Information and materials for hosts
For the Billionaires & Guillotines Winter/Spring 2026 tour
Thanks so much for hosting me on my tour!
Play sessions
Here is some boilerplate you can use to advertise play sessions of Billionaires & Guillotines.
Join designer Max Haiven to learn how to play the board game Billionaires & Guillotines. It’s the billionaire simulator you and your friends have been waiting for!
In Billionaires & Guillotines, 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 gobble up ever more resources, crises cascade out of control: wildfires and floods, pandemics and doomsday cults… Will you collaborate to put down the rebellions, or escape into your luxury bunker?
Played in under 90-minutes, the game is fun for all sorts of players, even those who usually don’t like board games.
Academic talks
Here are titles and abstracts for talks geared towards academic audiences.
The rise of the playgrom: Fascistic violence in gamed capitalism
Ten years ago, under the banner of #gamergate, a decentralized swarm of thousands of vengeful video games fans orchestrated a vicious campaign of harassment targeting people (mostly women) they accused of being part of a feminist conspiracy to undermine their beloved hobby. In 2019, a 28-year old white supremacist massacred 51 people at a mosque and Islamic cultural centre in Christchurch NZ, which he staged and livestreamed as if it were a “first-person shooter” video game, earning praise and gamified “points” in real time from online fans. These are two illustrative instances of what I call the playgrom (play + pogrom): a form of “fun” fascistic mob violence that takes shape within a digitally-mediated and gamified society. While many are eager to blame games themselves, I argue we should see these as resonant with a form of 21st century fascism that emerges within (and offers a false remedy to) the contradictions of a forms of gamed capitalism: not simply a capitalism driven by the games and gamification industries, but one that feels, to many, like a compulsory but unwinnable game.
The rule of the cheats: The players and the played in 21st century reactionary politics
The extreme right has rocketed to success around the world based on a shared formula: blaming the pain and frustration of life under capitalism not on the system, but on convenient “others” who they accuse of cheating: migrants cheating the border; welfare and benfits claimants cheating the system; trans people cheating at sports; “elites” cheating democracy. And yet how is that so many of those who champion these reactionary narratives are themselves cheats, and often proudly so, guilty of fraud, corruption and other malfeasance in politics and business? In a ruthless and nihilistic capitalist society, where we are all forced to recast ourselves as competitive players in a winner-take-all game, the belligerent cheat become a powerful political archetype, an antihero who can lead a dangerous politics of revenge. After taking up politicians, manosphere and tradwife influencers and professional wrestlers, this presentation concludes with a meditation on the political category of fairness and its limits.
What are antifascist games? Political imaginaries and collective agency beyond Nazisploitation
There are plenty of digital and tabletop games where you get to kill Nazis, but as satisfying as that may be, it will do nothing to challenge the rise of new forms of fascism in our gamified times. In this presentation, we outline three perspectives on fascism and use them to analyze a range of recent and historical games that dwell with (anti)fascist themes. The best among them challenge fascism as at once an mutating ideology, a pervasive tendency within capitalism, and a way of being. While the mainstream games industry has typically promoted games that have implicitly fascistic values, games are uniquely poised to help us imagine and create an antifascist life based on radical forms of individual and collective agency.
Public talks
Here are titles and brief descriptions for talks geared towards a general audience
Games: The dangerous medium of 21st century politics
Some 2-billion people a day play a commercial game and the gaming industry is bigger than film, music and publishing combined. Mainstream and fringe political parties and movements around the world are using (or hijacking) games and creating “gamified” experiences with dangerous consequences. As newspapers were to the 19th century and as radio and TV were to the 20th, so too are games to our 21st century political realities. What are the consequences? What makes games unique is the way they seduce our sense of agency in a world where many feel disempowered and helpless. How is this being used, for good and for ill?
We’re being played: Fascist billionaires and the gamification of capitalism (and resistance)
Put away your phone for a moment. The “gamification” of our digital lives has radically transformed sex and relationships , education and learning, health and fitness, wellness and psychology, money and finance, politics and protest. But behind the promises to make our lives easier, fun and more connected is a grim corporate infrastructure, concentrated in the hands of game-inspired billionaires for whom most of us are little more than disposable NPCs (non-player characters). How have games shaped 21st century capitalism and its ideologies of violence? How are social movements using games to fight back?
