"I think that you can make a board game about anything", designer Cole Wehrle tells me. "Now, should you make a game about anything? That's an open question."
It's a question many have been asking since January. The catalyst, it seems, was two separate board games, both from Connecticut-based publisher Compass Games. These two historical board games are yet to be released, and each has received some degree of public backlash. Why? Because they recreate two pivotal and extremely painful moments of Irish history.
"You can make great, thought provoking games about real tragedies, but this isn't it"
The first, The Troubles: Shadow War in Northern Ireland 1964-1998, is a strategy game by Scottish secondary school teacher Hugh O'Donnell. It was first announced in 2021, but it saw sudden mainstream media attention in 2026. The coverage has, by and large, not been positive. BoardGameGeek says that The Troubles is expected to release this year, but, after some very critical press coverage in British and Irish media, Compass Games told the BBC in January that the game was "not even close" to its final version.
Multiple victims' groups that support real people affected by the Troubles have said that the board game risks minimizing the suffering of Irish people. However, Compass Games has defended the educational importance of the game. The firm's president Bill Thomas also told the BBC that, while he understood the subject was sensitive, "the people that are yapping and yipping have probably never played an historical board game before."
That defense holds less water when we consider Compass Games' second controversial title. The Great Hunger, a tabletop recreation of the 1845 Irish Famine, began crowdfunding via Kickstarter in January, and has drawn similar criticism from the wider public. Its designer Kevin McPartland, an architecture teacher from Maryland, even went on an Irish radio show to tackle some of these comments. However, just as many critics were themselves tabletop designers, who very much have played historical board games before.
"As an Irish designer, this is deeply disheartening to see", Oakland Games wrote on Bluesky. "Part of the catalyst for founding Old Oak Games was because I saw Irish culture, mythology, and heritage being used as set dressing, or worse, a punchline. You can make great, thought provoking games about real tragedies, but this isn't it."
Renowned designer Amabel Holland also shared criticism via Bluesky. "Setting aside questions of Irish-Americans speaking over the Irish, and his [Kevin McPartland] on-the-record terrible behavior elsewhere (cf. the Māori [Warriors of the Long White Cloud] debacle): this game might be sincere, earnest, and heartfelt but if it is, he demonstrates a deep carelessness that makes him ill-equipped for serious games."
Surrounding these two games is a wider, in-depth debate about what could or should become a board game. And, when a board game based on upsetting real-life events is made, how can it be done respectfully?
I spoke to Wehrle and Holland about their approaches. I also reached out to Compass Games to offer an interview, but the company has not responded.
"Why am I trying to make this game?"
The first step in designing a board game about the worst moments in history is to ask yourself some big questions. "When you set out to create any game", Cole Wehrle tells me, "you should always ask yourself 'Why am I trying to make this game? What am I hoping to accomplish?'"
The answer is deeply personal to each designer.
"For me, it's always been about trying to understand why something happened", Wehrle says. He uses American biographer Robert Caro as an example. "He wrote this series of books on Lyndon Johnson that are incredible, and people have occasionally asked him at interviews 'Why are you writing all these books about a person who's kind of horrible?'"
"When you read the books, you hardly want to hang out with the guy - he's rude, crude, and racist", Wehrle adds. "But there's also something admirable about him. Caro basically said that we want to understand this character - and even sympathize with him - because it helps us understand how power operates at the federal level in the United States."
This is why and how Wehrle has wound up designing board games about historical figures he calls "horrible". He tells me about a Reconstruction era board game he's currently designing, explaining: "Whenever you design historical games, you're always looking for the actors who have agency, and so many of the people who had agency in this period are despicable".
"You want nothing to do with them," he says, "yet understanding the limits of their agency and why they act a certain way is critical to understanding where Reconstruction failed and where it succeeded."
