What The Hell America!

During the pandemic, London-based game designer Matteo Menapace began working with Matt Leacock, creator of the legendary Pandemic series of board games. The first of these highly innovative games was released in 2008 to widespread acclaim, busting the myth that cooperative games are boring and sanctimonious. When the global COVID-19 outbreak forced billions of people to stay home or limit social interactions, makers of independent board games found millions of new fans. Given its themes, Pandemic — where players take on the roles of scientists and public health workers collaborating to cure and eliminate global diseases — emerged as a clear winner.

Early in the pandemic, Menapace wrote a blog about what the game Pandemic could teach us about the real-world event. This then led him and Leacock to develop the idea for a game about another crisis: the climate emergency. The two researched extensively and interviewed and play-tested early versions of their game with dozens of scientists, activists, and policymakers.

The final result, Daybreak, was published by CMYK Games in 2023. Up to four players take on the role of geopolitical blocs (the United States, Europe, China, and the Majority World). In a game that takes about ninety minutes to play, they try to share resources and technologies so that they can each transition their economies away from fossil fuels and help communities deal with the ecological and social disasters brought by climate change.

The game has been celebrated by reviewers for the satisfying way it allows players to focus on the challenges of their own region but also collaborate on global problems, and for creating a game that foregrounds the difficult questions of what paths to take toward climate justice. That the players often lose the game by triggering climate tipping points doesn’t seem to be discouraging. Each card has a QR code linking to the data and debates that animate the game about, for example, the risks and benefits of nuclear power, the feasibility of solar at scale, and the possibility of degrowth.

Like socialist speculative fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s blockbuster Ministry for the Future (which was a big inspiration for the game), Menapace and Leacock’s game Daybreak brings us into the near future of capitalism’s climate chaos and invites us to imagine what kind of power and institutions we would need to build globally to deliver us from calamity.

Packing that much complexity into a game that remains genuinely fun and challenging is no small feat, and so it was unsurprising when Daybreak was nominated for a SdJ award. The SdJ might be compared to the film industry’s Oscars: an award unparalleled in its prestige since its launch in 1978. Hundreds of thousands of people, especially in Germany, follow the awards, which celebrate games that are both critical and commercial successes. The SdJ brand represents the gold standard of board games.

But in Germany and elsewhere, the board game industry is biased toward “apolitical” games. Games as commodities are often framed as family-friendly activities, a safe platform for good-natured competition, an uplifting alternative to television or other forms of entertainment. The preference has been for games that are themed around historical or fantasy settings that will not offend or perturb players.

That said, the board game industry has been rightly criticized for regularly promoting racist and exoticist tropes, including in the famous Settlers of Catan, where players invade an island and proceed to build trading empires, all the while beset by a mysterious “robber,” implicitly recalling European fantasies of colonialism.

So Daybreak’s more explicit political orientation already ruffled feathers in board game communities. But when it won the prize, it was Menapace’s expression of solidarity with Palestine that really set things off. In addition to making a short speech encouraging game designers to engage with real-world challenges, Menapace affixed a sticker to his T-shirt that depicted the silhouette of historic Palestine in a watermelon motif.

Shortly afterwards, without notifying Menapace, the SdJ issued a public statement, declaring that “we find it intolerable that a game author we invited wore a symbol on his clothing on stage that must be perceived as antisemitic by Jews.” (It was unclear if any Jews were consulted, and if so which ones, or how they felt about being told what they “must” find offensive.) The organization was keen to point out that their concern revolved around the shape of the map of Palestine, which extended to the 1948 borders, allegedly implicitly delegitimizing the State of Israel — which is illegal under Germany’s singularly draconian laws.

The SdJ also accused Menapace of behaving “in an extremely uncollegial manner toward the others involved in his game (author, editorial team, publisher),” in spite of the fact they had spoken to none of the supposedly disrespected parties. They announced that “Menapace is no longer welcome at events organized by the Spiel des Jahres association” — quite a sanction, given the singular prestige of the organization.

Menapace responded with a thoughtful letter explaining his reasons and rightly denying the highly offensive accusation of antisemitism. Others have since written letters condemning the SdJ’s actions, notably its spurious accusation that solidarity with Palestine is inherently antisemitic, which is unfortunately commonplace in Germany.

Whatever the case, beyond the scandal of German exceptionalism around Israel and Palestine, this story reveals what’s at stake when a game “breaks the rules” and dares to take an explicitly political orientation.

Perhaps all civilizations engage in what anthropologists call “deep play,” games that give expression to and help a society reflect on its fundamental beliefs and conflicts. In many societies, games and sports offer proxies for war and mechanisms to navigate political relations, for good or for ill.

The original Olympics, for example, were a vital diplomatic opportunity for the ancient Greeks. Given the ornate materials of many archeological relics, some scholars speculate that tabletop games like go, chess, senet, and the Royal Game of Ur were highly prized and may have been important tools for navigating domestic and international conflicts.

Modern board games stem from the tabletop war games used to train military officers, and from attempts to use the printing press to create toys for middle-class children to teach history and impress bourgeois values on them. This was hardly apolitical.

