Why political board games have the power to change our view of the world

Tabletop games offer a face-to-face opportunity to convey a message that the impersonal world of online gaming misses

We label board games as cerebral things; toys for the mind. I agreed, until I played Labyrinth, a title by CIA analyst Volko Ruhnke simulating the war on terror. Playing as the Jihadists, I put down a "Martyrdom Operation" card. My aim was to secure funding for my terrorists by demonstrating their effectiveness. It struck me like an ice wall what that card's clinical euphemism actually meant: I'd just killed dozens of innocent people. I felt so sick I had to walk away. A physical reaction from a mind game.

It's an illustration of how effective tabletop games are at making political points. The most extreme examples are Brenda Romero's series of art-games entitled The Mechanic is the Message. Train is the best known of these. It appears at first to be an exercise in getting players to optimise space on public transport. During the game, it's revealed that it's actually about transporting Jews to Auschwitz. If there was ever a more direct, personal demonstration of the banality of evil, I've yet to see it.

Yet this latent power remains untapped. While the indie video game scene hums with political titles like Papers, Please and Democracy 3, few tabletop games even have a political theme. This absence is a puzzle to both Ruhnke and Romero. "Games are nothing more than systems where there is a winner," said Romero. "Politics are the same."

Indeed, the designers agree that face-to-face play offers more opportunities to convey a message than the impersonal world of digital interaction. "It's easy for a player to betray another online," Romero observed. "It's much more difficult to do so to their face."

For Ruhnke, it's more about transparency. "Tabletop games put players inside their world by requiring them to learn and operate the game model themselves," he explained. "That aspect is even more critical for games that are about something controversial. Even players who are skeptical at the outset can evaluate and choose what parts of the model to add to their understanding, and what to leave by the roadside."

Romero gives similar reasons as the motivation for continuing to design her games. "An analog game is something incredibly tactile, beautiful, raw and bare," she said. "The systems are exposed; they are not hidden under graphics or obfuscated in code. It's all there to see."

For all their common ground, the work of these designers differs in one fundamental way. Romero seeks to put players in the role of the afflicted. "When I'm working on my games, I am always mindful of both the people who lived the real-life system I'm modeling as well as those who are experiencing it through my game," she said.

Ruhnke's games, by contrast, are about a high level, strategic view of politics as problem solving. It might seem this runs the risk of trivialising the suffering of those involved. The designer disagrees. "Great books, movies, art and journalism all seek to entertain so as to hold interest, even while contributing insight for serious discussion," he told me. "Games should be no different."

Ultimately, the dearth of political board games is a matter of economics. Romero's games are showpieces, never intended for commercial production. "It's hard enough to sell an analog game," she observed. "Selling one whose audience is niche by default is even more challenging."

Ruhnke's publisher, GMT Games, concurred. "Normally we shy away from current event games," their managing partner Tony Curtis explained. "Perceptions of current political events are often ruled by emotion and lack of information. We published Ruhnke's games because of his unrivaled store of knowledge on the Middle-East, and knew he'd make his game factually based."

Of course, not everyone agrees on what the "facts" are in any given political scenario. Politics would be simple if they did. And that's just the point. Working the transparent mechanics of a tabletop game is an incredible opportunity to analyse competing viewpoints.

Ruhnke thinks the tide is turning, in spite of the lack of commercial opportunities. "There are limitless, exciting possibilities for gaming topics in recent and current history," he said. "I receive ideas nearly weekly from gamers about doing this or that new topic. My sense is that the hobby is coming around to realising the possibilities of gaming political life."

Let's hope so. Reactions to Train have ranged from tears to desperate attempts to cheat. It's hard to imagine anyone playing it and not learning from the experience. The same is true of Labyrinth and A Distant Plain, Ruhnke's game on the war in Afghanistan. As politics become increasingly fragmented and extreme, perhaps we'd all benefit from sitting down, face to face, with a game designed to help us understand our opponent's point of view.