In this blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month the series continues with Jenny Morrison’s review of Billionaires and Guillotines.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month we continue with guest contributor Patrick Shea’sPeople Power, a game about political economy and conflict.
When I ask my students in the first class session in my Political Economy of Conflict course why conflicts happen, the answers tend to centre on power and territory. These answers are understandable, but they limit our ability to assess the motivations, strategies, and consequences for those involved in conflict. People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 is a board game that helps highlight the different political economy elements of conflict.
How does it work?
Designed by Ken Tee, People Power is part of GMT Games’ COIN (Counterinsurgency) series — a family of wargames that share gameplay mechanics across a range of historical conflicts. In this game, each player controls one of three factions: the Marcos Government, the insurgent New People’s Army (NPA), and the nonviolent Reformers. Each faction pursues asymmetric goals — the Government seeks territorial control and patronage, the NPA builds resistance through guerrilla operations, and the Reformers shift popular opinion through activism. Each turn, a card is drawn from an event deck that determines both the order in which factions may act and a historical event that players can choose to trigger. Factions that act on one card must pass on the next, forcing difficult decisions about when to act and when to wait. The game is organised into two Campaigns that culminate in Election Rounds, where victory is checked, resources are redistributed, and popular support can shift.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month we continue with Andrew Judge’s Daybreak, a game about climate change and international cooperation.
In this blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month the series continues with Jenny Morrison’s review of Class Struggle, a boardgame on the capitalist system.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month, we begin with Michael Toomey’s review of Tammany Hall, a political boardgame about power, patronage, and competition.
How does it work:
Tammany Hall is based on the eponymous political machine of late-18th and 19th century New York City (for 3 – 5 players) . Players compete with one another to accumulate political support (and more importantly, political favors) among four contemporary immigrant communities (Irish, English, Germans, and Italians) in Manhattan, aiming to gain and to maintain control over the city’s mayoralty. In essence, Tammany Hall gamifies the process of securing power in an imperfect democracy and utilizing that power to reward allies and punish adversaries.
The Serious Play Review Board: Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison
It is a surprisingly rich and dynamic game. Early on, the Irish immigrant population is dominant, encouraging players in the early stages to focus their efforts on appealing to this constituency. However, as the game progresses, the Italian population becomes increasingly important, replicating the demographic shift that happened in the city throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and forcing players to respond to this influx. The game mechanics are relatively straightforward and easy to get into, but with enough flexibility that it can be re-engineered to connect to other concepts or issues from Politics and International Relations.
Applications for teaching:
Tammany Hall is directly adaptable to teaching several political concepts and issues. This is not particularly surprising, as it was designed specifically by its developers to connect and relate to contemporary politics. At its most basic level, it can be used to teach the dynamics of political contestation amidst an electoral campaign. Going deeper, it is readily usable for classes teaching the concepts of corruption, patronage, and clientelism. In the game, players are rewarded with political favour from particular immigrant communities for providing them housing and support. This favour can then be leveraged during elections to control power- a clientelist dynamic which is replicated in many polities throughout the world. Alternatively, the in-game practice of dominating an electoral constituency through the use of “ward bosses” to exercise influence on your behalf (and those of your supporters) directly replicates political practices in countries and contexts as different as modern Ireland and pre-2022 Russia (to name just two).
The game can also be used to teach classes on the politics of immigration. On one hand, it can be used as part of a lesson on how politicians might appeal to immigrant communities for votes. Perhaps even more useful and interesting would be its usefulness for understanding how rivalries and hostility might subsequently emerge between these groups, and how political actors oftentimes play different ethnic demographics off against one another. More abstract concepts can also be illustrated with it- it would not be too difficult to connect the game to a lesson on the politics of grievance, for example, or even to illustrate theories such as Selectorate Theory. In all these instances, the teaching benefits are most sharply accentuated when followed up with a debriefing session, where the lecturer can highlight the specific points, they wish to draw out, and/or where students can reflect on the real-life relevance of the game.