Wehrle also thinks that, with the right intent, this understanding approach can be applied to more modern events - as long as the proper care is taken. "I was talking to somebody about working on games about the current war in Ukraine", he tells me. "Someone said 'is it possible that the game is a little too soon?'." "My general attitude is that games can never be too soon, but they can be too late", he adds. "If you have a game that's genuinely trying to understand the world, and you don't finish it in time for that understanding to help people navigate their current situation, then your game was too late."
Wehrle's philosophy of understanding is a very, very distant cousin of the argument that traditionally justifies upsetting historical board games: education. This is the value with which Compass Games defended both The Troubles and The Great Hunger. It's a purpose The Troubles designer Hugh O'Donnell has spoken at length about online.
For O'Donnell, "historical simulation and games-based learning" are "pedagogical tools that are relatively more effective in cognitive and affective gains in students when compared to traditional and more passive mediums such as books, film, and TV". O'Donnell, in fact, compares historical board games more closely to interactive museums than linear narratives. "Participants are not simply learning historical facts," he says; "they are afforded the opportunity to interrogate and undertake an interpretative approach to history: key characteristics are participant agency and the ability to react and reflect, collectively, on the consequences and results of an event."
"From this agency comes an increased sense of historical identity, the participants' adoption (temporarily) or understanding of the beliefs, values, perspectives, and social roles of people from the past, helping players connect cognitively and affectively with events, encouraging deeper empathy and insight into the complexities of the past", he writes.
"That's not my story to tell"
Amabel Holland, on the other hand, thinks "the educational value of games is not zero, but it is overstated". "Most historical games give you the gloss of history you might get from a History Channel documentary or a high school textbook", she tells me. Unlike Wehrle or O'Donnell, Holland's reason for designing 'difficult' historical games is communicating a message, laying out an argument.
"All art is about people and their relationships to each other and power", she says. "That art is either expressing something about those things, or it reflects the cultural values of the time and place," which in turn "means there has to be a level of thoughtfulness".
"A lot of historical games try to be what they think is neutral, and in doing that, you are echoing an understanding that has been passed down and approved by power," Holland adds. "It leaves things open to interpretation, and more so to misinterpretation."
"If you have an argument, you have a focus, and at that point, you know what you're saying and what you're condemning", she tells me.
Holland explains that her game, This Guilty Land, was deliberate in its depiction of pre-Civil-War America. "I was very careful not to make a game about the institution of slavery or the lived experience of it", she says, "because that's not my story to tell - that's not where my voice is useful". "But I'm making an argument about political discourse, about centrism and compromise, and how that often entrenches oppressive forces and stops progress from happening."
"When dealing with a serious topic, I think it's very important to be clear about what you're expressing", Holland continues. "I spend a lot of time with my doubts, asking 'Should I make this? Why do I want to make this? What do I have to say to contribute to this?'."
"The times when I've come across games on upsetting topics that feel less thoughtful, I feel the creators are not asking those questions, and they don't have a thesis", she says, using The Great Hunger as just one example. "In the discourse around The Great Hunger, people much more knowledgeable than I dove into how it reflects an Irish-American rather than an Irish viewpoint, how it doesn't reflect some of the realities of migration or the tragedy of the event."
Both Wehrle and Amabel touch on the importance of perspective in historical board games. In their view, the lens that players view the events through is integral to representing lived experiences in an authentic, sensitive way. Wehrle seeks the perspective of figures with agency in order to gain the richest understanding of historical events, while Holland limits aims to present perspectives that create a sound, sincere piece of criticism.
O'Donnell, too, stresses the importance of perspective in creating both empathy and criticism. "Many historical games do not just impart historical facts, they encourage critical reimagining and interpretations of the past", he writes in his essay on The Troubles. "But history itself is a constructed and often contested discourse, shaped by power, perspective, and selective memory."
"If it allows students of its discipline to inhabit the world in which they are placed, then simulated histories allow players to be better informed in challenging, probing and understanding the characters that they meet, and assume the identity of", O'Donnell continues. "To do so, we must develop historical empathy by inhabiting the individuals and their perspectives of the socio-cultural structures that formed their opinions and shaped their actions within invariably complex historical situations."
