Quantified Brings Neoliberal Politics To The Tabletop
December 14, 2018 by cassn
Quantified is a game about a world consumed by inequality and injustice. Players must take on the role of one of four asymmetrical characters and attempt to gain access to all their available rights. However, not all people are equal, and one player may be a happily employed citizen while the other is a refugee without any rights.
During a turn, players can move around the city, network with non-player characters, solve rally cards (cards which attempt to support human equality), work an official or illegal job, and prevent threat cards. These threat cards can be invasive amendments to the current laws, correction camps for non-conformers, or the implementation of totalitarian laws. If three totalitarian laws come into effect before all players gain equal human rights, the players collectively lose.
Of course, not all players have access to all turn options, and it is only through the gaining of rights that a player can gain more freedom on their turn. For example, those who do not have the right to free speech cannot share rally cards with others who do.
Furthermore, every time an action is taken, personal data is leaked to the government. If too much personal data is leaked, the players may face behaviour analysis, which can impact their current position in the game.
I can see why Quantified may not be everyone’s board game choice - political games, even fictional ones, always have the potential to divide opinion. However, I think Quality Beast have put a lot of effort into creating a dystopian game which borders precariously on our own reality, and I live for tabletop games like this.
Players loved it when it featured at PAX Unplugged earlier this year, and I personally am super excited by this game concept. Quantified is still in the design phase at the moment, and interested gamers can sign up to be possible playtesters here.
Do you think political games are a good idea or do they divide tabletops?
"A dystopian game which borders precariously on our own reality!"
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Nope.
Too real and depressing.- add the art style on the image if that is taken from the game it leave me cold as well.
The art looks like a Unicorn vomited all over it
It sounds a bit like Monopoly, largely invented to prove Capitalism doesn’t work. Except it does work. And ironically Monopoly has gone on to earn millions if not billions of dollars. This just sounds like someone trying to “prove” to everyone that neo liberalism doesn’t work. I will make my own mind up about politics and philosophy thanks. And will likely do so using life experience rather than a boardgame. To me this game is dangerously close to the whole “orange man bad” school of thinking, and I can see the game would be very popular with such people. I’m… Read more »
I’m not a betting man but I would wager this isn’t going to be a runaway success.
I mean, monopoly proves perfectly that capitalism naturally weights to monopolies when left unchecked. So it does work in proving you can’t just expect “Free Market” to regulate itself any more than you can expect people to put common good ahead of everything else. Both great C-isms of XXc failed miserably, one just happened to fail 30 years ago instead of now.
No philosophy, if left unchecked, will ever work. But Capitalism has done more for human advancement than anything else simply because it encourages and rewards innovation. And of course the biggest irony is that Capitalism is the reason why the game was so successful.
Capitalism has worked better than any system before or since. The fact that there are inequalities in human societies isn’t necessarily the failing of capitalism, but instead an inherent rule of existence. Ironically, Communism, which sought to expunge all ‘structural’ inequalities from the human experience, set big parts of the world back in a huge way, not even counting the cost in human lives and freedoms. Capitalism, meanwhile, has brought more people from more nations out of poverty than anything in our history. Upon first reading this description, I thought this game might be a satire or a joke. However,… Read more »
Looks like the same artistic style from Yellow submarine
I think this sounds interesting, but I’d definitely want to know more about it before buying (or even playing) it.
Lots of games have a political angle embedded in them, and some of them are overtly political games. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing unless if’s thinly-disguised propaganda.
I quite like the art, but I’d like to see more about the game before making up my mind about whether this is something I’d like to explore.
Except this feels very much like thinly veiled propaganda. Comparing refugees to citizens to try and highlight either an injustice or an inequality sounds like someone trying to push a “world without borders” narrative. Essentially the game sounds like it pushing the idea that a refugee should be granted the same rights as a citizen of country in which they’re seeking refuge when the reality is so much more complicated. Maybe it’s not doing that, however by reading the description of the game here, that’s what it sounds like it’s doing and I am afraid that is propaganda.