Università degli Studi di Torino

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.

• Mauro Mola's DiGRA 2025 paper documents the design of a card-driven simulation board game on the Resistance in Turin (1943–1945), built from city archives and the Istoreto institute's materials and publicly presented in April 2025 for the 80th anniversary of the city's liberation.
• The game's central aim is to test whether board game design can enhance cultural heritage by telling a local wartime story in an unconventional, playful form.
• A survey of 69 video and board games set in Italy during World War II found that about 90 percent focus on the Italian Campaign in southern and central Italy, with Piedmont almost absent and no game set in Turin.