Playing World War II: Designing a Simulation Game on the Resistance in Turin in Collaboration with the Historical Archive

Mauro Mola's paper, presented at DiGRA 2025, describes the design of a simulation board game about the Resistance in Turin between 1943 and 1945. Produced as part of a doctoral project at the University of Turin on the relationship between game design and cultural heritage, the game draws on materials from the city's historical archives and on the Piedmont Institute for the History of Resistance and Contemporary Society (Istoreto), and was publicly presented in April 2025 for the 80th anniversary of Turin's liberation. The central aim is to test whether board game design can serve as a tool for enhancing cultural heritage by telling a local wartime story in an unconventional, playful form.

The paper situates the project within a survey of 69 video and board games set in Italy during World War II. Roughly 90 percent of these focus on the Italian Campaign in southern and central Italy, and Piedmont and Turin are almost absent: only one board game and one video game are set in the region, and none in Turin. The author notes that Turin was an industrial and administrative center for the Axis rather than a site of major battles, yet it became a significant hub of anti-fascist mobilization through strikes, protests, and sabotage that continued until the Allies arrived in spring 1945.

The game itself is a cooperative-competitive, card-driven design with influence placement, loosely inspired by Twilight Struggle. Four or five anti-fascist parties, including Communists, Socialists, Catholics, Intellectuals, and the Partito d'Azione, must build a clandestine network across city neighborhoods and factories through propaganda, then confront the Nazi occupiers in a second phase. Neighborhoods carry defense values reflecting their location and the historical strength of the regime there. Mechanics are deliberately unbalanced, with stronger Fascist cards, unfavorable dice odds, and unpredictable event draws, to convey the uncertainty and constant risk of discovery, betrayal, and arrest that anti-fascists faced.

The paper is primarily a design-rationale account rather than an empirical study, so it offers no playtesting data, player feedback, or evaluation of the game's educational effectiveness. Its contribution lies in documenting how archival research, historiographical sources, and game mechanics were combined to represent a local, civilian-centered history.