Vi Är Ej Maskiner (2025)
2 - 3 persone
15 - 30 min
0+
Al momento questo prodotto non è disponibile presso nessun venditore.
Descrizione: Vi är ej maskiner ("We Are Not Machines") is a fast-paced, knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth-type game about the great miner’s strike at the ore fields (Malmfälten) of Norrbotten, Sweden, 1969-1970.
Over the course the game, players engage in a political power struggle to organize and manage the massive wildcat strike that broke out on December 9, 1969, when about 4800 miners at Loussavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag’s (LKAB) mines in Kiruna, Svappavaara and Malmberget, supported by dockworkers at LKAB’s shipping ports, Narvik and Luleå, halted work for 57 days.
The primary aim of this game is to capture the tensions in collective efforts to organize extra-parliamentary action against capital in the years leading up to the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s and 1980s. To this end, players in this game assume the roles of social democrats, unionists and communists - members of the strike committee who are, in principle, on the same side, but internally split - in an effort to build and maintain a united front against LKAB (the company/management) and the state.
Mechanically, players are at once allies and rivals: on the one side, they must cooperate to prevent LKAB from breaking the strike by exploiting their own internal conflicts, diverging interests and ideological disunity; on the other side, players must use their cunning to individually pursue their own political and ideological agendas in order to win the game. In other words, players are neither social democrats nor unionists or communists, ideologically diverged but politically aligned, and they must bicker, negotiate, coordinate and carefully organize against their oppressors. Yet they must do so without stirring up too much internal conflict to be exploited by the company.
I made this game because I sometimes feel like I was born in the wrong century: born too late to be part of the struggle between labor and capital; born too soon to be a teenage star influencer on social media; born just in time to experience the final stages of planetary collapse under late capitalism. I wanted a game that simultaneously told stories from the side of labor rather than capital. Today, notions of social progress, revolution and class struggle have been replaced by the cursory nomenclature of culture wars, trivial influencer activism and blunt awareness campaigns. No regular, middle-class wage slave, nor any lifestyle-politician or head of government in the global north truly believes in revolution beyond the market. Indeed, they cannot imagine any alternative to capitalism. Nor do they consider any notion of social progress beyond the technological inventions of new apps, synthetic food, anti-obesity prescription drugs, decarbonized electric cars, solar panels and vertical farming. The Western world wants commodities at the expense of life, order before justice.
But what seems to be forgotten today in our crisis of democracy and collective amnesia in the West is that the threat of revolution forced the ruling classes to extend political rights to larger sections of the population. Class war, a term today replaced by superficial culture wars and identity politics, pushed the bourgeoisie to consider wages as an investment rather than a cost, making real material changes to the living conditions of ordinary, working people. But I also had more banal reasons to make this game, simply to convey a fraction of Scandinavian economic history, which is predominantly marginalized in board gaming.
What I hope to show with this game is that without collective organization, struggle and the idea of revolution, strikes, riots, national liberation struggles, even the labor movement’s reformist choreographies with capital, by which compromises were made with the ruling classes, would have made no sense at all. This game revives a historical, somewhat nostalgic fraction of European revolts in the latter half of the 20th century; movements that were crushed, from Paris 1968 to Bologna 1977, together with the notion of revolution during the 1980s, buried and forgotten in the neoliberal hellscape we inhabit today.
—description from the designer
Over the course the game, players engage in a political power struggle to organize and manage the massive wildcat strike that broke out on December 9, 1969, when about 4800 miners at Loussavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag’s (LKAB) mines in Kiruna, Svappavaara and Malmberget, supported by dockworkers at LKAB’s shipping ports, Narvik and Luleå, halted work for 57 days.
The primary aim of this game is to capture the tensions in collective efforts to organize extra-parliamentary action against capital in the years leading up to the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1970s and 1980s. To this end, players in this game assume the roles of social democrats, unionists and communists - members of the strike committee who are, in principle, on the same side, but internally split - in an effort to build and maintain a united front against LKAB (the company/management) and the state.
Mechanically, players are at once allies and rivals: on the one side, they must cooperate to prevent LKAB from breaking the strike by exploiting their own internal conflicts, diverging interests and ideological disunity; on the other side, players must use their cunning to individually pursue their own political and ideological agendas in order to win the game. In other words, players are neither social democrats nor unionists or communists, ideologically diverged but politically aligned, and they must bicker, negotiate, coordinate and carefully organize against their oppressors. Yet they must do so without stirring up too much internal conflict to be exploited by the company.
I made this game because I sometimes feel like I was born in the wrong century: born too late to be part of the struggle between labor and capital; born too soon to be a teenage star influencer on social media; born just in time to experience the final stages of planetary collapse under late capitalism. I wanted a game that simultaneously told stories from the side of labor rather than capital. Today, notions of social progress, revolution and class struggle have been replaced by the cursory nomenclature of culture wars, trivial influencer activism and blunt awareness campaigns. No regular, middle-class wage slave, nor any lifestyle-politician or head of government in the global north truly believes in revolution beyond the market. Indeed, they cannot imagine any alternative to capitalism. Nor do they consider any notion of social progress beyond the technological inventions of new apps, synthetic food, anti-obesity prescription drugs, decarbonized electric cars, solar panels and vertical farming. The Western world wants commodities at the expense of life, order before justice.
But what seems to be forgotten today in our crisis of democracy and collective amnesia in the West is that the threat of revolution forced the ruling classes to extend political rights to larger sections of the population. Class war, a term today replaced by superficial culture wars and identity politics, pushed the bourgeoisie to consider wages as an investment rather than a cost, making real material changes to the living conditions of ordinary, working people. But I also had more banal reasons to make this game, simply to convey a fraction of Scandinavian economic history, which is predominantly marginalized in board gaming.
What I hope to show with this game is that without collective organization, struggle and the idea of revolution, strikes, riots, national liberation struggles, even the labor movement’s reformist choreographies with capital, by which compromises were made with the ruling classes, would have made no sense at all. This game revives a historical, somewhat nostalgic fraction of European revolts in the latter half of the 20th century; movements that were crushed, from Paris 1968 to Bologna 1977, together with the notion of revolution during the 1980s, buried and forgotten in the neoliberal hellscape we inhabit today.
—description from the designer