Game Preview: Fair Play

by Andrea “Liga” Ligabue & W. Eric Martin
August 3, 2007

Publisher: Pangea - Niente Troppo (See below)
Designer: Andrea Angiolino
Artwork: Valeria De Caterini
Players: 2-6
Ages: 11+
Playing Time: 90 minutes
Languages: Italian, Greek, Maltese, Portugese & Czech
Release Date: September 2007

Andrea Angiolino is best known for the Wings of War series of games from Fantasy Flight and Nexus, but he’s designed more than twenty other games as well, many of which lie far afield of aircraft combat. Fair Play just might be the most obvious example of such a game.

"I was contacted by Pangea - Niente Troppo, an Italian fair trade organization, to design a game that could help to explain the state of the cotton market,” says Angiolino. “In all the travel that the cotton does from a seed in a remote field to the T-shirt you are wearing, many things can be done to have a less polluting and fairer process.”

With everyone in the game competing to be the first to create cotton products in the best way possible, player interaction is inevitable—and cooperation almost essential. “If everyone goes his own way, the risk is that the state of the Earth will get so messy that everybody will lose the game,” says Angiolino.

As for this style of game, Angiolino says, “I am used to designing boardgames that tell stories, that are very involving. ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi,’ said Gustave Flaubert, and I could say ‘Lothar von Richthofen, it’s me!’ Several of my boardgames are just a different way of telling dark stories of medieval struggles between rising feuds or, say, rewriting the story of Ulysses. Sometimes my games are not novels but essays: I design games for teaching, advertising, promotion and such. I am happy to have done this one, with a message that I believe is correct and useful. And I’m also happy to have a game translated in several unusual languages: It’s the first time that something of mine is officially published in Maltese!”

Yes, Pangea - Niente Troppo is releasing Fair Play in cooperation with the Gaia Education Centre (in Greece), the Koperattiva Kummerc Gust (in Malta), Reviravolta (in Portugal), and the Society for Fair Trade and Development Education (in the Czech Republic). They aren’t the usual suspects in terms of game publication, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Fair Play won’t be on sale at Spiel 07. If you want to pick up a copy, you’ll need to do a little traveling of your own. Dress light…

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	Inside the “box”

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