Class Struggle is a board game for two to six players, designed by Professor

Bertell Ollman Bertell Ollman (born April 30, 1935, in Milwaukee) is a professor of politics at New York University. He teaches both dialectical methodology and socialist theory. He is the author of several academic works relating to Marxist theory. Ollman att ...

. It was published in 1978 by

Avalon Hill Avalon Hill Games Inc. is a game company that publishes wargames and strategic board games. It has also published miniature wargaming rules, role-playing games and sports simulations. It is a subsidiary of Hasbro, and operates under the company' ...

. The game was intended to teach players about the politics of

Marxism Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

and was loosely compared to the board game ''

Monopoly A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek el, μόνος, mónos, single, alone, label=none and el, πωλεῖν, pōleîn, to sell, label=none), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situati ...

''.

Gameplay

The game pits Workers against Capitalists, represented by hammers and top hats respectively. Players receive their class by a roll of the "genetic" dice. Players move around a board following dice rolls and draw "Chance" cards which either advantage or disadvantage them.

Publication history

In the year of its release, Bertell Ollman was interviewed about the game by print and TV news journalists. Critics of the game considered it to be "subversive" and lobbied some stores to remove the product from their shelves, largely unsuccessfully. After attracting mainstream media attention during the Cold War, the game went on to sell approximately 230,000 copies. In 2014, Keith Plocek wrote that the objectives of the game were to "avoid

nuclear war Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a theoretical military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear w ...

and win the

revolution In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due ...

". Plocek claims that the game "disappeared" in 1994. A Reddit post circa 2013 piqued limited renewed interest in the game among socialists.

Reviews

*'' Jeux & Stratégie'' #23 (as "Lutte des Classes")

References

Avalon Hill games Board games introduced in 1978 Educational board games Marxism {{Board-game-stub