TDG: World Order

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the discriminating gamer. You know, the other day I was wondering if it would hurt if I pulled out a nose hair. Judging by my wife's reaction, it certainly did. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to go ahead and take a look at World Order from Hegemonic Project Games.

>> [music] >> In World Order from Hegemonic Project Games, what if four players take on the roles of the various world powers, the European Union, Russia, China, and the United States, as they vie for supremacy on this kooky kooky globe? Now, there's a lot of great videos out there on gameplay. I'm not really going to teach you the game here.

I'm just going to tell you some of the basics of gameplay and then tell you what I think. So, you have the game board, which is a map of the world with various locations attached to it and places where you can place cards that will be associated with those regions, different countries that are located in those regions.

You're going to go ahead and set some of those up. Some of those countries up. You're also going to each take your own player board. Your player board is going to have a lot of different information. It's going to have kind of a focus area where you can choose what kind of a focus, domestic, diplomatic, military focus you want to take for that round.

You're going to have kind of a track to track the various resources. You have, of course, you know, like like like wheat and oil and ore, these sorts of things. But, you also have like consumer goods that is going to be a major resource in the game. You're also going to have kind of your diplomatic level right there as well.

You'll also take a couple of your tanks. These are kind of your military power and you're going to place them on your player board as well. And they'll be useful later in the game. Now, the first thing you're going to do every round is have kind of a preparation phase. And here what you're going to do is you're going to kind of produce the resources that you um you're going to look at the resource level for your various resources and you will produce those resources.

You'll gain those resources at that time. This is the time, too, where you will choose one of those focus areas. Do you want to focus on your domestic resources and your production? Do you want to focus on diplomacy to be able to help you better conduct negotiations and whatnot with other countries?

Or do you want to go for military and have more military might on the board? You'll also determine turn order for the round at this time. Essentially, you're looking at the player with the fewest victory points. They will go ahead and get to decide at you know, what order they want to go in. And you'll just go in reverse victory point order to determine exactly who will go when.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, next you have the action phase. Now, during the action phase, you're going to go ahead and do all sorts of fun and kooky things as you and your friends take turns going around taking various actions. Now, one of the first and most basic things you can do is play a strategic asset card.

So, you have your cards, you have a I believe six cards. You start with a deck of I think 12, if I remember correctly, and then you start with six. As the game progresses, you'll have opportunities to get more cards. You can go ahead and play a card and resolve the action. A lot of time it may ask you to spend some of your resources or do other things around the board, but you go ahead and you can resolve that card.

Now, you can also try to improve diplomatic relations, meaning you can spend diplomatic points from your your resource track in order to essentially claim various countries along the board, essentially bring them over to your side, make them allied with you. So, you can go ahead and you can place them in front of you.

You can also, if you have other countries of that region that you already control, you can tap them, you can exhaust them in order to get a discount on bringing that card over to your side. Now, there's another diplomatic action you can take. You can actually engage with a region. So, if you have a card from a specific region, you can go ahead and spend the diplomacy points needed, depending on what that region is, to place one of your cubes in that region.

Now, these different regions have several spaces where you can place your cubes. Some of them, once they're there, they're permanently there and you get kind of, you know, an immediate you'll get some immediate points for it. But, there's also kind of a temporary space and you may get bigger points here in the short run.

But, what's going to happen is over the course of the game, you may be you may slide off of this track. So, that can be helpful in the short term, but if you're looking to for the long-term play, you may want to take those lower point permanent places, so you know you can dominate it. Now, as an economic action, you can engage in trade.

Essentially, you can trade with other countries on the board. You're you're going to look at a kind of a chart, which indicates exactly kind of what goes for, you know, how how much you get for what. You're going to go ahead and engage in some of that trade in order to kind of produce those things you can't naturally produce in abundance.

Another economic action you can do is invest. Essentially, you can invest in any one of your allied countries. So, what you do here is, of course, you pay the cost associated with it. You can go ahead and kind of put an investment marker on it. It's going to pay dividends in the long run. You'll get more back over time.

But, critically, too, this action again allows you to place a cube in one of those those regions' boxes. As a military action, you can build a base. Essentially, you can build a base in any allied country that's a country you have the card. You can go ahead and that means that you will always have kind of a military presence in that region.

