It was fun to learn that training to be a CIA agent involves playing board games.
Not just any old off-the-shelf game mind. These are special CIA-created playthings, including such hidden hits as:
- Collection: vibes of Pandemic - ‘a group of players must work together to resolve three major crises across the globe.’
- Collection Deck: a Magic The Gathering like game that ‘focuses less on collaborative work and more on the sheer act of collecting intel’.
- Satellite Construction Kit: ‘players cooperate to manage resources, budget, and time to build and maintain connected satellites.’
- Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo: used ‘to train analysts who might work with law enforcement and other partners around world to find a well-armed, well-defended, well-protected bad guy’.
I suspect that board games are a vastly underutilised opportunity for education. Apparently for the CIA they’re particularly good for helping agents learn how to cross-reference vast amounts of information in order to understand how situations they might face in real life might work.
“People playing a game, together they’re experiencing the designers' mental model of insurgency in Afghanistan and sharing that model,” he says. “They are learning it, very quickly, because they’re inside, operating in it. Pushing levers, pulling cords, seeing what happens. Stories are very sticky, and they’ll remember their own stories.”