Last weekend, on a windy, cloudy day in London, I probably ruined a promising date by asking if we could go to The Bishops Avenue to shoot a video of me explaining Billionaires & Guillotines, the board game that’s now finally available for pre-order from Pluto Press.
Please help us meet our funding goal by Friday!
The Bishops Avenue is reportedly the most expensive street of London, with perhaps the greatest concentration of billionaires anywhere in the world. You can’t see it in the attached video, but we were being watched the whole time by men in several very expensive-looking vans. Were they police? Drivers? Or snatch squads, looking to kidnap us for deranged experiments to attach our brains to the internet (honestly, what could be worse? Have you seen the internet these days?)
Luckily, we made it out alive to bring you…
The launch of the Billionaires & Guillotines kickstarter campaign
Yes indeed! Please head over to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/plutopress/billionaires-and-guillotines to preorder your copy today!
For those subscribers somehow not in the loop (in other words, not reading my emails… gee, thanks.):
In Billionaires & Guillotines, 2-5 players take on the role of plutocrats vying to grab the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution where they all lose… a lot more than their assets.
Will you play the aristocrat or the war profiteer? The tech overlord or the property speculator? You will try to build a private space program, marry (and divorce) a celebrity spouse and start your own scam charity in this raucous game for aspiring billionaires and their enemies.
As the revolution approaches, the billionaires have one chance to cooperate to delay their downfall… but otherwise, may the best (or worst) tycoon win.
Billionaires & Guillotines starts out easy and you can add complexity and more features once you’re ready, making it a great game for both casual and more experiences players. It takes about an hour to learn and play the first time.
It’s the first board game produced by the legendary radical publishing house Pluto Press in cooperation with designer Max Haiven, author of many books including Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts.
You can learn all about the game over at my website: https://maxhaiven.com/billionaires-and-guillotines/
And please join us on the evening of Sunday, April 13 for the London game launch with me, Danny Dorling and Meghna Jayanth!
Help us beat the algorithm and antagonize Elon
We are putting all our energies into securing 500 backers to preorder in the first 72 hours of the campaign (or sell £20k in stuff) so that we can basically game the algo and see the game “go viral” thanks to Kickstarter and its affiliates promotional engine.
Why? Because, of course, I hope to become a billionaire and use my wealth to connect people’s brains to the internet and live large on The Bishops Avenue.
No… in fact, we are gunning for a quick campaign acceleration in order to get the game trending so we can troll Elon Musk (who, yes, curiously resebles the Tech Overlord character in Billionaires & Guillotines. Must be a coincidence).
Anyway, now is the time to order your copy (or copies!) of the game to help us break that barrier. And also:
If we make our 72-hour challenge, we’ll a include 3D stand-up disaster bunker and guillotine in every kit!
You can also order both the Billionaires & Guillotines game and our first expansion, Reform or Revolution, at a deep discount.
You’ll get a whopping 50% off your next order from Pluto Books.
You can add-in either of two book bundles from Pluto at a steep discount.
You can also add a Billionaires & Guillotines tote bag to your order.
Still not convinced?
That’s normal… for a cheap killjoy.
More seriously, if you’re unsure, you can
Download and print-at-home a free version of the game
Watch the tutorial video so see how the game works
Do you hate games?
Well, I bet someone in your life loves games and would love to get this as a gift.
Also, Billionaires & Guillotines is designed to start easy and fun, and then you can add complexity when all players feel ready.
Just buy it for the art, by Berlin’s Amanda Priebe.
Are you an educator?
Why not consider order a game or several games to play with your class?
Billionaires & Guillotines can take under an hour and can stimulate interesting conversations about wealth, greed, inequality, capitalism, crisis and the politics and purpose of games (especially important for students who’ve been raised on games. By the way, here’s an article I wrote on the subject).
Later this summer, I’ll be releasing a teaching guide to accompany Billionaires & Guillotines including discussion questions, suggested supplimentary readings and exercises for secondary and post-secondary students, as well as for activist and public workshops.
Are you broke?
Sorry to hear that! but you could still help by…
Sharing the game on social media or forwarding this email. I can’t tell you how important this is: with a game like this, word of mouth is really essential. Thank you!
Hassle your (least) favourite journalist or podcaster and ask them to review the game.
Ask your local or university library to order a copy. Most libraries these days have a games section and it would help us get this to others. Here is an information sheet for them.
Buy clothing and other cool things from our webshop and pretend like you’ve played the game.
Other things
Antifascist Study Workshop
We’ve extended until April 7 the deadline for applications to join Sarah Stein Lubrano and me in Palermo from May 25-29 for a “study workshop” on Fascist Games, Antifascist Awakenings.
New interview and writing
I had a great conversation with Ivan Txaparro of Resonar’s radio show el Barrio Global on “The Radical Imagination and Creative Activism.” You can listen here.
My article “All Games are Political” was recently published in Jacobin.
I’ll be speaking on April 8 at London’s Goldsmiths University at the launch of the Finance Aesthetics collection, to which I contributed a chapter on “sacrifice.”
I’ll be co-hosting a workshop in Lonon on April 10 on the theme “The Truth? In This Economy?!”
What is the antifascist game?
On July 11, we will be gathering radical game-makers, -thinkers and -players in London for a symposium on the question “What is the Antifascist Game?” You can learn more here.
Organized in conjunction with the 2025 edition of the Games Transformed festival.
