gregrutter:

From the Game Developers Conference comes Train which sounds like a crazy art piece/psychological experiment in the form of a board game.

Train is a board game that, at least initially, tasks players with getting as many yellow game pieces from one end of the game board to the other. In an average turn, the player can choose to move their train forward, put more people into the train, draw a card, or take a card. After reaching the end of the track with one train, the player draws a card revealing the destination they’ve arrived at.

All of the possible destinations are concentration camps. Auschwitz, Dachau. Brathwaite described the moment of realization as “a fall from a hundred feet up,” once the now-victorious player realizes what he or she has just done.

This isn’t the end of the game. Train’s rules (typed up on a genuine Nazi typewriter) specify that “the game is over when it ends.” After figuring out where the trains are going, you can choose to stop playing or, as some players did, try to actually rebel against the rules and sabotage the game by intentionally trying to draw derail cards.

When a train in the game gets derailed, two things happen: half the people go back to the beginning of the board, and the others refuse to board the train. The game pieces simply sit on the board, and can no longer be manipulated. Brathwaite intentionally refused to explain exactly what had happened to those pieces. Some players assume that the tokens are dead, some assume that they’ve escaped and gone to Denmark. This process of volunteering your own narrative isn’t lazy design or metagaming, Brathwaite seemed to suggest, but an integral part of the game that makes the player feel complicit in what they’re doing.

Holy shit. I mean, dark as you like, but also really getting people to question complicity and interesting Maslov-y *things*. Love that players tried to break the game within the rules.