As early as the nineteenth century, social movements began using board games to convey their messages, including Suffragetto, a board game developed by militants fighting for women’s right to vote that simulated street fights with the police, or Monopoly, which was a critique of free-market capitalism before it was hijacked and turned into the game we all know today.

There have also been explicitly anti-capitalist games. In 1978, Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman gained international notoriety for bringing to market Class Struggle, a socialist response to Monopoly that eventually sold over 230,000 copies worldwide. That game inspired Jacobin to release two-player board game Class War in 2022.

The idea that games are “not political” is really a fiction cooked up by late twentieth-century corporations who were keen to sell first board games and then video games to kids, mostly boys. This industry developed in the postwar years when childhood was being increasingly commodified and conformity to white-supremacist, homophobic, and sexist norms was being strictly enforced.

These days, the anti-politics of games serves an industry that promises to deliver players an escape from unnecessarily busy and stressful lives under modern capitalism. But often games’ reactionary politics are hidden in plain sight. In Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson catalogue the past and present of racist and colonial tropes in board games, notably in popular genres like 4X (also prevalent in video games) where players “eXplore” curiously cleansed landscapes, “eXpand” their empire, “eXploit” resources and people, and “eXterminate” their opponents. Many games are built around market mechanics that, inspired by the myths of neoliberalism, imagine economics as a matter of pure calculation and risk, failing to recognize the role of power and exploitation, or the possibility of solidarity.

In the past decades, many game designers have struggled to tell different stories and create games that move us away from the common themes of accumulation, competition, violence, and scarcity. But it was only with the recent rise of crowdfunding platforms, as well as the emergences of diverse online gamer communities, that a space has opened to a multitude of experiments.

Menapace’s collaborator on Daybreak, Matt Leacock, is widely recognized as a hero of today’s “board game renaissance” when it comes to cooperative games, a genre of games that many children of lefties (like the present author) remember as boring, pedantic, and profoundly unfun. Leacock and others have developed ways to make cooperative games deeply engaging and enjoyable, and so accessible to many players who don’t enjoy games that trade in stress and competition.

Many others have followed by adapting these mechanisms to speak to radical themes. T. L. Simon’s Bloc By Bloc, for example, is a (mostly) cooperative game of urban insurgency where players work together as students, workers, incarcerated people, and local activists to defend their neighborhoods from the cops. The TESA Collective works closely with progressive and environmental organizations to produce cooperative games like STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion, Community Garden: The Board Game, and Space Cats Fight Fascism.

While not cooperative, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory is a phenomenal simulator of class struggle in social democracy (including the possibility that the workers take over the state and institute communism or that the ruling and middle classes team up to impose fascism). Board games like Red Flag Over Paris or Chicago ‘68 help us reflect on the victories and defeats of movements in the past.

My own game, Billionaires and Guillotines, is a satire that dramatizes the lessons of Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital: the capitalist class cannot be trusted to solve the crises its competition has created; they will cascade out of control unless we rise up and establish a system that serves people and the planet, not profit.

As Richard Barbrook argues in his fiery book Class War Games, games help every radical hone their skills at developing meaningful movement strategy, something the Left desperately needs as it contends with growing corporate power, rising fascism, and climate and social crisis.

Many board game designers use the format to do radical work that is less concerned with market success. Avery Alder’s mapmaking game A Quiet Year movingly depicts the joy and struggle of building community after the fall of “civilization.” Live action role-players (LARPers) explore queer and radical political themes from the past, present, and future by playing characters in immersive, interactive theatrical productions that can be profoundly transformative.

Organizations like Red Plenty organize “mega games” (large simulations, kind of like a Model United Nations) at radical and lefty events and festivals to help us explore potential futures. And many movement facilitators and educators around the world have been inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed to use social and board games to help train a new generation of activists and community organizers, and many compendia of these games are now available.

The ruling class has always resented and feared workers’ playfulness, even as sports and other spectacles of play have long been used to defuse social tensions or sew divisions among oppressed people.

But play is our birthright. All animals play — David Graeber even argued that subatomic particles play. If capitalism forces us to work for the benefit of bosses, play and games contain within them a kernel of resistance.

Some of our first and most meaningful experiences are small games that caregivers play with us when we’re infants. This is because, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen makes clear, games allow us to explore how the world shapes us and how we shape the world. Games offer us a chance to try on other forms of agency: what is it like to be a property tycoon trying to bankrupt your opponents, or a geopolitical bloc trying to collaborate on fixing the climate crisis, or an orca taking revenge on the boats that killed your family? Many games allow us to simulate real-world radical struggles, from organizing a union to managing an anti-capitalist government. But even when they are more poetic or abstract, games invite us to, for a time, gain and share new powers.

Most people today feel like they’re caught in an unwinnable game, hence perhaps the popularity of TV shows like Squid Game or the Hunger Games film and book franchise. The far right has capitalized on this feeling, but offers racist and reactionary explanations: it’s the immigrants, the “special interest groups,” and some nebulous “elites” who cheated the system, which is presented as otherwise a fair meritocracy.

The reality is that the capitalist game was always rigged, from the very beginning: it works to cheat the working class of its time, power, and wealth and transfer it upward.

Games can and should help us understand this system for what it is and envision alternatives. Daybreak is a phenomenal example of just such a game, and for that it couldn’t be forgiven.