‘Enlighten’ isn’t
quite enlightening enough for players
By
Jamie Rowe
Online Forty-Niner
Editor in Chief
To enlighten: to give spiritual insight to (Merriam Webster).
While the concept behind the creation of the game Enlighten is good, the game
just plain sucks and is a mockery to the religions it’s attempting to
give spiritual insight into.
To win the game, two individual players or two teams of players have to move
their pieces (either a black or white pawn) around the board through six major
religion’s sections and two not so major religious sections. The major
religions included New Religious Movements, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism,
Islam and Buddhism. The other religions are paganism and prehistoric.
To move around the board, players roll an incredibly weird dice. Why is it
weird? Well, it’s six-sided, but has two ones and two threes, instead
of a five or four.
After rolling, players move their pieces clockwise around the board, landing
on numbered circles in each section. The numbers signify the difficulty of
the question that must be answered before a player can move on.
The questions themselves are completely ridiculous. They use trivial information
in a poor attempt to teach players about other religions. Like in the Buddhism
section, “In what year did China invade Tibet and the 14th Dalai Lama
becomes a leader in exile?” This is more of a history lesson than a lesson
about religion.
After going around the board once (players pick which religion’s section
they want to start in), players can move into the Enlighten circle, where they
must name the source, speaker or religion of particular quotes before moving
on the next roll. This might be the only education section of the game, but
quotes mean nothing out of context.
Also on the board are “Life’s Rough Patch” spots, which force
the player who lands on the circle to perform a religious rite of whatever
religion’s section he or she is in, unless they land on a rough patch
in the paganism, prehistoric or enlighten areas, the other player or team gets
to choose from a book.
The rites include Buddhism’s three prostrations, Christianity’s
genuflecting, Judaism’s Shabbat prayer, Hinduism’s lotus position
and om prayer and Islam’s “Sufi whirling dervish dance and chanting
the 99 names of Allah,” (of which they only use three names).
This game can be equated with something sold on MadTV’s Spishak commercials.
This game is a stupid way to educate a person about a religion. It’s
like creating a game about races filled with stereotypes.
On top of the flippant questions, the instructions for the game are incredibly
difficult to understand. A newsroom full of college students couldn’t
figure out this game. I don’t think teenagers (the game is for 16 and
up) will want to spend the time to figure it out.
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