A game where culture wins

The atmosphere in the hall of the Donghu community in Beijing's Chaoyang district on Sept 11 was bristling. Forty people, ranging in age from 20-somethings to septuagenarians, were divided into groups of four, each group engrossed a board game.

It is a game that tests their knowledge of culture and history and casts a keen eye on the future. Players are given scenarios that challenge their ability to ensure good governance.

The game, A Great Nation's Dream, requires them to act as administrative figures to build a country in different scenarios while learning to apply the policies and theories of the Communist Party of China via series of questions and answers.

Pushing her glasses higher up on her nose, senior citizen Feng Xiulan took her time to carefully read what was written on the card in her hand before solemnly moving her pieces across the board. Her next move saw her sending specialists to oversee a construction project facilitated by high technology. "I never imagined myself playing a posh board game. My first experience is a good one," she says with a smile.

The game, launched in August, was produced by Xinhua Bookstore. The idea was conceived last April, during a brainstorming meeting of 20 insiders from various industries about the potential of creative cultural products. After much discussion came the decision to produce a board game, according to Zhou Guangyao, a marketing chief of Xinhua Bookstore.

Many of those present observed that board games remain a popular indoor pastime among young people, and that might prove to be an effective method for people to learn more about the nation by, for instance, implementing policies like a good provincial chief, as well as providing information on such issues as patriotism, culture and political theory, among other things, through gameplay.

The process of creating the game itself was "a happy dreamlike experience", according to Chen Minlu, 31, a co-founder of Beijing-based Gstone, an online board game community set up in 2018, which designed and created A Great Nation's Dream.

To ensure quality design, the community gathered three teams to develop it. Four versions were showcased at five board game conventions, during which time more than 1,000 gamers test-played it over the course of 300-odd rounds of evaluations.

"Throughout the process we argued, fought and even screamed at each other over terminology, rules and game mechanics, yet we still felt good challenging each other. When seeing the testers' smiles, we were very content, like that we were all sharing the same dream," Chen says, who adds that in the game, all people, Chinese as default, work together to advance modernization in fields such as education, culture, social insurance and many other areas to attain harmony and happiness for all.