For a domestic action, you can take a growth card. Now, there are essentially five levels of growth card. There's I think two columns in each. And the first time you take a growth card, you have to take a level one, but then you can take a level two, three, etc. once you've got them. And these will give you immediate points, but they'll also allow you to kind of streamline and make more effective your own government.

Now, another action you can take is to produce, a domestic action. So, you can go ahead, you can use that to produce more of your resources on your player board. Now, after every player has taken four actions, you're done with the action phase and then you move to the research phase. Now, as you're into the research phase, this is where you can actually purchase more cards from the kind of card market.

You can go ahead, you can take those cards and add them to your deck. Next, you're going to go ahead and you're actually going to make money for all of the investments that you have. They will pay dividends at this point. You'll make money for that. And you can spend money to kind of move up your infrastructure, essentially by by spending consumer goods, you can actually move up on your infrastructure to improve it and get you more victory points.

Next, you have to resolve threat. Now, threat is a consequence of military action. So, essentially, if you have you know, your military power in a region, you're going to look and see if you've got more than one of your opponents. If you have more threat than an opponent, then that opponent will essentially lose two victory points.

The exception to that is Europe and the United States with NATO, they don't do that. They're cool. They they don't threaten each other militarily. But, other players will take hits in their victory points if they allow their opponents to have more military threat than they have defense in that region.

So, that's basically how a round goes. Essentially, there are six rounds in the game, but on the third round and on the sixth round, you will have scoring. Now, basically, what you'll do during scoring is you'll look at all the regions on the board. And every region that has all of its permanent boxes filled with with players' influence, that will score.

You'll actually gain one VP for each influence cube you have there. And then, whoever's got the most VP will win first place, they'll get the most points. Second, second. Third, third. If there is a tie, you look at who has the most military available in that region. You're also going to do things like look at who has the most money, who has the most military threat on the board, who has the most allied countries.

Those things will score you points as well. Players will also score points depending on if they didn't use any of their strategic assets during the game. And at the end of the sixth game round, whoever's got the most points wins. World Order. We'll get back to the review in just a moment. I want to take a minute to ask you to check out my other channel, that is Cody Carlson PhD, where we talk about history, books on history, military history.

I even post some of my lectures for my classes on there. Please check that out. Please subscribe to that channel. And now, back to the review. All right, ladies and gentlemen, World Order. There is a ton more to this game. I am just hitting the very very basic ideas here, the very basic concepts. This is a pretty dense game in many ways.

Um this game, of course, is brought to us from the same people that brought us Hegemony, which was all kind of about society and different economic interests, different classes, and how they all functioned in a in a society. And this game, of course, takes us step back and out and you are the different countries around the world, the different powers around the world.

In the game, you can tell is is it was was well researched. I believe they actually had some academics on board that actually really consulted with this to try to get this idea of kind of international relations. So, it is pretty solid thematically. The game, I think, really shines in that sense of being presenting to you what it is like on the world stage, what what these kind of negotiations and these kinds of the economics are like and the role of military even though you don't have a war how important kind of a military presence is.

Uh it does all of these things very well and it juggles them all very very well. The game has this kind of again again deck building component to it which is interesting. I'm always a big fan of deck building games. It's not really the focus of the game. You don't feel like it's really all about the deck building.

There's only six phases so it's not like it's going to be a major thing here but it is kind of fun and interesting to get some of these more powerful cards during the game and be able to play those for you know for various advantages from from time to time. I always like games that can incorporate deck building in fun and unusual ways and I think this one does it and as I say it does it very very well.

And it's hard it really is an area control game because you're trying to get those regions, right? You're trying to get the most cubes in the regions. And the system where you've got the kind of the the the the permanent areas and then you've got these kind of rotating areas where you can actually kick people out and you can actually take steps to try to rearrange so you can stay in there longer.

It's very cool because whoever got the most cubes is going to win. So you could not theoretically not even have any in the permanent and dominate the temporary and and win score that region. Probably not likely but it's but it could happen. So >> [clears throat] >> it's that's really fundamentally what the game is about is trying to get that.

But how you get there is very very interesting. And how you are again trying to get it's a little asymmetrical because the different players have different kind of resources resource levels and stuff and that's interesting. You've even got kind of like special objective cards. I didn't mention that you get at the beginning of the game for each player that so they they're chasing kind of those those objectives as well.

