Sometimes, we play longer games at our tabletop group! Revenge of the Dictators is a medium length (that’s longer for us, for certain), strategy game where you are looking to convince the president of the United States to let you take over the world. Starting at a conference for dictators, the players get bored there and start a race across North America to hopefully take over the world.
It starts with assigning everyone a passport and a character card. These characters each have different abilities, although they didn’t feel very balanced to me. For example, one person had a higher starting hand than everyone else along with an additional ability, whereas my ability completely relied on me drawing a card with a specific symbol and using it — which I never did. The passports for our characters were neat though, I did like how they looked generally and how they mimicked real passports.
Each player starts with a hand of three, generally, along with four little cards that show what targets you have on the board. These targets are locations that you want to go to and defuse the nuclear bomb, which will help you become the dictator. On your turn, you get one movement via road (there are some areas that have dotted lines, meaning you need to fly), along with three actions. Actions can be used to draw more cards, with a hand limit of five, or to spend a card based on the number on them.
Revenge of the Dictators then has everyone moving towards their targets, playing cards that mess with others, and trying to get to the president. A lot of the cards are really harsh to other players; we had one person take over another player’s turn, for example. There are also cards that can be pulled that increase the Deathcon, which causes disasters and makes the map more challenging to navigate.
A lot of thinking and strategy needs to be used to play, especially as getting to your nuclear locations, or even to the president, isn’t the end of the game, you also need to roll a die and get the correct (often hard to roll) number. If you secure your nuclear areas, you will get to roll for less to convince the president, but at the same time, going to the president you will then need to draw a specific card to see if he is even in office, and he most likely isn’t.
That’s sort of the issue with Revenge of the Dictators — a lot of it is down to luck and card draws, despite it feeling like it is meant to be a strategy game. It feels like it shouldn’t be so luck based! The game also came with stickers on all of the meeples and tokens, but these have peeled back and won’t stick properly, which feels really odd.
Revenge of the Dictators is an interesting game, with a lot of drama as you try to take over the world.
You can purchase the game on their Kickstarter.
