The Road --- Creative Project

Title: Carry the Fire

Player(s) should be metaphorically “carrying the fire.” The idea is to protect and keep your fire throughout the game and stay alive.

The Board

Approximately a 4 by 3 foot board. Two inch squares that extend around the board to form a swirly path. The beginning point is titled “Darkness” and the end point is titled “The End of the Road.” Every few spaces reads “Draw Card.”

Gameplay

To start, each player is given 20 tokens. 10 of these tokens are survival tokens and the other 10 are fire tokens, the former representing overall player health and the latter representing the player’s overall compassion “level.” For each players’ turn, a die is cast and the player must move a corresponding amount of spaces along the board. If the player lands on a “Draw Card” space on the board, the player must draw from a stack of “Chance” cards and read their card out loud. Chance cards throw the player into a situation that they are out of control of and will ask them to either give up or collect one of the two categories of tokens (they typically concede or rescind 2 to 3 tokens). Additionally, players may opt to go down certain routes on the board to the “Scenario” locations, where they must draw a card from a separate stack of cards. The cards will present various scenarios, most of which will instruct the player between surrendering a certain amount of one type of token in exchange for the other. This way, strategy is introduced into the game. If a player loses all their survival tokens, they’re out of the game and pronounced dead. However, the goal is to reach The End of the Road with fire token still intact, and the player with the most fire tokens by the end of the path is the winner.

Explanation

Our game combines player strategy with an inevitable construct of luck, or lack thereof. In the book, the father and the boy face a series of unfortunate events that out of their control, such as rainstorms and earthquakes. Many of our scenarios reflect this randomness. However, one of the underlying conflicts worked into the novel is the boy’s unwavering compassion for life versus the father’s self-centered will to survive, and how both dispositions simultaneously interfere and cooperate with certain aspects of the human identity. In an attempt to recreate this conflict, we have made it so that the goal of the game is to collect fire tokens, but all fire tokens will be null and void should someone lose all their survival tokens.

Often in the book, the man and the boy must together come to a consensus of what the right thing to do is. When their cart is stolen, for example, they track the thief down and the father nearly shoots him, but the boy implores him to let it go. When they come across a feeble old man, the father wants to play it safe and show him no attention, but the boy wants to help him. In scenes like these, McCarthy means to demonstrate two divergent conditions of humans: kindness and selfishness. In such a desolate and dead world, decisions like these could mean life and death, and we made the game based on that premise. Accordingly, there are many scenarios that mirror real events in the book. Of course the Fire tokens are a direct reference to the “carrying the fire” motif that most notably appears in the novel at the end, when the man, dying, expresses his faith in his son’s ability to make a brighter world, even in the darkest of circumstances. In this sense, the boy’s compassion ideals triumph over everything in The Road as the most important saving factor. This was our reason for making the collection of Fire tokens the objective for the game; we want to make the statement that value of goodness in the world will always outweigh the benefits of selfishness. We imagine that while playing, players will have an earnest conversation about personal morals and how they affect our world.