Teaching International Politics with Board Games

Allan Wilford is a professor of political science at Anderson University in South Carolina. His teaching interests include international law, comparative politics, research methods, international relations, and Western European politics. Allan has published original articles on the determinants of voter turnout in peer reviewed journals including Social Science Quarterly, European Politics and Society, European Political Science, and Politics and Policy. When he is not teaching, Allan likes to play board games.

Over the last two decades, the board game industry has expanded beyond all recognition, going from staple family games such as Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble to becoming an industry that employs thousands of people and creates thousands of products every year. This success is epitomized with games such as Wingspan, which was initially released in 2019 has gone on to sell over 1.3 million copies worldwide and was interestingly designed by a health policy analyst. Successes such as Wingspan mean that hundreds of board games are released each year, covering topics ranging from industrial capitalism in England (Brass Birmingham) to halting a raging pandemic (Pandemic) to cattle ranching management in the Great Plains (Great Western Trail).

For the political scientists, this richness means there are many games with overtly political themes relevant to our discipline. Classic political board games include Watergate, Tammany Hall, and the German parliamentary experience that is Die Macher. This resource eschews these broader political games, to instead, focus on five board games more closely connected to international politics. These five games are respectively Andean Abyss, Crescent Moon, Guerilla Checkers, Spirit Island, and Twilight Struggle. What these board games all have in common is a focus on strategy, player cooperation, asymmetry and all have topics and design elements relevant to students of international politics.

The ability for students to engage in active learning has long been recognized as incredibly useful for learning (see, for example, Freeman et al. 2014; Michaelson et al. 2004; Prince 2004). The modern board game is a potentially useful tool to tease-out and discuss political themes in the classroom, so I have encouraged and experimented with board games as a teaching tool for the last few years. The benefits are somewhat obvious. Firstly, any ‘hands-on’ experience likely engages students more fully in the classroom, more so than say a traditional lecture. This tactile and shared experience has the potential to more fully engage students and tease-out the concepts we are trying to teach. For example, the first game I cover in this resource, Andean Abyss, covers the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Colombia during the 1990s. This board game allows students to learn about asymmetrical warfare, guerilla war, terrorist groups, Cold War politics, ideologies of the region, and so on. Spirit Island can help students learn about colonialism, cooperative strategy making, and indigenous peoples’ experiences of colonization. The themes and game strategies employed in modern board games provide a rich mine for exploring important themes in international politics.

This pamphlet is organized as follows. I cover five board games directly and all are potentially useful as teaching aids for undergraduate students in international politics classes. Each board game is separated into a number of sections which include a description of the game alongside a number of connected learning goals. These learning goals are, of course, not exhaustive but may help instructors incorporate these games into particular courses. I also include a longer descriptive section on each game and its appropriateness in a classroom setting. Next, I include a sample assessment for each game. I end with my observations on how to make the game work in a classroom setting, where I offer suggestions and my experience of playing the game to help instructors incorporate that particular board game into the class setting.

I hope this resource is of some use to the teaching community. The games included are but a small fraction of the number of potential board games that could be incorporates into a political science classroom. However, this just scratched the surface and I hope this encourages instructors to incorporate these fascinating learning tools into their classrooms more frequently.