A great idea here that will provide hours of entertainment for Burners.
Johan the Dome Guy is a 20-year veteran of Burning Man, he has built many of the fabulous domes we’ve all enjoyed.
The idea behind the Burning Man Board Game is to have fun, and maybe learn a bit about Burner culture at the same time. You can use actual MOOP for game pieces.
The game has interactive elements, like “everybody bump the thermostat on your A/C up 5 degrees”, which will have a flow on effect on the Playa.
The game is being created as a reward on Kickstarter to help raise funds for some of the larger camps. Backers of the project can choose which camp they want to support with their donation. This follows the tradition of camps like SK8 selling skateboards and hoodies with the Burning Man logo, but is nowhere near the blatant commodification of Fest300 making Burning Man promotional videos with 10 seconds of their logo in them.
A Burner who has played the game several times already told us “it’s fun to play, and I don’t like board games”.
Fun, right – that’s what this is all about? Art and enjoyment. All of us participating together, to amuse and entertain each other. Not money, not corporate power. Decommodification, not DECOMMODIFICATION LLC. Word is BMOrg are in an emergency crisis meeting right now about this game. Let’s hope they don’t try to shut it down. Last year they said they were teaming up with Indiegogo and Kickstarter to support Burning Man artists…how’s that coming along?
Find out more at the Burning Man Board Game Kickstarter page.
There is some discussion about the game at Reddit. Apparently some Burners think no camp should ever be allowed to use anything related to Burning Man in their fundraisers. This is different from Burning Man’s policy, though.
I would rather play this game than Caravancicle’s Burner Bingo…but to each their own. Cards Against Humanity released their game under the Creative Commons license, you can download it for free. This might be a good way for Burning Man The Board Game to go. Perhaps even an open source version, where Burners can come up with their own cards and share them.