FRONTIER
"A game of geopolitics, migration, and genocide"...
Too gruesome?
It's a game for 5 players (representing 5 nations), with colored sticks representing boarders, cubes representing population, and tokens representing industrial output (which effects population growth and expansion into adjacent enemy/neutral territory). The map is that of Eurasia. (or Africa, or America, or any single land mass with no large bodies of water seperating bodies of land).
The goal is to expand your territory in order to sustain a larger national population. The game ends when the first nation is exterminated. The victor is the player who satisfies these two conditions:
1. largest territory with
2.the largest population
I am reading the REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY and figured there is a game there. Geopolitics is fascinating, although scary.
Thoughts?
Removing sticks and using population cubes solely to define borders won't work. The border represents the extent to which a nation can dictate policy: ie adjust national population, build industry, relocate/exterminate minorities, or expand militarily. If I remove the sticks (clearly defined borders) then I fear the player will be confused as to what is and is not allowed within that territory. Who controls it? Who dictates policy within that region?
The sticks are there to easily identify a nations boundaries. Removing the sticks toward simplification, I think, would cause ambiguity and confusion.
Thank you for the thoughts.
As a side note,
Does a game which creates as a rule the possibility of population extermination turn you off? Would changing the theme to perhaps religious conversion (swap one color cube for another) sit better with people?
Call it cognitive dissonance, but the game in my head sound fun and would teach a lesson about the dangers of geopolitics, but the thought of it being fun disturbes me...