What is it we like about dystopia? We shouldn’t like it; by definition, it is the worst possible vision of society, but for some reason, we continue to find it alluring. Perhaps it’s because it reveals something about the future of our own society. Perhaps it’s simply a great source of conflict. Either way, we find ourselves coming back to stories about hellish societies and oppressive social orders in every medium of storytelling, including board games.
If you’re looking to explore a dystopian society in a board gaming context, this list has you covered. Each of these games takes place in some kind of dystopian world, and most of them are all about the flaws of the society they depict.
Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia
Do the best you may with this rotten society
This worker placement and resource management game casts players as middle-ranked bureaucrats within a dystopian society and tasks them with managing affairs within it as well as they can. They must advance their own interests and those of their recruits’ factions in order to gain the points they need to win.
Set in a dystopia reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Euphoria casts the player as a middle-manager in its bureaucracy, and tasks them with using its worker placement and card game mechanics to advance the interests of this world’s various factions in the hopes of acquiring the victory points they need to win.
This is an intricate game, though still a surprisingly approachable one. It’s best experienced with a large group of players who will be able to keep play moving fast and ensure that all of its different elements come into play.
The Resistance
A minimalist approach to finding a traitor
This simple game is designed to create a semi-minimalist social deduction experience by facilitating those elements with less elaborate mechanics than other games in the genre. The result is a very approachable game that serves as a great introduction to the genre.
Resistance groups don’t tend to do very well in dystopian settings. Unless their efforts are the main plot of a story, they’re usually there just to show that the society is too far gone to be fixed from within. Some people would let that discourage them, but for others, it’s nothing but an intriguing challenge.
Resistance allows you to take on that challenge. This game casts the majority of its players as members of a resistance group working against a dystopian government. However, there are spies among them, and they’re going to need to identify those spies if they want to succeed in their missions without being sabotaged. This is a simple, elegant game, which keeps its focus on the social deduction mechanics rather than nesting them within something more complicated, like Dead of Winter or Bang!
Coup
What cards do you really have?
Set in the same dystopian world as Resistance, Coup takes the focus off of freedom fighters and onto the nobles they’re rebelling against as these aristocrats scheme to eliminate and outcompete one another.
Set in the same universe as Resistance, Coup concerns the intrigues of that society’s nobility, and tasks its players with using the abilities on the cards they draw to outmaneuver and eliminate their opponents. Different cards have different abilities. You only have two of the possible five, and you’re theoretically supposed to use the abilities on those cards. However, your cards are face down, and you’re free to lie about which ones you have. You’ll be punished if you’re called out, but if someone calls you out and is wrong, they’ll be punished instead.
This game is reminiscent of the Dune universe, with an advanced spacefaring society that is socially stuck in the Middle Ages. If that aesthetic appeals to you, or if you’re just looking for a well-crafted bluffing game that plays fast, this is the game for you.
Formore board games set in sci-fi worlds, check out this list.
Gale Force Nine Dune Board Game
Play in a classic sci-fi universe
This strategic board game brings the intrigues of the Dune galaxy’s noble houses to your table, allowing you to play as one of them and pursue its unique objectives.
Speaking of the Dune universe, here’s one of the many games that takes place within it. Whether Dune is in fact a work of dystopian fiction is a matter of opinion and impassioned nerd debate. The early books arguably (we stress,arguably) don’t focus as much as they could on what’s wrong with the society they take place in. However, it’s extremely hard to look at Dune’s setting and deny that, for a person unfortunate enough to live in it, it would essentially be a dystopia.
This game allows you to play through the intrigues of Dune’s various noble houses, and other factions, as they vie for control of Arrakis. Each house has different abilities and different victory conditions, making for a very dynamic play experience.
Deep State: New World Order
Taking over the world? Of course!
This worker placement card game follows the intrigues of a secret society as it attempts to take over the world, with its members, the players, each trying to make the biggest contribution to that effort.
While the other games on this list take place in worlds that were designed to be fictional, this game takes place in a version of the world some regard as entirely real. This worker placement card game casts players as members of a secret society reminiscent of the Illuminati of western conspiracy folklore, and tasks them with taking over the world by covertly infiltrating powerful institutions such as governments, mass media, banks, and corporations.
Even though all players are part of the same secret society, they’re competing against each other to make the biggest contribution to world domination, and one of them will ultimately triumph by collecting the most points.
Crossfire
Ideal for large groups of players
Somehow even more minimalistic than Resistance, Crossfire manages to distill the essence of hidden identity gaming down to a single element: giving people role cards and making them argue about who has what roles.
Ideal for large groups at parties, this game is quick and simple. Every player is assigned a hidden role and given imperfect information about the roles of the people close to them, and then they spend just three minutes arguing about who is what before deciding who to shoot. Assassins want to shoot the VIP, agents want to shoot assassins, and no one wants to accidentally shoot a bystander.
Where Resistance built a hidden identity experience on bare-bones mechanics, this one somehow manages to build a working game out of even less. The dystopian flavor is light—the futuristic setting simply being a justification for why these people are killing each other—but it still makes for an interesting roleplay element with the right group, if you can find the time for roleplay within the span of this short game.
Scythe
The beautifully rendered aftermath of a terrible war
This complex game uses beautiful art to portray an alternate version of Europe in the aftermath of the Great War, with various European powers fighting for dominance in the resulting world, each hoping to fill the power vacuum left by the departure of the mysterious “factory” that supplied all of these strange weapons.
War can turn any world into a dystopia, and so it has in this dieselpunk variation on the real world. This game casts each player as a European power in the aftermath of the Great War, and charges them with recovering and taking advantage of the situation to become the next European power.
This game has well-crafted mechanics for resource management and combat—it turns out the degree to which the war is over is somewhat debatable—but the best thing about it is its art. Illustrator Jakub Różalski did an amazing job rendering this alternate version of history, and his illustrations make every element of this game feel wonderfully alive.
For moregames with amazing art and illustrations, check out this list.
FAQ
What is the setting of a board game?
The concept of a setting has an interesting relationship with board gaming. Setting provides context and flavor for the actions being taken in a board game. On some level, any given mechanic could exist completely devoid of that context, but humans inherently want to have a sense of why they’re doing the things they’re doing, even if those things and that ‘why’ are fictional. The setting of a game gives players that context, and makes the actions they take feel less generic and more flavorful.
