Cardboard Genocide: Board Game Design as a Tool in Holocaust Education

In "Cardboard Genocide: Board Game Design as a Tool in Holocaust Education," the authors make the case that designing board games, rather than playing them, offers an effective pedagogical route into local Holocaust history. They begin from the observation that the Holocaust has long been largely absent from game culture, a scarcity they attribute to the perception of games as trivial, to restrictions on Nazi imagery, and to pressure from memory custodians. Only two board games are identified as directly addressing the genocide, and the authors argue that the medium's growing narrative capacity now makes Holocaust-themed games a viable form of memory education.

The central obstacle the document identifies is ethical rather than technical. Player agency in Holocaust games risks implying that victims were responsible for their fates, while assigning players the roles of perpetrators or heroic rescuers invites distortion. The latter is especially fraught in Poland, where the heroic-rescuer narrative aligns with official memory that downplays local participation in murders. The authors draw on Bodnar's distinction between official and vernacular memory to frame their intervention as an effort to move students from a passive archive of textbook knowledge toward an active, embodied repertoire of memory.

The empirical basis is a two-day workshop in Radecznica, a Polish village where residents took part in killings at the Second Pits site. Fourteen middle school students aged 15 to 16 designed games on neutral hiding, escape, or smuggling themes and then re-themed them around local history. Teams replaced winning with surviving, reduced player agency, and avoided active antagonists, and the authors report strong emotional engagement, though long-term effects were not verified. They attribute the difficulty of such games to a dissonance between competitive game mechanics and trauma-centered Holocaust memory. While the authors present curated design as generalizable, the evidence rests on a single local event.