This Guilty Land

Game Design: Tom Russell Art: Cole Wehrle Hex Number: 36 Duration: 45 minutes Players: 2 Solitaire Suitability: High Theme: Politics MSRP: $60.00 I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but by blood. This Guilty Land is about the political struggle over slavery in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Its central premise is that the war was the only way to achieve abolition: the slave states never would have willingly given up the practice, nor would it have worked itself out at some point down the road. This is a story of how the systems that democracies use to solve problems - debate and legislation - utterly failed in the face of an undeniable moral evil, of how that evil was defended by those systems, and of how calls for compromise only strengthened it and delayed the reckoning that had to come. In this game, each player acts on behalf of an abstract idea - Justice and Oppression - with one player working for abo