Offensive Board Games

There are a number of games I've seen that have offended people such that they will not play them.

I'm not talking about games like Juden Raus or Up Against the Wall... that, while offensive to people now days, are more an artifact of their times then they are a game created with modern sensibilites.

And I'm not even talking about intententionally offensive games like Ghettopoly.

I'm talking about games meant for a mainstream audience (insomuch as there is a mainstream audience for niche board games).

There's the obvious games about WWII that draw ire. In fact I've seen accusations calling the all war game hobbiest as facist wannabes. WWII games are in particular frowned upon in some quarters because they allow players to "play" the Nazis. There's a lot of hemming an hawing about how appropriate this is. But check out the most recent edition of Axis & Allies and you will not see a single swastika. In the original version you'd think Erwin Rommel led the third Reich.

Some frown on war games in general about all the death. And I have to admit, playing a game of Paths of Glory weirds me out due to the amount of carnage represented. WWI must have sucked.

But these offenses caused by war games do not surprise me at all.

Let's go for something a little less obvious: Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, players try to build buildings and develope plantations in and around colonial era San Juan, Puerto Rico. There's no war, no violence but you do have to "hire" "colonists" that come in on a "colonist" ship. The colonists are represented by little brown disks (make sure you read some of the comments on that picture!).

Puerto Rico defenders say that the colonists are also employed in offices, universities, etc. And therefore the little brown disks represent generic workers. Supposedly the prototype of the game that was used before it was published had blue disks as workers. Nevertheless, many people refuse to play the game for due to this little "colonist" issue.

Now for something that completely surprised me: Imperial. Imperial is a stock market game where players, rather than investing in companies, invest in pre-WWI era European countries. A company's value is a function of how well developed its military and industrial capacity is. A player holding a stock majority in a country can even use its military to attack a neighboring country in order to reduce that county's stock value.

So how does this novel take on the stock market game genre offend? Well, people associate this game's theme with the ideas put forth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Go figure.

I find it fascinating to see what people, myself included, find to be offensive.