Billionaires and Guillotines, a game for aspiring plutocrats and their enemies
Print it at home, play it with your boss, tell me how it goes.
I made a fun and hopefully insightful game about some of the contradictions of capitalism.
This fall, I’ll be working with my publisher Pluto Books to run a crowdfunding campaign to manufacture it.
But meanwhile, this summer, I’ve released a free print-at-home version you can play with your friends and family.
I’d very much appreciate it if you played it and sent me feedback!
Billionaires and Guillotines is a raucous and moderately challenging competitive game for 2-5 players. New players can learn in under an hour. Experienced players can finish a game in less than 30-minutes.
You take on the roles of billionaires, competing to win by claiming 🏆PRIZES before a 🚩REVOLUTION happens and every billionaire loses (almost).
By using cards to ⬇️BID at five different 💹MARKETS, the billionaires can try and grab the five 🏆PRIZEs they need.
But hidden in the deck are ⚡️CRISIS cards that penalize players and unleash 👊🏾REBELS.
Players use 💰BRIBES to change 🏛️GOVERNMENT POLICY to make them richer, or to have the government 💸AUDIT their opponent.
When the going gets tough, the billionaires can trigger a ❗PANIC! phase, where they can cooperate to try and distract the public or put down the rebellion before the 💀GUILLOTINE gets wheeled out and all the billionaires lose (more than their assets).
As the players gain experience, each billionaire gets assigned a secret 🎭ROLE that gives them special powers.
To download the printable game and the manual, please visit https://ourmove.itch.io/billionaires-and-guillotines
If you do play Billionaires and Guillotines, could you send me some feedback? You could…
Write me an email, send me a voice note or record a video.
Please tell me how long it took you to learn and play the game and what happened (“it took us about 20-minutes to get the hang of the game, but then things started moving quickly. For most of the game, Karl was in the lead, but near the end Rosa used her gangster power to steal his private island and it looked like she would win. But then Che triggered the revolution and Slavoj won as the celebrity at 48mins in.”)
Was the game fun? Was it fun for everyone? If not, why?
What was frustrating or confusing?
Any suggestions, either for changes to the game or ways we can publicize it?
Billionaires and Guillotines will be the first game either I or Pluto have published, so your feedback is especially welcome! If it’s successful, we’re looking forward to collaborating on a new initiative, Pluto Games, which will combine that press’s 50+ year history of publishing radical books with the rising popularity of board, card and other analog games.
A huge thanks not only to the fine folks at Pluto, but also to Stella Lawson and Sam Cousin who worked as graduate assistants to me over the past two years and did invaluable and fascinating research on the politics and political economy of games that helped get this game this far.
I’ve turned to games in recent years as a way of exploring and publicizing some of my ongoing research into capitalism. You can read a little about my approach in this recent piece in ephemera: “Why play games with conspiracies? A reflection on the board game CLUE-ANON.”
I’m also currently working on a book tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism.
You can also hear more about games and capitalism on the 10-episode podcast The Exploits of Play, produced with Halle Frost of Weird Economies.
Speaking of which, let me give a plug to Yoni Goldstein, who is crowdfunding now for his new game Chicago ‘68, an “open-ended historical conflict game that pits revolutionary spectacle against civil order during the Democratic National Convention riots of 1968.”
And a huge congrats to Matt Leacock (designer of the legendary Pandemic games) and Matteo Menapace for winning the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres prize at the fabled Spiel des Jahres for their phenomenal cooperative game Daybreak, “a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change that presents a hopeful vision of the near future, where you get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to save the planet.”
Unfortunately, the Spiel des Jahres brass took issue with Matteo’s shirt, which expressed solidarity with Palestine, and has now banned him from future events and slandered him publicly. This is an utter travesty, although one sadly typical of the infuriating and despicable climate of censorship, character assassination and repression in Germany today. The Spiel des Jahres owe Matteo an apology. If they cared so much about racism maybe they should have thought twice before giving so many prizes to games that celebrate Orientalism and colonialism (which, by the way, you can learn about in Mary Flanagan’s co-authored new book Playing Oppression, or in the podcast interview we did with her for The Exploits of Play…)
A few exciting things are on the horizon this autumn.
The World After Amazon
In early September, the Worker as Futurist team (myself, Xenia Benivolski, Sarah Olutola and Graeme Webb) will launch The World After Amazon, a collection of nine short stories from rank-and-file Amazon workers that emerged from a series of workshops we ran in 2023. The book, which also includes essays from us editors and amazingin art from Amanda Priebe, will be released in print (at cost) and also online, as a PDF, as an audiobook and as a podcast (all free).
We are also holding several launch events: in London on September 15, in Berlin on September 26, and in Toronto and New York in the latter half of October. Stay tuned!
We could use your help! If you know of publications, podcasts, individuals or groups that might be interested in The World After Amazon, please let me know! We’re publishing this book in-house, so we need all the publicity help we can get!
Meanwhile, you ca learn more about the project in a recent academic article in Triple-C or in a shorter, pithier contribution to Jacobin, or listen to a lecture I gave at lasyt year’s Historical Materialism conference in London. and you can also listen to The Workers’ Speculative Society, a podcast we recorded to accompany the project, featuring interviews with wonderful champions of the radical imagination including Robin D. G. Kelley, Charmaine Chua and Cory Doctorow.
Sense & Solidarity
Sense & Solidarity is the banner under which Sarah Stein Lubrano (who recently successfully defended her dissertation at Oxford - congrats Dr. Stein Lubrano!) offer workshops and other materials for social movements that bring together her expertise on the psychology of politics and my expetise on the radical imagination.
Many of you were kind enough to contribute to our crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, and we promise we’re hard at work producing What Do We Want?, a podcast about the wild, weird and wonderful things that bring movements together…and drive them apart! Our episodes focus on themes including heartbreak, conspiracy, fantasy, shame and pleasure. We’re on track to release our first of six episodes in September and culminate November with a live recording event on the afternoon of November 16 at London’s Kairos.
That event is a public-facing part of Changing Hearts & Minds a 3.5-day workshop (November 14-17) for activists, artists and other troublemakers, also at London’s Kairos. This follows on our very successful Mayday Movement Ant-Academy in Berlin in May of this year.
As part of that event, I’ll also be giving a public lecture on the evening of November 14: “What Can We Learn from the Radical Imagination?”
In late 2023 and early 2024, Sarah and I are taking our show on the road in the UK and North America. We’d love to come to your community to give talks or workshops. Please get in touch if you might be interested. Because our activities are supported by RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab we can work with a wide range of budgets.
Capitalism and Sacrifice
It has been a pleasure to work with the wonderful Stefan Christoff on a short series of three episodes on the theme of capitalism and sacrifice for his long-running radio program and podcast Free City Radio. The series was inspired by conversations Stefan and I had about my recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire.
In the first episode, released on August 18, Stefan talks with author and activist Nick Partyka about “capitalism’s sacrifice of humanity.” In the next two forthcoming episodes Stefan speaks to Keren Wang about his book "An Atlas of Ritual Sacrifice in Late-Capitalism" and to me about “palm oil, prisoners and capitalism today.”
