Can You Survive the Apocalypse?: A Revelatory Board Game (Charlotte Hutchinson)

Can You Survive the Apocalypse?: A Revelatory Board Game


Charlotte Hutchinson
            A key theme of “Stories from the End of the World” has been the different forms narratives surrounding apocalyptic events can take. Whether they be religious texts, fictional movies, or short stories, each work we have studied has adopted a unique perspective on the end of the world. For my project, I decided to develop my own creative spin on how apocalypses unfold by inventing a board game. Inspired in part by the game of Candyland but fundamentally altered to include various apocalyptic motifs, “Can You Survive the Apocalypse” draws on the Revelation of Paul and other elements of divine intervention.
            The game begins with a natural disaster. A massive asteroid has crashed into the Earth’s surface, immediately killing most of humanity and rendering large swaths of the planet uninhabitable. A small group of survivors find one another and set out to survive the apocalypse, albeit not necessarily working together. The game is played with three to six players, with everyone beginning at the start of the board. The order of play is determined by age – the game begins with the youngest player making the first move and ends with the oldest. The goal of the game is to survive all the apocalyptic events that unfold across the board and be the first one to reach “the New Jerusalem” at the finish line.
Each turn begins by the player selecting a random “move card” ranging from one to four that determines how far along the board he will move. The board consists of blue, purple, brown, and black position squares. Blue squares are “rest” positions. If a player lands on a blue square, their turn concludes and the next player draws a move card. Purple squares are “power up” positions. When a player lands on a purple square, he draws a bonus card from the purple pile, which includes beneficial moves such as “find new provisions – move three squares forward.” Each bonus card is designed to reflect a condition or supply that may prove helpful in surviving the apocalypse, as articulated in the CDC’s “Zombie Preparedness” manual.[1] In contrast, brown squares mark “setback” positions. If a player lands on a brown square, he must draw a card from the brown pile that hurts their positioning in some way. Consequences include “followed the wrong directions to the safe house – lose your next turn.” Similar to the purple bonus cards, these brown cards were created with adverse events that might occur during a zombie apocalypse in mind.
The final element of the game are black squares. If a player lands on a black square, he must return to the beginning of the game. If he lands on two black squares before reaching “The Rapture,” he must take the longer and more arduous “earthbound route,” whereas those who avoid the black squares are allowed to be raptured and take a shorter, heavenly route to the end of the game. If a player lands on three black squares before The Rapture, he is eliminated from the game and is condemned to the “lake of fire,” as described in the judgment of the dead in Revelation.[2] Before the lost player enters the lake of fire, however, he is reborn for one turn as a zombie; during the zombie turn, he is entitled to strip one of the surviving players of their next turn.
Although not entirely obvious at first glance, many elements of the design of the game have been informed by imagery used in Revelation. For example, the coloring of each of the position squares was deliberately designed to illustrate their purposes. The blue “rest” squares and purple “power-up” positions push the player forward towards the New Jerusalem; as a result, they were chosen to be jewel tones to reflect that “the foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone.”[3] Similarly, the disastrous black squares were designed to reflect tragedy and death. Furthermore, there are four black squares on the board before a player reaches the Rapture. The four black squares are designed to signify the four horsemen of the apocalypse.[4] The symbolic coloring of the board carries through to the end of the game, where the finish line is written in golden yellow and orange hues and the New Jerusalem is illustrated in yellow, both in reference to the city’s construction out of “pure gold.”[5]
The religious connotations of the game are not solely limited to elements from the Revelation of John. The Rapture that occurs in the middle of the board is a direct reference to the evangelical belief in a divine intervention manifesting itself as a rapture of worthy individuals. Its inclusion in the game’s design served two purposes. First, it creates a bridge between old and new Christian doctrine around the apocalypse in the plot, thereby creating a sense of timelessness. Second, it allows the game’s plot to diverge while still allowing both paths to end at the New Jerusalem. Although the longer, more arduous path remains on earth whereas the easier path temporarily ascends to heaven, it has the same conclusion – the potential to survive and reach the new Jerusalem. The duality of the board embodies the Christian ideal of redemption and the mercy of God.
Although the board game draws heavily on apocalyptic motifs from Revelation and more recent evangelical concepts of divine intervention, the board game deliberately ignores more modern, popular culture elements of apocalypses. Zombies are involved in a minor role in the rules, but such a utilization is inspired more by an early Christian understanding of the second coming of Jesus Christ resurrecting the dead.[6] Instead of more contemporary motifs of aliens, viral infections, and nuclear apocalypses, the board game focuses on more traditional religious understandings of apocalypse. This decision was informed by the very nature of a board game, which involves a beginning, end, and a clear winner. Because the Revelation of John heavily discusses the punishment of sinners and the rewarding of worthy individuals, it serves as a terrific foundation for developing a board game. Such a clear plot trajectory is not necessarily apparent in more recent apocalypses, particularly in discussions surrounding climate change and a potential climate apocalypse, in which there may be no survivors. Given such considerations, the board game focused on more religious apocalyptic motifs, culminating in its appropriate name – “Can You Survive the Apocalypse?”

