Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
SHASN: AZADI is a box full of gimmicks. Those gimmicks are equal parts corny and high-minded, clever and ham-fisted. The area majority mechanism that is used to tally points is, frankly, pedestrian and simplistic. But, in spite of it all, the game is ambitious, and I admire games that are high-minded, even when that highmindedness has flaws.
Hegemony this ain’t
And that’s a good thing. AZADI is trying for something explicitly political—it is about the construction of political blocs more than it is about forcing players to accept the roles and bounds of its simulation. From where I sit, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory’s conception of political economy and class is at best misguided and ignorant. AZADI doesn’t presume to gamify and fragment class struggle, casting players as some fake-o thinktank concept of the “middle class” and the “state.” Instead, players are a political ideologue constructing their own ideology out of what will best get them into the big chair. More on this in a moment.
The way you win AZADI is by forming majorities. In the version that I’m reviewing, you have a modular dual-layered map with holes in it for player pieces. Each map tile has a crosshair hole (volatile area) and a number reading something like 11/21. Players get points for having majorities, which in this example, means they have at least 11 of their pieces occupying the map tile. If someone gets a majority, they flip the majority-forming pieces over to a symbol side, and each piece is 1 point. Those are the only points players can earn. The player pieces represent voters, and you get them by spending four different types of resource on cards in a card market which give you a number of voter pieces to place in a given zone.
There’s a few more rules governing how you can manipulate voters and move them around the map, but that’s most of the game—putting out wooden pieces, trying to get majorities. Those resources I mentioned, that’s gimmick no.1.
Putting my literature degree to use
On a player’s turn, the player to their right opens a little box of secrecy filled with cards and asks a question to the active player. The questions range from silly to serious, covering everything from gene therapy to the role of women in a socialist economy. They’re dependent on the scenario you’ve chosen, so you’ll get different questions depending on which revolution you’ve chosen to play within. An example question might be something like “do we exile our revolutionaries after the war?”
Each card has two answers. Each answer corresponds with one of four ideologies (Supremo, Capitalist, Showstopper, and Idealist), and each answer gives the active player the card and 2 resources that correspond with the ideology (Idealist answers gain yellow Trust resources, for example) plus 1 resource that could be interpreted as co-dependent. So the options above might be something like “Yes, who says they won’t be revolutionary again!?” or “No, we should honor them and integrate them into a post-revolutionary world,” which would likely be Supremo (Red) and Idealist (Yellow) respectively.
The schtick is that the active player doesn’t get to know what ideology corresponds with which answer, they only get to hear the answers. So, you try to pick which answer will give you the card and resources that you want based on your interpretation of the answers and how they fit the ideologies. The Supremo is a fascist, the Capitalist wants money, the Showstopper wants attention, and the Idealist wants “peace in our time.”
Many times it is obvious which answer corresponds to which ideology, but often it isn’t. I’ve seen people mischaracterize this mechanic as roleplaying or a sort of party-game-provacateur sort of thing, but it’s not really that. You get an extra resource for every two cards of an ideology, so if you pile up a bunch of one kind or two of each of the four, you’ll end up with quite a bit of in-game currency. Plus, there are very powerful abilities that unlock once you have 3 and 5 of a given ideology tucked under your board.
So, what you’re actually doing is set collection, where you try to intuit from the questions and answers what will best complete your sets. It sounds like goofy eurogame stuff, because it is, but it tries to make a non-flashy point: when constructing a political movement, ideology’s purpose is to amass power, not reflect actual belief systems; make of that what you will.
Resist this
This has mostly been a summary of half of AZADI, and covers most of the rules for the original game, SHASN. AZADI removes a lot of the take-that chaos of its original game’s multitude of cards and special powers, and replaces it with a semi-cooperative game mode. In AZADI, you and the other players start as a team of revolutionaries facing a neutral player, the white-colored Imperials.
In a four-player game, players need to collectively gain enough Azadi across 6 rounds (a resource on a track) to throw off the yoke of the Imperials. The moment that happens, the game immediately switches to competitive mode, with a few additions. But, if they don’t manage to gain enough Azadi after 6 rounds, everyone loses.
AZADI as a purely competitive game is a curio, but with this cooperative mode, there’s something to it that I just can’t quite shake. I’d liken it to a scenario generator, but that isn’t quite the full picture. Because the overall objective of the game is quite simple, an environment where everyone needs to cooperate introduces some exciting tension to the experience.
A major change is that you can form coalitions, which are majorities that two players form (each time a player/coalition forms a majority, the group gets an Azadi point), effectively improving the potency of their pieces at the cost of exchanging one of their majority ideology cards from their board with each other.
Additionally, when a player places a voter in one of the volatile areas (the crosshair spots on the map I mentioned earlier), a Tyranny card enters the game. It’s basically a little foldout that adds two new rules and two new objectives into the game that require players to exchange power and board position in exchange for a new resource. It might be sacrificing their own pieces, moving Imperial pieces around, things like that. Once one of the two objectives is completed, players gain an Azadi point, and a new rule enters the game that benefits a specific style of play related to the objective.
If players manage to defeat the imperials, there’s a check on the game state where you determine the top two ideology cards across all player tableaus, and players vote on a set of rules based on those top two, representing the new society they have formed. This is my favorite part of the experience.
Politics
All art is political, and the act of declaring something as expressly not political is itself a political act. AZADI tries to move beyond the edgelord basic declarations I’ve described earlier, where players form expedient ideological camps to win the game. The game makes a real effort to organically incorporate rules that reflect the choices that players have made. If players rack up a ton of capitalist ideology and then vote to have their new society reflect that, they are rewarded in the game for amassing resources and hoarding them. If they wanted an ideal society where resources are shared in common, that is also possible.
It’s not perfect, and the primary dramatic vehicle, reading questions to each other, can get a little tedious. All that said, I appreciate a system that tries to be responsive to player input, and rejects the common “games that tell stories” fallacy in favor of one in which players tell stories through the choices they make.
If you can give the game a shot, I recommend it. I’m going to keep fooling around with it and see what kind of mess we can get ourselves into.
SHASN: AZADI details
- Designer: Abhishek Lamba, Zain Memon
- Artists: Soumik Lahiri
- Publishers: Memesys Culture Lab
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 90 - 180 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Alliances, Area Majority / Influence, Events, Map Addition, Market, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Semi-Cooperative Game
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.95349 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about SHASN: AZADI.
