At dining tables or on TV talkshows, conversation in Spain today is dominated by the growing popularity of the leftwing political party Podemos or the 1,500 corruption investigations unfolding across the country.
Now these animated discussions are being turned into fodder for an unexpected pastime — board games. The objective for players in Democracy (with the letter “e” represented by the euro symbol) is simple: to gain and stay in power for as long as possible. To that end, anything goes — from leaking documents that slander your opponents to shuffling inquisitive judges off politically sensitive cases to buying a media company to control the campaign coverage.
“We wanted to show how politics works in our country,” 34-year-old geneticist Carlos Martin Guevara said.
After repeated heated conversations about the investigation into a secret slush fund that allegedly benefited the governing People’s party, Martin Guevara said: “We decided we have to make a board game out of this because it seems more like a game than anything else.”
A successful crowdfunding campaign meant it went into production last year.
The resulting game plays like a scathing critique of the state of Spain’s democracy 39 years after the death of the dictator general Francisco Franco.
“We still have confidence in the democratic system,” Martin Guevara said. “We’re just not in agreement with how some politicians apply democracy.”
The game highlights the choices politicians make, with players forced to choose whether they want full transparency in their campaign finances or prefer to use undeclared donations from companies, as was alleged in the autumn when 51 people were arrested across the country. To prop up sagging popularity rates, players can start rumors about their opponents or launch a campaign to host the Olympics.
The goal of another board game, Corruptopolis, on the other hand, is to draw attention to the scandals that have engulfed politicians of the left and right, as well as businesses, trades unions and soccer clubs.
As she watched the spreading corruption accusations, Marina Belda, a 22-year-old industrial design student, worried it was becoming easy to tune out the many scandalous headlines.
“I wanted to take the situation and make a statement out of it,” she said.
Players are invited to take on the role of those involved in some of the most notorious scandals. Their goal is to become the most corrupt, a feat achieved by reaching the fictional city of Villa Corrupta. To progress, players have to answer questions about high-profile scandals, such as which socialist parliamentarian opened a bank account in Switzerland in 1998? Or which member of the royal family, entangled in an investigation for money laundering and tax fraud, repeatedly used the replies: “I’m not aware,” “I don’t remember” or “I don’t know” to a judge’s questions?
“If you’re playing a game, you get a little more angry. I wanted people to get angry but in a different way,” Belda said.
With her game due to go into production soon, her biggest headache is keeping up with the headlines. In the five months since she finished the prototype, four more cases of corruption had come to the light, she said.
Belda now keeps a folder of news clippings on corruption, in anticipation of updates to the game. The team behind Democracy said they have learned to do the same.
As Guevara said: “Our politicians never stop surprising us.”
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