen for the Middle Class, and one per thirty in the Treasury for the State. Highest total wins. If tied, count how many of Policies one to five sit in the tied player's own section, A for Working, B for Middle, C for Capitalist, or matching the Agenda card for the State, and the most wins. If still tied and the State is among them, the State wins. Otherwise the most Voting cubes wins, and if still tied the tied players share the victory.

A turn, played out

Round 3, Action phase, and you are the Working Class on your second turn. Your Population is 6, your Prosperity sits at 3, you hold exactly 6 Health bought last turn, and you have 2 Influence. Start with your Free Action. You spend all 6 Health, matching your Population, and Prosperity steps up to 4. That scores 4 points, the new number. Because it was Healthcare, you also take 2 bonus points and a new unskilled Worker, so 6 points in all. Now the card. Nothing in hand fits this moment, so you discard one for the Basic Action to propose a Bill. Welfare Education sits at C, and nobody has a marker on it yet, so you place a Bill marker on B, the section directly next to C. You spend 1 Influence to call an Immediate Vote rather than wait for Elections. You are in favour automatically, the Middle Class declares in favour, and the Capitalist declares against. Five cubes come out of the bag: 2 Working Class, 1 Middle Class and 2 Capitalist. That is 3 for, 2 against. Then everyone reveals Influence at once. The Capitalist shows 2, pushing against to 4. You show your last 1, bringing in favour to 4. The Middle Class shows nothing. A tie goes to In Favor, so the Bill passes. You score 3 as proposer, and the Middle Class scores 1 because its cube voted on the winning side. The 2 Working and 1 Middle cube are discarded along with all revealed Influence, the 2 Capitalist cubes go back into the bag, and Welfare Education moves to B right now. You are out of Influence, and play passes to the Middle Class.