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.

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 ꩲvictory 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🍸.

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 f🐎ar gone to be fixed from within. Some people would let that discourage them, but for others, it’s nothing but an intriguing challe🐼nge.

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!

Set in the same universe as Resistance, Coup conce🍸rns 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&rsquꦑo;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 gಌame 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.

For mo༒re board game🌞s set in sci-fi worlds, check out this list.

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.

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 seღcret society reminiscꦫent 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 agains💛t each other to make the biggest contribution to world domination, and one of them will ultimately triumph by collecting the most points.

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 wit𝔍hin the🥃 span of this short game.

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 Great𒈔 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 R&oaᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚcute;żalski did an amazing job rendering this alternate version of history෴, and his illustrations make every element of this game feel wonderfully alive.

For more games with amazing art an🌺d il👍lustrations, 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.