STRIKE! is a strategic, cooperative, and beautifully-illustrated board game for 2 - 4 players about building a city-wide rebellion to stop a mega-corporation's takeover. It was created in a collaboration between The TESA Collective, a publisher of games about changing the world, and Jobs with Justice, a leading labor rights organization.

HappyCorp, the richest company in the world, has just unleashed its most diabolical plan yet: turning Mercury City into an entirely corporate-run metropolis. From the schools to the sidewalks, everything will be owned and run by HappyCorp, and every resident will become a HappyCorp employee. There will be no more minimum wage, no more public services, and no more unions. HappyCorp has already begun unleashing its Smile Drones to convert the city’s infrastructure, crush protests, and ensure every resident watches its Commercial Breaks.

Players take on the role of the Strike Council to lead a city-wide rebellion against HappyCorp’s takeover, while also fighting for better livelihoods for all. Players will grow their ranks, mobilize their workers, and lead strikes around Mercury City. As the Strike Council scores victories for workers, they will gain the support of more allies, from the steelworkers to the teachers, and build new bases of support from the manufacturing district to the university.

So do you have what it takes to lead the worker rebellion to defeat HappyCorp? Or will you soon be a smiling employee of HappyCity? 

 STRIKE! features beautiful artwork and visual designs by T.L. Simons. 

Here’s what comes in each copy of STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion:

STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion is a cooperative game: all players are on the same team, fighting against HappyCorp. Players collectively win by completing enough STRIKE! cards to score 15 victory points, and thereby abolishing HappyCorp from their city.

HappyCorp, like any nefarious corporation, can win in multiple ways: by scoring 15 victory points of its own, or by deploying all five of its MegaDrones across the city.

STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion has a short rulebook. However, the combination of cooperative gameplay, eight unique characters, as well as a tough opponent in HappyCorp, makes this a highly strategic game!

Experienced game players should be able to understand the gameplay behind STRIKE! relatively quickly, while novice gamers should be able to pick it up within a few turns. The unique characters and different difficulty settings will let you play over and over again!

At the start of each game, players choose one of eight characters to play. Each character has unique powers and stats, giving them different ways to strategize.

For example, Valentina can disassemble Smile Drones three times on her turn, meaning she’s great at challenging HappyCorp. Skyler, on the other hand, can grow ranks three times per turn, meaning she can quickly organize large strikes.

Every turn, players will spend four action cubes in order to complete STRIKE! Cards and halt HappyCorp’s takeover of their city. 

Placing actions on your player board allows you to add new strikers to the board, move your strikers around the city, disassemble HappyCorp's drones, and complete requirements on STRIKE! cards to score points.

Players can also recruit workers from other industries across the city, from the teachers to the steelworkers, to grow their strikes and take powerful actions.

At the end of each turn, HappyCorp will force you to draw a Commercial Break card. These will do bad things for the Strike Council: such as remove Strikers from the board, cause players to lose energy, and deploy HappyCorp’s drones throughout the city. 

But worst of all is HappyCorp’s dreaded MegaDrones. Whenever three regular drones are in a location together, they fuse into one humongous MegaDrone! The creation of a MegaDrone causes HappyCorp to score one point for each MegaDrone in a shared color, and it blocks the players from completing strikes in that location.

Every facet of gameplay in STRIKE! is based around teamwork and cooperation. These are some of the key cooperative game features:

STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion is completely and unabashedly a pro-labor rights game. This is a game about building the power of working people and taking on a mega-corporation. To make it, we teamed up with one of the country’s leading labor-rights organizations to make it: Jobs with Justice.

The idea for STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion was born out of conversations between Jobs with Justice (JWJ). TESA and JWJ worked on every step of the game together, from the conceptual concepts, to the world building, the game design, and playtesting. This is a game about, by, and for the labor movement.

Pictured: TESA playtesting an early prototype of STRIKE! over video chat with Jobs with Justice.

-Matt Milkowski, public school teacher

-Vanessa Fernandez, labor organizer

-Eli Kurtz, game designer 

Our games have also been featured in Mashable, YES! Magazine, iO9, Fast Company, The Guardian, Waging Nonviolence, and more.