Promesa
Voicing Counter-Colonialism Through Board Game Creation
Most contemporary board and card games set in Puerto Rico depict the island during the European colonialist era. The narrative of European colonialism is told over and over again in a whitewashed and even romanticized manner. Meanwhile, people in the United States have a very limited understanding of the hopes and struggles of present-day Puerto Ricans. The objective of this project is to amplify these voices through game design and create a board game that challenges narratives of colonialism and foregrounds Puerto Rican voices and lived experiences.
In the Summer of 2018, Mikael Jakobsson, Rik Eberhardt and Aziria Rodrigez led an ideation and concept development workshop at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico and a design workshop at MIT. At these events, Puerto Ricans, game designers, students, and others interested in counter-colonial game design shared their ideas and experiences, and created game concepts. After the workshops, Mikael and Rik continued developing and playtesting one of the concepts and in 2020, Graphic Novel artist Rosa Colón joined the team to work on illustrations and graphic design for the game Promesa.
Promesa is a cooperative board game for all ages about the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. One to six players take on the role of the local government in Puerto Rico with the task of getting rid of the debt before the archipelago succumbs to natural catastrophes. Players make strategic and tactical choices about investments in infrastructure, education, and social services while trying to keep the debt from spiraling out of control.
The game begins with one player attempting to balance a large number of black gems on a convex silicone pad and place it at the center of the board which has an illustration of Puerto Rico on it. The pad is blue and represents one of the Fema tarps that covered many houses that had had their roofs blown off by hurricane Maria nine months before the workshop in San Juan. The default player action is to make an investment, this is represented by drawing two gems from a bag. The player decides which of the gems to invest (green for social services, yellow for infrastructure, and blue for education).
When players invest in infrastructure, they unlock other actions related to debt management that players can take instead of investing in subsequent turns. Every time players make investments, manage the debt, or take political actions to cancel the debt, they have to pass a dexterity skill-test. This involves adding or removing gems from the tarp without any gems falling onto the board. The shapes and materials of the game components are chosen to make the skill-tests precarious, bordering on outright nightmarish. This is the core of the gameplay experience, and represents the struggle that all Puerto Ricans are only too familiar with and refer to as “la brega.”
Links
MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology: Rosa Colón – Visiting Artist
MIT News: A new board game highlights the colonized experience
Popular Science: You’ll need to solve Puerto Rico’s debt crisis to win this new board game