Uh you got like the consumer goods. Like if you're not very good at consumer goods you're not going to really be able to get those points unless you trade for them, you know. So there's there's there's some really interesting ways the asymmetry works here that that kind of again plays into the theme of the game.

Like for instance in the game you're seeing here I was Russia meaning I was very resource heavy, right? Russia's Russia is made up of extractable wealth but I didn't have a lot of consumer goods. That's not where I was where I was coming from. So so that kind of hurt me. Uh but but but it was still it was a challenge and it was fun.

I definitely had some advantages. I could definitely I would definitely make money cuz I could trade on those resources oil and ore and those things. So I I I was I was good in that sense but it it kind of [clears throat] would you know trip me up in in in other areas. But I like that. I like the asymmetry and the thematic ideas of the game.

Now I'll tell you I'll tell you right now we all had a lot of fun with this game. I think I think World Order is is really really a good game and I'm going to kind of comment more on that in a minute but I want to talk a little bit about this and Hegemony. This game is is I'll tell you right now it's more accessible than Hegemony was.

I felt this game was easier to get into easier to learn easier to play. And that was really cool. I really liked how you know when I played Hegemony for the first time and subsequently it it really you there's a lot to learn. And I must confess with you I'm still not 100% sure I've always played that game right.

I always feel like I am missing a rule or there's something not quite right. But I've always had fun with it. And that's the thing. World Order is a fun game that I really enjoy. But if I'm honest as as as as deeper and more complex as Hegemony was I think I preferred Hegemony of the two. It wasn't because it was deeper and more complex.

I felt like when I played Hegemony there was a real role playing aspect there. You know if [clears throat] you're playing the workers you know you're like you know screw corporate America. And if you're the um you know if if you're the corporations you're like ungrateful workers. And you really get into that and and that was a lot of fun.

And I felt like here with World Order there was a level of the role playing but it wasn't as as intense and I'm a sucker for that kind of a thing. So all things being equal I I think Hegemony is probably the better game here at least in my opinion. But the flip side is World Order which is still a very good game is more accessible.

I feel like I I would not play this game with non-gamers or people just getting into the hobby. This is not a gateway game at all. But I feel like maybe somebody who's played a few games maybe they're ready for something a little bit more challenging. I I I could see bringing out World Order. I still would bring out Hegemony.

I I would just play Hegemony with seasoned gamers period the end. I would not bring in somebody who who was kind of on the fence about games for that one. So this one's more streamlined. It plays a little quicker too. On the whole it's I really appreciated that from this game. I was a little afraid it was going to be as heavy as Hegemony and it's not.

But getting back to just looking at World Order. It's just fun. It's great. I love games that that have this kind of contemporary historical feel if that's a term. You know I played a few in the last few years and um you know I played I was it New Cold War was one of them I played. Europe Divided was one I played.

And this one to me so far is my favorite of that genre. It's really it's really fun to kind of see this kind of dynamic of the different countries play out. And I'll tell you too you know I'm I I've got a PhD in in history. I'm not an uneducated person and I still feel like I was learning from this game.

Like I was getting some concepts from this game and things were becoming clearer in my mind about how countries relate to each other. And that was pretty cool and that's always fun when you can learn something in a very fun game, right? Uh all told I enjoyed this game a lot. The area control stuff is a lot of fun the way it works here.

The deck building is interesting here. Um I I love the military threat stuff because you're sweating that. You want to make sure you can defend these regions and you're not going to lose points. It's just it's really fun. Really liked World Order. Fun game. I I have some of the expansions for it. I haven't played those yet.

I'm hoping to play those soon because I I really dig this game. Uh on the Cody scale I'm going to go ahead I'm going to give World Order right now as it stands an eight on the Cody scale. Eight out of 10. I think maybe if I play those expansions it could go up but it's a very fun game. Thank you once again for joining us today on the Discriminating Gamer.

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And then what's the state doing? I'll vote for it. Yes this is awesome. Screw capitalists. >> [laughter] >> Finally oppressed workers they got voted down. What's it going to be? What's it going to be? What's it GOING TO BE? OH YOU PIECE OF CRAP.