Polish board game recreates hardships of Communism (Feature)

By Dominika Maslikowski Feb 4, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Warsaw - Poles will have a chance to go back in time to the Communist days of shortages and food lines with the release on Saturday of a new educational game.

Called 'Kolejka' (queue), the game was created by the state-run National Remembrance Institute to show youths the grim facts of daily life in Poland before the end of Communist rule in 1989.

'All this is supposed to show the realities of Poland in those times - the black market, the long lines, and how one person in a line looked at another as an adversary,' the game's creator, Karol Madaj, told the German Press Agency dpa.

'Even though this game is just numbers and colors, we really tried to get across the climate of that time,' Madaj said.

Players scheme against each other to move ahead in line to secure such basic goods as shoes or loaves of bread.

Each player has a set of cards, which confer certain advantages. One card, which depicts a mother with a child in her arms, allows the holder to move to the front of the queue.

With other cards, a player can transfer goods from one store to another, or shut down a store entirely to thwart opponents' shopping plans.

The game also features a bazaar where players can trade unwanted items or resell store-bought goods at a higher price.

This feature is meant to recreate Poland's flourishing Communist-era black market. During that time, many Poles brought back goods from their travels abroad to re-sell at home at inflated prices.

It's all meant to give young people a realistic image of the times they're too young to remember, Madaj said.

'The idea was to show young people, who have not experienced this, how hard those times were, and what their parents or grandparents had to undergo to buy ordinary everyday items and to shop,' he said.

'It's a game primarily aimed at young people because, as tests show, standing in line or empty shelves is something new and abstract to them.'

The game comes as increasingly affluent Poles can look back more objectively at the past.

Madaj, who is 30, said he was 9 years old when Communist rule ended in Poland, after years of protests by Lech Walesa's Solidarity labour union.

In creating the game, Madaj mostly relied on his own memories of standing in line with his mother. Historians helped to fill in the gaps and make the game as realistic as possible, he said.

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