What is Evil Corp?

The last time a boardgame was launched which reflected the dominant economic and political mores of it's time, we got Monopoly.

Today, we get Evil Corp.

Designed as both game and social commentary, it's incredibly fun to play, and by the end you might think differently about the role of technology in shaping our cultures and society.

Who made it?

Evil Corp is a boardgame by Allix Harrison-D'Arcy and Alfie Dennen, with art direction and graphic design from Michal Ozorowski and illustrations by Liam Brazier.

Alfie and Allix both have a 20 year background in web technology, having founded and run start-ups, organised massive city-wide Art projects and engaged millions of people through activism.

Basically, we give a shit, and this game is a really fun romp whilst hopefully also being a subversive artefact to make people think a bit more about how much power the CEO's of our world now have over us.

Why Did WE Make It?

We called our company Newbie Games, after the first British Publisher of Elizabeth Magie's Landlord's Game.

The Landlord's game was a realty and taxation game, specifically intended to espouse the tenets of Georgism and how coming together in social co-operatives could offset the negative social consequences of the monopolistic economic trends emerging under tycoons like JD Rockefeller. 

On its Wikipedia page it is cited as the "inspiration" for Monopoly, which is just incredibly ironic, considering Monopoly celebrates the landlord and taxation as a means of leverage even to bankruptcy.

Since Magie created The Landlord's game in 1904 our world has embraced the toxic effects of Monopolism, and the ceding of power from Governments to economic entities.

We are now right at the apex of that trend with companies like Facebook and Google (Alphabet), Apple and Microsoft are technology behemoths so deeply embedded in the world they are basically locked in and will still be there when we get to the future unless we actually do something about it.

...What does that mean for Mike in 2046 who earns 40k a year? He gets a message from his insurance company:

Each of our player characters has a plan of optimism and hope that they tell the world but behind the scenes they are well aware that to achieve their goals they will have to sacrifice many people along the way.

So, our world is weird and only getting weirder, with no guarantee of security in the long term. Our institutions and system of Democracy in the West has been unarguably corrupted, and the tech companies have become both the amoral sea sucking up the minutia of our human experience, and the true infrastructure we are now reliant on.

Our game exists as a fun and satirical comment on the weirdness of the world today, and after playing we hope that it has some small impact on how people think about the imbalance of power that CEO Billionaires represent.