There is a board game that I am not writing called something along the lines of Take it With You. This board game (that does not exist) is usually introduced to you by your board-game-friend who describes it as a sort of “anti-board-game”. It’s reviled by people who love board games, and loved by people who love experiences.
In this game, that I have not written, players live out an entire life around a table. They make business decisions, they may raise families, they develop and test faiths that can’t be tracked on anything physical. Eventually, each and every player dies and then the game is over.
What I like about this game (that hasn’t been written) is that it has secret information. Before the game begins, there are a number of properties randomly determined. The most important one is a binary choice: is there an afterlife?
Players won’t find out for sure until after the game ends. There are certain tech trees you can follow that can provide hints and suggest certain odds. One strategy that players cannot use, because this game does not exist, is going down the medical pathway and then committing heinous, Flatliners style experiments to get glimpses of what lies after. Nothing is ever certain, but it can help inform your choices. And, of course, there is also a “Divine Revelation” card promised to be shuffled somewhere in the cards.
The player who draws that card is shown, without a doubt, that there is or is not an afterlife. Which is tricky, because you can spend the whole game searching for that card and theres no guarantee it will ever show up. What's worse, is that when another player claims to have drawn it instead, theres no guarantee they're lying. Unfortunately, due to the end-game rules, when they say you have to pay them in-game currency for a better position in heaven, there's no guarantee they're lying about that, either. Thats a real possibility for how the afterlife might work when the game is over and you're tallying it all up.
What I really like most about this fictional game, though, is that at the end its very possible you will find out the afterlife is real, and everyone will count up their victory points and compare who had the highest moral score and figure out, mathematically, who won at life. Everyone will shake hands and say things like "i'm glad the writers of this rulebook gave us a clear way to know who is good and who is a loser" and “you really knew more about early game investment strategies than the rest of us”, and then they’ll clean the game up while they say things like “do you want to take the rest of this bottle of wine back home with you? oh look, this bag of chips didn’t even get opened” and everyone will go home and watch tv.
But, sometimes, not always, not even usually, but sometimes, everyone will get to the end of the game and find out there is no afterlife. All those choices you made to prioritize gaining morality points over wealth options? All those times you stuck with a bad deal because the only penalty for betraying a friend’s trust is a lower karma score? All for nothing, it seems. And someone will say “so who won?” and theyll check the rulebook and find out the only way to win is to have the most karma while in heaven or the most money while in heaven or the most children while in heaven. And someone will say “but there is no heaven?” and someone will say “so all this was for nothing? we just sat around, moving around pieces on a game board and agreeing they had conceptual value? just for it to be over?” and someone else will say “well, i ended with the most money, so i feel like i won” and someone else will say “ … ” because a whole room not responding is still a response.
And then they will drive home while (ideally) (if this game did its job) continuing to be mad at the game for wasting their night but also, in spite of this loathsome game, thinking about how much fun they had drinking wine and not eating chips with their friends.