Adaptations and setup:
The game takes between 60-90 minutes to play the whole way through (both according to the developer’s estimates, and to the reviewer’s own personal experiences playing the game). As such, it is likely that a game would need to be truncated to include an effective debrief session. This is not too complicated: the game is divided into four distinct phases (each replicating a single electoral cycle), so there are natural points at which the game can be stopped. This does hinder the possibility of fully simulating the demographic shift that occurs later in the game, potentially curtailing one of the more interesting features of the game, but this can perhaps be compensated for by starting the game at a later phase with a pre-set distribution of communities across the board.
The basic game mechanics, centred around building support among a given community of actors within a set period or cycle of time and then leveraging this to attain and wield political power, can be re-imagined illustrating various Politics/IR concepts or issues without much adaptation. However, the game board might need to be re-designed somewhat if being used to illustrate more abstract or conceptual dynamics. A single copy of the game can easily accommodate groups of between 3-15 students (organised into teams of up to three players). Larger teams might also be possible but can become unwieldy and/or may lead to some students being marginalised.
Conclusions:
Many boardgames are most useful as framing devices or as icebreakers to provoke broader discussion in a classroom but are less useful for simulating specific behaviours or more complex concepts. Ironically, Tammany Hall probably functions best for the latter but is less suitable as a framing device or as an icebreaker. It is most useful for helping students apply and analyse what they have learned about cronyism, patronage, and clientelism (or whatever behaviours or practices the instructor is teaching) in a gamified setting, but is maybe less useful for achieving lower order steps on Bloom’s Taxonomy. All in all, though, Tammany Hall is a highly useful and adaptable boardgame with plenty of application in a variety of Politics and IR classrooms.
Last year, Dr. Brooklyn Walker (UT Knoxville) wrote a guest post for ALPS, presenting her new game/class exercise, titled “The World’s Best (Worst) Dictator” Game/Exercise. The learning objectives focused on students’ understanding of authoritarian systems, the durability of authoritarian leaders’ powers, and what an authoritarian playbook looks like.
Since I am teaching Comparative Politics for the first time in a long time this semester, I wanted to try Dr. Walker’s game and implement a fun exercise in my syllabus. Below I discuss and reflect how I adapted the game to a twenty-five person classroom, what worked, and what interesting moments the students experienced.
As Jeremy noted, the ALPS blog team recently met to discuss ideas for the next academic year and the shocking lack of kettles in American hotels. We are now looking to onboard some columnists to offer regular content on the site, similar to Jeremy’s new monthly roundup of SoTL publications. This would be a monthly commitment for a period of 6 months, with the option to renew if agreeable to the columnist and editors. Join our team to share your insights and experiences with political pedagogy, the scholarship of teaching and learning, games and simulations, and the wider academic environment in which we teach and learn.
Currently we are looking for the following columnists:
Simulation and Game Reviewer–write about a game or simulation that can be used for educational purposes in the higher education classroom. This might be a commercial board or video game, a game you or a colleague designed, or the subject of a published article.
‘From the Archives’–search the ALPS archives and find some lost posts that deserve a second read, and add on your own thoughts to the topic to make it new and current.
SOTL Book Reviews–write a short review of a recent book on the scholarship of teaching and learning or political pedagogy.
To apply, contact us at the following email: alps AT activelearningps DOT com. Please include your cv, and let us know which column you are interested in offering, your availability to write monthly for a six month period, and a short paragraph on why you want to write on this topic for ALPS.
Fresh off the virtual presses is my latest article, Simulations and Games (SAGs) to Teach Conflict and Political Violence, a literature review in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. In it, I pose several new typologies as I consider the key considerations for instructors who are considering what kind of game or simulation to use in their classes. This piece will be useful both to scholars publishing on SAGs, providing ways to categorize their activities, and also to instructors who are trying to decide what kind of SAG to use in their classroom.
Here are 7 considerations or decision points for choosing a game or simulation, according to my analysis of the existing literature:
I mentioned Discord about a year ago as we were all turning to virtual instruction at the start of the pandemic. I want to return to it specifically in the games and simulations context, though, as it has some really useful properties that can aid those instructors looking for a way to run their online simulations. If you are ready to start thinking about how to run Model UN, Diplomacy, or other complex simulations online, you should really consider Discord.
