"Brenda Brathwaite's Train is a table top game that teaches the player about the Holocaust through simple, effective game design."The game Train exists in the nebulous space between board game, art, and social teaching tool. The game is beautifully designed, aesthetically, to reflect the subject material and present only information that is useful to the game's end.
The goal of the game is to fill a car with as many passengers as possible and deliver them to an unnamed destination. You are the train conductor, trying to get all your passengers to the destination safely. When you've reached the destination, you select a card with tells you where you've just delivered your passengers. "Dachau." "Auschwitz."You have just delivered a train full of passengers to a nazi concentration camp. This moment of revelation is really the point of the game, and how the game is handled from this point on reveals the level of understanding the players have. Most players do not mention their destination to the other players, suggesting they are either embarrassed or do not want to ruin the surprise.
The point of creating the game around this reveal is that you have been looking at the game up to this point impersonally. You are a player with a goal, and you do not question the motives for the goal. You participate in a types of systemized killing without having to actually participate. It provides a point of understanding as to how something like this can happen, and how different reactions can then be justified. One woman continued to play, insisting that the train conductor probably had a family to feed and had to keep working in order to keep them alive.
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