Category: Jennifer Ostojski

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-18^th and 19^th 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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

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