I spend a lot of time looking at crowdfunding campaigns. I can’t really help it, they pop up in my social media feeds, or my friends send me the ones they like so we can ooh and ahh over them together. But I don’t back very many crowdfunding campaigns at the end of the day. I’ve backed about a dozen projects total. They’re always exciting, and I love receiving them when the game is finally released, but I’m just never willing to drop the cash for a new game years in advance when there are so many games deserving of my money on store shelves right now.

So when someone in my board game group pulls the trigger and backs a game, I’m more than ecstatic to fulfill my obligations, and be the person to sit down and play with their new toy with them. Today’s new game is World Order, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou, with art by Angga Satriohadi and Miłosz Wojtasik, and published by Hegemonic Project Games in 2026 (this is one of those moments where I’m very glad I work in a written medium, because my anglophone face would have butchered those names).

In World Order, players control the four great powers in the mid-2010’s as the once-unrivaled influence of the United States is beginning to wane. China, Russia, and the EU all step up to posture themselves and the next great super power.

What a nice clean board

Before we really get underway, I just have to admit something. I’m kind of a dummy. Like, I read the news sometimes, I read books, but I’m never terribly invested in international politics until it actually starts to affect my daily life. Scrutinizing economic dependencies while balancing domestic projects and expanding military spending is not something I really want to dedicate very much of my brain space to. So right off the bat I have to admit that the theme of World Order doesn’t exactly light my world on fire.

To play World Order, each player takes control of one of the four factions, and draws 6 cards from their unique deck. Each turn they’ll play one card, which will allow them to do the actions on that card. The base deck generally just lets you do the actions straight, while upgraded cards will let you do multiple actions on your turn, or modify how you might preform that action.

This player aid is double sided

The actions largely break down into 4 categories. The diplomatic actions let you improve relations with other countries, letting you spend a resource to take the associated card into your play area, allowing you to invest or build a military base in that region. You can engage with a region, again, spending diplomacy to place an influence cube and an engage token into that region, both of which will be important later.

The military actions let you move tanks from your board into any regions within your zone of interest, with each of the four players having their own zones of interest, overlapping with one another like a Venn Diagram of violence. Building a base has you placing a single token onto one of your allied countries, and if the region that country is located in is not within your zone of influnce, then you now have the option of moving your tanks into that region. It’s worth mentioning here that at the end of each of the 6 rounds, each player checks each of their zones of interest, and for every player who has a larger military presence in that region, they lose 2 victory points.

The economic actions let you import and export your resources, getting cash for your exports and netting resources you can’t easily produce yourself. Each of your allied countries will have a list of resources they wish to import, and some will have resources they can export, expanding your ability to move goods around your player board. Investing in an allied country on the other hand, has you dropping wads of cash, to place a token on that country that will earn you a paltry sum back each round. Most countries seemed to have an ROI of 4 or 5 rounds, making this action less attractive the further the game went on. But investing does allow you to place an influence in a region, which can earn a lot of points throughout the game.

Each player has different starting productions and limits on each of their tracks.

Last are the domestic actions. Getting a growth card is like researching a new technology in every 4X game you’ve ever played. Pay the resources to get the card, now you have a persistent ability for the rest of the game. The other domestic action is to produce. If you produce one of the three primary resources, you just gain as many of those resource as your production allows. While the secondary resource types require that you pay some resources to get a resource, and your production limit being how many times you’re allowed to make that exchange.

Each round lets each player take 4 turns. At the end of the round, the cards remaining in your hand would give you some resources and some research points, which lets you take upgraded action cards from the card market and place them on top of your draw deck. I loved this little wrinkle, letting you prepare for the upcoming round by buying a clutch card, unlike a lot of deck builder games where the exciting new card you buy is thrown right into the trash and then shuffled in, perhaps taking whole rounds before the card shows its ugly mug again.

After research, everyone’s investments pay out, then you have a chance to spend your cell phone resource to increase your nations prosperity, and then you resolve threat, which I explained in the military actions section. At the end of the 3rd and 6th round, you also score the regions.

Each region has a number of spots for players to play influence cubes, and those spots are separated by a line. All the spots above the line are permanent influence spots, once a cube goes on that spot, it’ll never move. The spots below are temporary spots. If all the temporary spots are full, then one gets added in on the end of the line and the oldest cube gets bumped off the track. The reason why you want influence in all of these regions is because each region will bestow a hefty number of points to the majority influence holders.

At the end of the 6th round, and second scoring, the player with the most points is the winner!

All of the systems and actions in World Order feed into each other really nicely. Taking allied countries gives you avenues to spread influence for points, or it might let you roll tanks into regions where you’d otherwise be barred from moving. Nothing feels overpowered or obvious, but everything feels considered. In fact, “considered” is probably the word that kept coming to mind throughout the entire experience. Everything about World Order feels like the designers put an enormous amount of time, effort, and care into making it. It feels extremely well playtested. Everything is finely balanced.

I quite like the asymmetry in World Order. Each faction has different strengths, but every player is still fundamentally playing the same game. It’s one of my biggest frustrations with wildly asymmetric games like Root, where it often feels like all four players are playing completely different games and interacting with one another via happenstance. It makes it difficult to understand what anyone is capable of doing until you become extremely familiar with the system. Here, everyone can do the same things. Sure, Russia might produce more resources, China might generate more technology and consumer goods, and Europe starts with more allied countries, but at the end of the day we’re all still pursuing the same goals using the same action framework. That makes it much easier to parse a board state and understand what’s happening around the table.

If I have something to complain about, World Order did take us a very long time to play. We started around 7:30 and wrapped up close to 12:30. A five-hour game is not something I’m really keen to bring out very often, especially when our game night falls on a Wednesday. This isn’t the kind of game I want to sink my teeth into and then immediately try to function at work the next morning.

I also felt that after the third round, when we completed the first scoring phase, the second half of the game largely felt similar to the first. There was a point where I wondered whether we could have simply stopped there and still had a satisfying experience. But I also understand why the game is as long as it is. In our game, the United States was almost twenty points ahead of everyone else after the first scoring phase. in the second half of the game, however, the rest of us had begun chipping away at America’s economic and military strongholds. Round by round, we slowly eroded that lead until the once-dominant superpower was left a shell of its former glory. If World Order only lasted three rounds, then the United States would have cruised to victory. The six-round structure, combined with every other player effectively working together to contain the leader, creates a much more tense and dynamic experience.

Aside from the criticism that it’s probably too long, I find it surprisingly difficult to criticize much else about World Order. It feels very well designed. All of the edge cases feel like they’ve been considered. Every faction’s powers feel appropriately balanced and tuned. Everything seems to exist for a reason. I could criticize my own skills and strategies! I let myself get blinded by emotion, sinking way more resources that what was reasonable, just to deny another player two points, or to hold onto a region that would give me two points. I can sense there’s a really high skill ceiling at World Order, but at this stage, playing well still feels opaque to me.

That feeling of a really well designed and considered game reminds me of when I played Arcs. Every single level exists for a reason, and I could see why things worked the way they did. But unlike Arcs, World Order felt more sensical to me. Arcs often felt like wrangling an arcane system of trick-taking while wearing handcuffs. World Order felt more like reacting to shifting world politics and adapting to changing circumstances.

So if you have any love for the theme, if world politics excites you, and if the idea of spending four or five hours with your friends jostling for global supremacy sounds appealing, then World Order is an achievement. I’d recommend it without reservation.

Maybe I should have gave up on Europe. Maybe.