How Board Games Handle Slavery

Board games are probably more popular than they have ever been, and the hobby’s boom has allowed it to speak to new audiences in new ways. With their surge in popularity, they have come to tackle a wide variety of subjects and themes. Often, tabletop adventures offer pure escapist entertainment: from hunting and gathering during the stone age, to the awakening of nightmarish Lovecraftian beasts, to the colonization of Mars in the not-too-distant future. It also goes to darker places: The horrors of war, mining yellow cake for atomic bombs during World War II, the spread of deadly disease are also fodder for play around the table.

Board game designers—like their counterparts in PC strategy gaming—often tend to look to history as backdrops for their projects. This often takes board games to places their digital counterparts would never visit, like the 16th century spice trade or trading in the Mediterranean during the height of the Roman Empire.

In addition to the more benign facets of world history, this liberal use of the past brings many board games within striking range of some of the more tragic and divisive aspects of humanity’s history. For example,  Twilight Struggle, a game that spent time atop Board Game Geek’s rankings, sees players acting out the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Russia, and  CO2 tasks players with reducing pollution in an increasingly industrial world.

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