amy pickles Builds a Card Game About Reaching Consensus
Dissenting Decisions, a work in progress, had a session at the Rijksakademie's [untitled games event] in Amsterdam on Sept. 18.
amy pickles has shown Dissenting Decisions, a work-in-progress card game about how groups reach consensus. A session ran at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam on Sept. 18, during the first [untitled games event] weekender, with players cast as a fictional collective of cultural workers.
Each player draws a secret character card that sets their social influence and their attitude toward group decisions. Vibe cards then change the mood at the table, and chance and event cards limit what the group can say. Three to six players get 90 minutes, about the length of a real meeting, to agree. The project page carries a tagline: "Without us there is nothing but stagnation."
pickles is a Rijksakademie resident and a member of Varia, a collective in Rotterdam. The game was shown alongside more than 10 other works at the weekender, and the series updates at untitledgamesevent.nl, a growing body of experiemental games work for the city.
For more reading, see our coverage of Bloc by Bloc, a board game about modern uprisings, and the Dissenting Decisions project page.
Killscreen looks for the games that treat a meeting, a ballot or a march as playable form, and makes the case for them. The Radar newsletter delivers the best of that search free, three times a week.
