Game about Communist rule of Poland

The Queue Board Game

(by Daniel Michaels, The Wall Street Journal) – WARSAW – Shopping in communist Poland was a dreary ordeal of shortages, rationing lines and – if you managed to buy something – Soviet-Bloc dreck [junk]. So Karol Madaj has turned it all into a board game called Queue.

The challenge: Buy everything on your shopping list. Players wait outside empty government stores, fend off line-jumpers and haggle with black marketeers. The 40-page instruction manual warns the game may inspire “tears of exasperation” and “the gnashing of teeth.”

Queue, introduced in 2011, paradoxically proved to be so popular that buyers had to stand in line for hours for one and a black market emerged.

It also inspired a competing game about frustrations of Polish shopping during the 1980s, called You Cut the Line, Sir. Publisher Jaroslaw Basalyga says his goal was to create a game “whose climate and emotions convey the absurdity of those years.”

Polish kids today don’t know how good they’ve got things. Surrounded by candy, electronics and hipster fashion, they live their parents’ old dreams. So an increasing number of adults – who grew up with “chocolate-like product,” lumpy vinyl “Relaks” footwear and a tiny ration of sanitized Warsaw Pact TV cartoons – are out to tell children how bad things were before Poland shed Soviet domination in 1989. …

Post-communist [teachers] are using children’s books, graphic novels and games to inform young people about life in the People’s Republic of Poland, or PRL as it is known by its Polish initials.

Writer Aneta Gornicka-Boratynska, who was born in 1971, tired of her children saying, “We know you had nothing and we have everything.” So she created a children’s book called “Green Oranges, or the PRL for Children.” It is filled with vintage black-and-white photos and narrated by a colorful cartoon girl who explains phenomena like perennially unripe citrus fruit.

The game’s goal is to acquire everything on your shopping list.

“My son can’t imagine life without Lego,” says Ms. Gornicka-Boratynska, whose first visit to a French hypermarket in 1990 was “like seeing something from another planet.” When she was young, farm women would show up at her mother’s Warsaw office selling black-market meat while government butcher shops had nothing.

“Marzi,” a series of graphic novels, recounts author Marzena Sowa’s childhood in the 1980s. It depicts a child’s-eye view of shortages, strikes and martial law that cracked down on the Solidarity trade union. The books are popular across Europe and have been translated into English. …

The success of “Marzi” has surprised Ms. Sowa, since “it’s not about superheroes.” Ms. Sowa started writing while studying in France, at the urging of her French boyfriend, who found her tales fascinating. He illustrates the books. Ms. Sowa, who was 10 when communism ended, now gets invited to speak to school groups about Marzi. She brings yellowing ration cards to show that the history is real. “Kids don’t know how the story ends,” she says.

Creating a fun way to learn about suffering under communism without making communism seem fun entails walking a fine line – even about rationing lines. Queue creator Mr. Madaj, who was born in 1980, spent a year balancing accuracy and amusement. “The first version was boring and nobody wanted to play it,” he recalls.

Making communism’s waning years seem silly is OK, though, since one Polish defense against Soviet oppression was mockery. An explanation of East Bloc consumerism in the Queue instruction booklet includes a poem about rationing lines with the line, “What are you in line for? Old age.”

Mr. Basalyga, who developed You Cut the Line, Sir for the Polish unit of Denmark’s Egmont Media Group, says that for kids today, “the battle for toilet paper or Soviet electronic games is fun in itself.” The game also prompts children to ask their parents questions about the era, he says.

Maciej Gorski, who was born three years after communism ended and grew up hearing about how bad it was, finds Queue fun because of its nuttiness. “The PRL’s end is an easy target of parody, and we mainly talk about it with a wink of the eye,” says Mr. Gorski, who has also studied more serious history, such as Stalin’s brutal imposition of communism on Poland.

Poles can laugh about the 1980s because communism ended peacefully and Poland has prospered. …

People lined up—with faux (imitation) rationing tickets—to buy Queue, a board game about lining up to buy goods in Soviet-era Poland.

Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.

“It’s like under socialism,” quips Andrzej Zawistowski, the institute’s director of public education, who is pushing for a market-based approach. One queue for Queue formed roughly four days before sales began, he said.

The shortage of the game about shortages has even prompted angry letters from consumers for whom it brought back bad memories, says Mr. Madaj. “Some people didn’t appreciate the irony.”

Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. Visit the website at wsj.com.