[1] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm.
[4] Ibid., 6:1-7.
[5] Ibid., 21:18.
[6] As discussed in section, November 18th, 2019.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Proximity, Photographs, and Podcasts (Nyla Brewster, Sruthi Palaniappan, and Sahar Mohammadzadeh)

Image
Proximity, Photographs, and Podcasts Nyla Brewster, Sruthi Palaniappan, and Sahar Mohammadzadeh Podcast link:  podcast INTRODUCTION For our final project, our team decided to compose our own apocalypse using the mediums of comparative photography and podcasts. Throughout the course, several apocalyptic themes and motives have been studied, from robotics, environmental, nuclear, and even religious. Countless authors and artists have chosen to represent their interpretations of the end of the world through a multitude of different media, ranging anywhere from videos, paintings, cultures, and literature interpretations. Although there exists great diversity in the way individuals believe the end of the world will occur and even more so through the mediums through which they are depicted, there stands one common mysterty between all hypotheses about the apocalypse: when will it occur? The timeline and proximity of the end of the world ranges dramatically, but u...
Read more

[Untitled] (Emma Kay)

[Untitled] Emma Kay Maybe you’ve caught the plague. You’re not sure, really. Since lunch your vision has been going fuzzy at the edges. You hammer on the up button, listening to your building’s elevator slowly descends. The grinding stops. You check the panel. Ninth floor. Ages before it’ll get to you. Sinking to the carpeted lobby floor, you let your head rest against your knees. No one is in the lobby to see, and you are too heavy. The elevator dings. You startle, stumbling to your feet. It must be only a few seconds since you sat down. It’s still dark outside. You slide into the elevator and huddle in the back corner.  Getting out on your floor, you fumble with your keys. Your door key has a distinctive metal triangle at the end. You know what it looks like, but you can’t find it. The keys are on the floor. You pick them up. The door key glints in the dim incandescence of the hall. You let yourself in.  As soon as you flip on the lights, you stumble into you...
Read more

[Untitled] (Christopher Dolce)

[Apocalyptic Story (Untitled)] Christopher Dolce He couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong; there existed this lull state of confusion that only seemed to be getting worse as the “miracle” progressed.   The people who were once awaiting a final liberation from war now seemed to have regressed into a catatonic stupor—unable to perceive the great changes happening to the world around them.   In a great metamorphosis, the last remnants of society were supplanted by a verdant paradise.   A lavish and undisturbed landscape blossomed.   Great deserts reverted to their aqueous beginnings.   The fires of war that had raged for decades had been reduced to ashes—their decaying cinders left as perhaps the only remnants of a past whose people would be no more.   Yet Jim persisted. The genesis of such an innocent world came suddenly.   Only a few months before, Jim Evans, a middle-aged retired army veteran and single father of a 6 year old girl, Evelyn, ...
Read more