Recently, a fan of Spirit Island who studies anticolonialism asked me a really good question, and I thought others might be interested both in the query and in my answer. The questioner was kind enough to give me permission to quote them if I anonymized it, so here’s their query and the (lightly edited) core of my reply. In one…
Category: Boardgames
Showing my work
Earlier this year, an Indigenous gamer1 asked what I was doing to find, create, or advance actual Indigenous voices in the board game industry. On hearing my answer, they suggested I ought to be more public with that information, to raise awareness and promote taking action as a norm. (Tied to the concepts of showing your work or paying the…
Spirit Island in a paper analyzing island-themed board games
Dr. Hannah Fair of the University of Oxford has published an analysis of island-themed board games, looking at how they reflect society’s ideas of the world – environmental, social, and more. The main three games examined are Taluva, Vanuatu, and Spirit Island. It’s a really neat read if you enjoy academic papers; I was struck by a number of its…
Fealty
Fealty is a lightly-themed positional game of territory control, half a step away from abstract positional games like Othello or Go. Players simultaneously reveal what piece they will play this turn, then place them on a map in order of the pieces’ speeds. Placement is constrained both by other pieces of the same color, and what portions of the board…
Spirit Island
In the most distant reaches of the world, spirits of the land, sky, and every natural thing still walk the earth. As the great powers of Europe stretch their colonial empires further and further, they inevitably lay claim to a place where these spirits still hold power – and when they do, the land itself fights back, alongside the islanders…
For Science!
You were never supposed to be the ones standing between the Earth and viral annihilation. So many other groups were better connected, better funded, better equipped, and had much nicer glossy brochures. But here you are, an eccentric bunch of researchers, lab workers, bureaucrats, virologists, and more ready to put it all on the line……FOR SCIENCE!!!For Science! is a cooperative,…