Terrible educational board games are a blight on us all. Everyone's played them: invariably, the game itself is little more than a reskinned snakes-and-ladders, but rather than climbing ladders, informative captions combine learning with fun. In theory.

"Witches have prophesied that no man of woman born can kill you! Move forward three spaces."

"Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip. Move backwards five squares."

"You've arrived in the uterus, but there's no egg to fertilise. Skip a turn."

It's not hard to pin down why the games are so unfulfilling. For one, they're basically pure chance, to the extent that even an eight-year-old on a rainy Thursday afternoon can tell that nothing they do has any effect on the outcome. For another, the actual game has little to do with what it's professing to teach: you're all just rolling dice.

But sometimes, people go the extra mile, and it makes all the difference.

Class Struggle is a faintly ridiculous educational board game, created by the New York University politics professor Bertell Ollman in 1978. Its aim, according to the basic rules available on Ollman's site, is to teach students "aged 8 to 80" about Marxism. "The object of the game is to win the revolution… "

"Until then, classes – represented by different players – advance around the board, making and breaking alliances, and picking up strengths and weaknesses that determine the outcome of the elections and general strikes which occur along the way."

The game is still not exactly fun, but it approaches its goal with such charm that it's hard not to be won over. Take the chance cards – a different deck for the workers and capitalists, representing random events in the game.

"You have just been laid off from work," reads one worker card. "If you blame yourself, or foreign competition, or the Blacks, or Jews, move two spaces back. If you blame the capitalists, move two spaces ahead."

"You are caught feeling sorry for the workers," says a capitalist card. "Victory in class struggle comes to people who think about their own class. Miss two turns at the dice."

Impressively, even the rules of the game serve to underscore the message it's trying to send. Take how the players decide who is to play as the capitalist:

"Individual players cannot choose their class," the rules state. "In real life, this is usually determined by the kind of family into which one is born. In "Class Struggle" too it is chance that decides. Throw the genetic (or luck-of-birth) die, the one with the symbols on it, to see who plays what class."

In the full rules (the game includes a "basic" and "full" rule book, as well as a booklet designed to expand on the lessons imparted within), the order that the players roll the luck of birth die is determined by their social privilege. The whiter, straighter and more male you are, the more chances you get to become the capitalist. Just like in real life!

In its own way, Class Struggle makes a good case for the advantages of using games, not just to teach, but also to persuade. Playing a game involves playing inside a rule-set devised by someone else. If those rules mimic the real world, they can embed simplifications which would never pass muster when laid out in a more straightforward manner.

Take Class Struggle's rule that only the capitalists can trigger nuclear war, never the workers or, in a subtler fashion, Sim City's modelling of crime (poverty makes crime, and police stop it).

The fans the game has won - which include libertarian economics blog Marginal Revolution - are drawn to it by the the charm and sensibility of a slightly eccentric professor from the 1970s. However gently persuasive its message and skillfully crafted its game dynamics, it seems unlikely to have won many people round to the cause of revolutionary marxism.

• World of Darkness - the inside story on the death of a game