Agency, conviviality, rehearsal and fun: What community organizers must learn from games
Movements for justice have typically ignored games. We couldn’t have been more foolish. In this presentation, movement organizer and educator (and game designer) Max Haiven shows how corporate power and the far-right have seized upon games, and why we must take them seriously as an important part of our struggles. Games allow us to bring diverse people together to experiment with new forms of cooperation, organization and living together. In an age of sorrows and pain, fun is political as never before. We explore how organizers are using games (digital, tabletop, role-playing and more) and why the revolution will be gamified.
Workshops
Here are some descriptions of the game-making workshops I offer.
Workshops are typically between 2-3+ hours in length, for groups of up to 16.
For community groups
Games are a major part of all our lives. Whether we play with children or animals, play games on our phones, or gather with friends for board games, structured play is crucial to how to learn, love and relax. In this workshop we’ll learn how community organizers for collective liberation around the world are using games as facilitation tools, convivial gathering-points and even protest tactics. We’ll design simple games to help us think about how we can find cooperative agency, possibility and imagination in hard times.
No experience is necessary, and you don’t need to know anything about games. This is a workshop for people who are organizing in their neighbourhoods, among workers, or in other ways.
This workshop can be customized for groups and coalitions struggling with particular challenges. In the past, I’ve done these workshops for ecological activists facing repression, for community organizers countering the far-right, and for researchers trying to understand the lure of conspiracy theories.
For academic groups
Games are platforms where players find agency within the complex systems of which they are a part. For this reason, they are excellent tools for scholars in the social sciences and humanities to revisit key questions, conundrums and ideas in their research. While often games are simply imagines as a fun means to reach non-academic audiences, their real value is the way the experience of game design helps us think more clearly, expansively and rigorously about our research questions and methods.
In this workshop, Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination Dr. Max Haiven showcases the best (and some of the worst) examples of research-led games and the features that can make gmae-making for research a success. The hands-one part of this workshop is tailored to the group in question and may lead to the creation and testing of a board game prototype or other game (role-playing, etc).
Dr. Haiven’s games include the recently published Billionaires & Guillotines (based on Marxist political economy) and the upcoming Comrade Orca (about more-than human solidarity)
Bios
Photos below
Short bio
Dr. Max Haiven is a writer, game designer, and educator and the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University. He is author of many books, including the forthcoming The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism (MIT 2026).
Medium bio
Dr. Max Haiven is a writer, game designer, and educator and the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University, where he directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab. His board game Billionaires & Guillotines is published by Pluto Press and his next book, The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism, will be published by MIT. He has written many books and articles and created podcasts on themes including art, finance, imagination, globalization, conspiracies, fascism, and grassroots activism. He is the editor of the VAGABONDS series of short, provocative books and, as part of Sense & Solidarity he offers workshops on strategy and communication for social movements.
Long bio
Max Haiven is a propagandist for an impossible country. He uses writing, teaching, games, podcasts and other techniques for the radical imagination. He works as an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University.
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 writing has been published widely for both academic and non-academic readers on topics including the imagination, (anti-)capitalism, social movements, art and financialization.
Max has produced several research-driven podcasts about themes including financialization and anxiety (2020-21), conspiracy theories and cultures (2021-22), Amazon and science fiction (2023-4), capitalism and play (2024), social movements and psychology (2024) and games and (anti)fascism (2025).
He also makes and thinks about games. He is currently working on a book for The MIT Press titled The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines, to be published by Pluto Press in late 2025.
He led the Worker as Futurist Project, which recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024) and a podcast, The Workers’ Speculative Society.
Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press whose latest titles include Nicholas Mirzoeff’s To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 and Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak
He teaches in Lakehead University‘s English, Social Justice Studies and Media Studies programs and also directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements, produces podcasts and builds infrastructure for the next generation of transformative public intellectuals.
Images and photographs
All the images provided here are free to use. Information on photographer, when relevant, is offered in the captions and image metadata.
...of Max
...of Billionaires & Guillotines
...of people playing Billionaires & Guillotines
Coming soon!
Logistics and finances
To access financial and logistical information, please use this link: https://drive.proton.me/urls/WMZSGQDTTG#azMrGjgdwlCh
You’ll need to email me to get the password at billionairesandguillotines at pm.me