Description

"A game of strategy, survival, power and wealth"

This is a sort of "communist Monopoly". The players go around the board, but which leg of the board they're allowed on depends on how far they've risen in the hierarchy yet. The most visible status symbol is your apartment size --and the competition for the one and only full-size Dacha can be ferocious. There are a number of other status perks, such as use of the State Car. All in all, a very amusing game that actually does capture a fair amount of the flavour of life in the communist USSR before its fall.

The game was invented by Harley Sachs in 1969 under the name POLICE STATE, and sold in England and the USA, even as far as Ireland and South America. It was copyrighted, patented, and published by the IDEA DEVELOPMENT COMPANY (IDEVCO), licensed by Gameophiles and later by the L.A. Producers' Partnership under the name COMRADES.

It got his second name COMRADES from a BBC documentary series (1983-84), which aired in 1986 in the US. The documentary was about the life of ordinary Soviet citizens, which got interviewed by the producer Richard Denton.