Grow Your Tribe In Manitoba From DLP Games
September 7, 2018 by cassn
Between the rolling mountains, the vast lakes, and the serene forests of Manitoba live the Cree natives, working with the glorious landscape to benefit their tribe.
Players represent different clans of the Cree Indians, taking care of the material progress as well as of the spiritual development of the clan. At the end of autumn, all clans finally come together to determine the new chief from the clan that has progressed the furthest!
Manitoba is a resource gathering game set in the Canadian landscape. As competing leaders of Cree tribes, players must balance the physical and spiritual development of their tribe. By amassing enough resources during the seasons, players aim to collect enough victory points to be elected overall Cree leader when the winter solstice finally returns.
The game is played over three seasons (spring, summer, and autumn). Players have the option to collect resources, explore the landscape or further their spiritual 'vision path' to collect victory points and players determine their actions by moving coloured disks along a totem.
DLP Games have faced significant backlash online over their use of the Cree tribe for this game, as the Cree never used totems as part of their iconography. The art design by Dennis Lohausen (Terra Mystica) is stunningly detailed but, again, contains images of totems alongside Cree natives.
Fair enough, this is not meant to be a game about historical accuracy. However, by choosing to design the game around a specific tribe, DLP Games (in my opinion) have entered into an unspoken agreement that they will do their due diligence when it comes to basic cultural research.
Whether or not this is enough to stop the purchase of a game is up to each individual player but, personally, I feel that this sort of sloppy research reflects poorly on the game as a whole. For those that are interested, the game is available for pre-order on their website, for collection at Essen in October.
Do you feel cultural accuracy in a board game is important? Let us know what you think!
"Players represent different clans of the Cree Indians, taking care of the material progress as well as of the spiritual development of the clan."
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
They really should have used a fictitious tribe rather than an actual First Nations people, as there are a whole slew of built in cultural and historical issues involved, especially in calling it Manitoba. I’m not going to give DLP Games flack for it, as they’re probably not aware of it, but there’s a level of unintentional cultural insensitivity with the game. I mean, man, a European company making a game out of being a Cree is pretty on the nose.