This aligns with many of Wehrle and Holland's thoughts on game design. However, from the birdseye view we've so far had of The Troubles, it's not clear to me exactly how O'Donnell has applied these statements in that game. The Troubles allows players to act as all key institutions involved, from the British Army, to the IRA, to other security forces and paramilitaries. One could argue that's an attempt to capture the situation's complexity - but it may also veer too close to the neutrality Holland warns against.
"Games have a unique ability to help people see systems"
Wehrle, too, marks the dangers of crafting "little empathy engines" that recreate such emotive events. "You have to be very careful, because you are going to be generating feelings of sympathy when those might be against your person".
In Kevin McPartland's interview with RTÉ Radio 1, one caller to the show told him that learning about The Great Hunger board game felt "as if somebody had taken a knife and plunged it into my heart". Gamifying such devastating events invites emotional reactions, especially if, as they have with The Great Hunger and The Troubles, consumers deem these products to commercialize, trivialize, and minimize the suffering of others. For many, making a game about these topics at all is a step too far.
Compass Games and its associated designers have defended their work by attempting to distance it from the usual connotations of the word 'game', with both designers preferring to term their work "historical simulation games". According to O'Donnell: "The label 'game' carries connotations of fun, enjoyment, and that it treats its subject matter in a light and fanciful manner, often at a higher level of abstraction than a simulation."
Holland acknowledges that the abstract parts of a board game leave "less room for emotional investment" when compared with traditional storytelling. But, for her, this has some advantages. "Games literalize everything", she tells me. "Games themselves are systems, and with board games in particular, they are systems with no black box." "There's nothing hiding the mechanics, so you have to understand them in order to play", she explains. "That gives them a unique ability to help people see systems, and create systemic critique. It can help you engage with a historical topic, and talk about why things happen, if done thoughtfully and carefully."
Wehrle goes a step further and says historical board games should embrace the inherent playfulness of the medium. "One thing that's really important to me is a sense of playfulness", he says, "even if things are serious". "I find that so much of the discussion around serious games forgets that levity is an important part of doing serious work." "That silliness lets you drill into the subject a little deeper", he adds. "Serious games, to me, always feel very superficial."
Everyone seems to agree that 'superficial' is exactly the quality that a board game on upsetting subjects should seek to avoid. The trouble is, the degree of levity that a designer (or player) finds acceptable is relative and intensely personal. Even Holland can't quite put her finger on what kinds of historical board games she isn't okay with.
"When I experience a work, I know if it passes my smell test or not, but it's something I struggle to actually tie down", she says. "I think anyone having a reaction and not wanting to engage with those games is perfectly valid."
I ask Holland if there is anything you could never make a board game about. The question gives her pause. "I don't know if I have an answer for that one."
"For example, there have been a number of games made, both commercially and as one-off art pieces, about the Holocaust", she says. "I don't think most of them handle that well, and I have no desire to play them." "I don't feel comfortable with that, but it's a personal thing", Holland adds. "There might be some people whose family lived through it that want to express it in this way, and maybe they'll find a way to do that."
Designers like Holland and Wehrle have proven that board games about upsetting topics can be sensitive and successful. Last year, I praised Molly House, a collaboration between Jo Kelly and Wehrle, for its emotional impact. Holland's This Guilty Land and Wehrle's John Company are equally emotive and thematic.
These games provide more than a surface-level exploration of Terrible Things That Happened. The events are more than set dressing; they are ingrained in the mechanics and framing. These games are emotionally curious, eager to get under the skin of the people and systems they portray. They come with years of research. They examine their biases early. These games do not attempt to be neutral. They are often driven by emotion, whether that be righteous anger or patient understanding. They are not distant from the subject. They do not examine the past as an artifact that can be picked up and put down without feeling its weight.
Such qualities can be difficult to quantify, but they're the make-or-break difference between a thoughtful historical piece and an offensive misunderstanding.