Realishpolitik

Politik is one of those games I wish were more fantastical, which isn’t a ding on the game but rather a reflection of the slow-motion dystopia we have come to inhabit. Designed over the course of more than a decade by Jonathan Klabunde and Lukas Peregrine, Politik is the story of nation-states that use ideologies as cudgels, wage shadow wars over the airwaves, and spend lives like discontinued currencies. When its pretentious old men play at running the world, we are the counters they shove around the board. And they aren’t even bothering to hide it anymore. Perhaps more relevantly, it’s also a mashup of new and old ideas, a flawed but enthralling piece that’s tough to learn but rewarding once the work has been put in. Our influence spreads across the globe. Set in a world not unlike ours, Politik begins sometime after a collapse — capitalized, articled, and adjectived as The Great Collapse — has riven the political scene into a near-total vacuum of little states with hardly any…