Join us for a session where we will play and discuss the new board game Billionaires & Guillotines with designer and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (Lakehead University) Max Haiven.
Billionaires & Guillotines is the billionaire simulator you and your friends have been waiting for! In this board game, 2-5 players will 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 compete to gobble up ever more resources, crises cascade out of control: wildfires and floods, pandemics and doomsday cults… At the final moment, will you collaborate to put down the rebellions, or escape into your luxury bunker?
Billionaires & Guillotines is the first game published by Pluto Press, one of the UK's oldest radical publishing houses.
To learn more, visit https://billionairesandguillotines.com/
Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018).
His book The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism will be published by The MIT Press in 2026 and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines is published by Pluto Press. He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024).
Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab(RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.