Billioniares & Guillotines
Lecture & board game session with Max Haiven
Join writer and game designer Max Haiven to learn how to play his newest board game Billionaires & Guillotines. Before the game, he gives the talk “We’re being played” on fascist billionaires, the gamification of capitalism, and how to resist.
Program
18:00 Lecture: We’re being played: Fascist billionaires and the gamification of capitalism (and resistance).
19:30 – 21:30 board game play session: Billionaires & Guillotines – The billionaire simulator you and your friends have been waiting for!
[The event is held in englisch –
Das Event findet in englischer Sprache statt.]
18:00 lecture
We’re being played: Fascist billionaires and the gamification of capitalism (and resistance)
The “gamification” of our digital lives has radically transformed sex and relationships, education and learning, health and fitness, wellness and psychology, money and finance, politics and protest. But behind the promises to make our lives easier, fun, and more connected is a grim corporate infrastructure, concentrated in the hands of game-inspired billionaires for whom most of us are little more than disposable NPCs (non-player characters). How have games shaped 21st century capitalism and its ideologies of violence? How are social movements using games to fight back?
19:30
board game session: Billionaires & Guillotines
In Billionaires & Guillotines, 2-5 players take on the roles of rival plutocrats, competing to accumulate the wealth of the world before their actions trigger a revolution and they all lose… a lot more than their assets. Will you play the media baron or the property speculator? The aristocrat or the tech overlord? Whoever you play, the aim is to acquire five extravagant assets prized by the super-rich (a mega yacht, a celebrity spouse, art masterpieces, and more!) and prevent your opponents from achieving their dreams. But watch out! As you gobble up ever more resources, crises cascade out of control: wildfires and floods, pandemics and doomsday cults… Will you collaborate to put down the rebellions, or escape into your luxury bunker?
Played in under 90 minutes, the game is fun for all sorts of players, even those who usually don’t like board games.
Collaborators
Dr. Max Haiven is a writer, game designer, and educator at the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University. He is the author of many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism (MIT 2026).
Max Haiven
https://maxhaiven.com/The event is hosted by the Club of What If – A club of shared imagination and roleplaying games, in cooperation with NODE Forum for Digital Arts and basis.