Discord is a social media platform used by gamers, podcasters, and other content creators to connect with their communities. Each group has their own discord ‘server’, a private space that you can only enter with an invitation. Inside, you can create text and voice based ‘channels’ that let you structure conversations by topic. These channels can be open to everyone on the server or private and hidden. As the server creator or administrator, you also have a lot of latitude for customizing settings–such as making something read-only or enabling ‘slow mode’, which prevents any one person from dominating the conversation. And server members can message each other individually or create small groups for private conversation. The text conversation is asynchronous, but it is easy to jump into a voice channel for voice-only or video conversations.
This kind of format lends itself very well to running complex simulations. There are several key needs for running an online simulation:
Instructors must be able to review rules and procedures, share documents and updates, and take questions from students, publicly and privately.
Students need to be able to post in-character public messages for other participants to see.
Students need to be able to post privately to their teammates, if they have them.
Students need to be able to send private messages to other students for secret negotiations.
Students may need to post files or links, share their screen, or jump onto a quick voice conversation.
It is easy to do all of this in Discord, without the constraints of a standard learning management system/virtual learning environment. By creating ‘roles’ in the server with different permissions, you can divide students by their teams or in-game roles and set channels that only they can access and that can identify them within the server. This makes communication much easier. For example, if you are running a UN Security Council simulation, you can create a ‘role’ for each country in Discord. You might not need to set up private channels for each country if there is only one person in each role, but this allows students to message each other without having to check a list of who is playing what role. They could also have a public channel for making speeches, and another where they upload and discuss the wording on resolutions. If you are running a full UN simulation with many different committees, you can have channels dedicated to the General Assembly and each committee, and private channels dedicated to each country so members of the same team can talk privately and share information. Discord therefore supports simulations both large and small.
I’m using Discord right now to run a game of Diplomacy in my ISA Career Course on Games and Simulations in International Relations (with Victor Asal). There are plenty of online platforms that you can use, but I chose to use Discord because I didn’t know in advance if I would have more than 7 players. Most online platforms don’t allow for teams–but Discord does. Here is what the server looks like:
As you can see, I have a general channel for administrative purposes. I’ve since created a new read-only channel called ‘maps and result’s where I post the outcomes of each game turn along with updated maps. The public channels–text and voice–are open to all players if they want to openly communicate. Italy has made a call for peace and protection of the status quo–but no responses so far! the other channels are organized by country category. Each country has a private text and voice channel open only to their team and the facilitators. They also have a private ‘orders’ channel where they submit orders for their units each turn. I use those channels to adjudicate each turn. If they want to message another team, all they have to do is right-click on the name of the person they want to message (their country name is next to their name) and select ‘message’ and that will open up a private conversation for negotiations. The person-shaped icon in the top right of the screen pops up the list of server members for this purpose. It will also tell you who is online in case you want to invite them into a voice chat.
Running the game this way instead of over email or through an online game system gives me several advantages as an instructor. I can keep tabs on most of the gameplay, although some private conversations I would only see if I’m invited to join them (something you can require if you want). I also have a record after the gameplay of everything that happened, which is useful for debriefing, grading, and assessment. The interface is easy to use, and once students get familiar with it, you can reuse it for different games and exercises throughout your course. I can also allow ‘observers’–people who want to watch but not play. I can give them as much access as I want–for example, I can limit them to read- and listen-only so they can’t interfere with the game play.
I’ve used discord for running an monthly trivia game as well as a 200+ person multi day conference, so I can attest to its robust capabilities. It is free, accessible from outside the US, pretty easy to learn, and has a robust mobile app that make it accessible to students. The main downsides are that the server creator needs to put in a bit of work to figure out how to set up the server to meet your needs, and that the video and screen sharing systems aren’t always reliable. Asynchronous text channels and voice channel work just fine though.
I know a lot of faculty want to run simulations but are restricted by social distancing or virtual classrooms. If you are ready to try something new, try Discord. I have no relationship with the company and am not being compensated by them for this post–I just want to recommend something that I’ve found very useful in my own teaching.
Model Diplomacy is a series of free National Security Council simulations put out by the Council on Foreign Relations. Michelle used it in her class last year, and I decided based on her positive experience to try it in my intro to IR class this year. In this post I’m going to explain the basics of Model Diplomacy, discuss my experience using it, and give my recommendation. Spoiler Alert: I loved it.
