I recently found an article on
Transgender Representation in Board Games. When I first saw it, I thought, 'I'm not sure how to represent any particular demographic in board games. For example, when I play
Power Grid, there are different coloured pieces for each player. There's no gender involved in that in any way!'
What I was forgetting was story-driven games, such as
Betrayal at House on the Hill. Apparently, I still suffer the old person mindset of someone who grew up in the 80s with games like
Balderdash,
Scotland Yard, and
Trivial Pursuit, along with still-popular classics such as
Monopoly,
Sorry, and
Scrabble. These games have only colours, no characters at all. Even games that
did include characters, like
Cluedo/Clue, the characters were not a big part of game play. Although I always knew that the yellow pawn, for example, represented Colonel Mustard, it never felt like I was playing him as a character in the game. The disassociation between the characters and the game itself was pretty strong.
The only game I can think of that really involved gender at all was
Life, which boiled everything down to incredibly abstract concepts of 'pink pegs and blue pegs.' There were a lot of games that used characters from existing franchises, such as
Star Wars and other movies.
So perhaps I can be forgiven for not immediately thinking of character-based games.
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