We're very excited that our 2026 Spring Online Workshop will be featuring The Congress of Vienna and the Shape of Europe, 1814-1815 by Terry Breese and Phillip Garland. For members who want to know more about the game before signing up, Intern Kyla Toombs sat down with Terry to talk about the development of the game.

Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you got involved with Reacting to the Past?

Sure, my name is Terry Breese. I am not a career academic. I spent 36 years of my adult life in the Foreign Service of the United States, representing the United States in embassies around the world. My only teaching experience at that time was two years at the Marine Corps War College as the State Department Chair. And of course, games, planning exercises, and tabletop exercises are a big part of military education. This is to say, I already had an interest in games before I encountered Reacting to the Past.

When I retired, I managed to persuade the head of the political science department here at University of Central Florida to give me a chance to teach. And we invented a course based on some of the stuff I'd done at the Marine Corps War College. Given my interests and experience, I immediately started looking at ways to make games and simulations part of the course. And then when I was over visiting one day at the Faculty Development Center, the deputy director there, a guy named Eric Main, handed me a copy of Mark Carnes's Minds on Fire. I went home and read it, and I said "This is what I want, this is what I want to do."

To someone who's unfamiliar with peace conferences, what is Congress of Vienna about, and why should they play it?

The Congress of Vienna was convened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The peace treaty with France had already been signed in Paris, and basically the provision of the treaty called for a general conference of all the parties involved in the war to meet in Vienna to try and settle all of the outstanding issues, because there were all kinds of territorial matters. Napoleon had rewritten the map of Europe, he'd changed everything, and the question was how to go about restoring it now. Could it even be restored?

And that was what the goal was, to create a durable international order that would maintain peace in Europe. And to a certain extent, it succeeded. People sometimes, although erroneously, referred to the following century as "the long peace" because there was no major European war from 1815 until 1914. There were lots of smaller wars, but nothing like what had happened before or happened afterwards. And so that's the way I've structured my class of honors diplomacy: about the search for order in the world and about how we've done  the Peace of Westphalia, the peace treaties ending the wars of Louis XIV, the peace treaties ending the Napoleonic Wars, and then we move on to the post-World War II order. There's this constant search for order and stability in an international system that is fundamentally anarchic. The Congress of Vietnam represented, in effect, the first great conference trying to do that and set the rules for international relations.

What has your students' overall reactions to The Congress of Vienna been?

Overall, I will say every student who writes something back in the student evaluation process always talks about the simulations being the part of the class they liked. I've had students often ask me, "Do I have any other classes I teach?" So, I think the students enjoy it!

I will say the one thing they really struggle with is understanding the geography of Europe. You throw it in this whole mass of names of places. And even though we've tried to find really good maps that clarify where these places are, I think it's difficult for students to really get that. So I now include in the prep session a discussion about Europe's geography to try and orient them to where all these places are. That's part I think they do find difficult to grasp with.

Yeah, geography's always been hard for me. Who is your favorite character in Congress of Vienna?

That's really hard. You know, there are so many great characters who are there. Castlereagh, the British delegate, is, you know, cold, logical, restrained. He's the very model of a British gentleman. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, is a man who has survived everything. He's served Louis XVI. He served Napoleon. but he now serves Louis XVIII. And along the way, he's also gotten fabulously rich. Metternich of course, defines the Conference and the coming age. But the kind of guy I kind of really enjoy and always try and make sure is in the game, even though he's a minor character, is Cardinal Consalvi. Cardinal Consalvi is there representing the Pope and the Papal States. And he has relatively little power. He has no army. He has no empire to control. But nevertheless, he has a certain moral authority, and he has the clarity of what should work to maintain peace. So I always try and make sure even if we have a smaller class, that Consalvi is included among the mix of characters.

Were there any other games that were particularly influential in the development of the Congress of Vienna game?

I mean, everything is built on other things. As I said, I also used Paris 1919 in this class. And in some ways, they have similar structures. And I will say, I think we've borrowed some things that we thought worked well in Paris. And I think Paris has things that were reflective of things that we did. The games in some ways are quite similar. They have a mix of the major powers who have a dominant control, and then a mix of smaller powers who have lots of other things they have to worry about. But most of all, they have to find a way to influence the great powers to get on their side. So that kind of, there's an overlap there.

I also, of course, got a lot of the writing ideas out of in The Needs of Others about the Rwanda massacres of 1994-95. And I will say, from that I just drew on how to organize things, how to do the structure of the writing, because as you know, the Reacting format has evolved somewhat over the years we've been writing this game. And each time we think we've got it down, there's a change and we go back and rewrite everything to match the new styles.

It's sometimes said in art that you have to kill your babies. Was there a concept, character, or mechanic that you desperately wanted in the final game but didn't make the cut?

I will say that the original game had a much greater role for Napoleon Bonaparte and his return to power during the Hundred Days Campaign. Phil even had a map with counters on it to represent the armies being maneuvered and competition over who would get command of the Allied armies, things like that. In the end, it just became too much. And so in the current version, Napoleon's entire return to power is a series of announcements that are presented to the Congress delegates as what's happening in the outside world.

And one of the reviewers said, it doesn't seem like Napoleon's return has much impact. And he's right, but that's historically what happened. Napoleon thought he could overturn the Congress and that the internal divisions would allow him to navigate his way into a return to power and peace. But in fact, his return caused the Allies to at least temporarily put aside all their differences and once again declare war on Napoleon! And this time send him off further away where he couldn't cause them more trouble. So in that sense, it was historically realistic.

The other thing that I really hated to have to give up was The Duke of Wellington. Historically, a couple months into the conference, the British delegate, Lord Castlereagh, was called back to London. There was parliamentary business and he headed the government; he was leader of the House of Commons. And of course, managing the government's business and staying in power was far more important than whatever was happening in Vienna. They sent the Duke of Wellington from Paris to take over as head of the delegation. We tried a variety of ways to capture this character change.

Sometimes we tried having one player be Castlereagh and another player be a second member of the British delegation, and then they switch, and Wellington becomes the head of the delegation, and Castlereagh becomes the number two. We've tried having the same student play both Castlereagh and then halfway through the game, change his name tag to the Duke of Wellington. Neither have worked very well, and in the end, we just sacrificed the historical accuracy in the name of play and game mechanics. So Wellington never appears now.

Can you finish a sentence for me? Reacting to the Past needs more games on what?

Well, I'll be selfish. I mean, I think Reacting has a vast number of games already. There are so many of them which I could play, except that I don't teach history, and most of them are historical games. There are a lot of contemporary ones, but they're more historically oriented. I really wish there were more games about diplomacy, but that's selfish because that's what I teach.

As I said, I've used Yalta in one of my classes. I've used The Needs of Others. I've used North Korea Hunger Games. I thought once about using Copenhagen as a multilateral exercise, but I don't think I have enough scientific background to be able to run a game like that. So what, yeah, I wish there were more games about recent diplomacy, things that you could do that have enough of a broad, because that's one thing I really want my class to get is that experience of multilateral diplomacy, not just bilateral or US type negotiations.

Are there any other projects, Reacting or otherwise, that you are currently working on at the moment?

Not really. I think Phil and I both believe if we can get this game eventually to publication, that'll mark the capstone of our goals and efforts. One thing I have been trying to do is using AI to create maps and historical maps. And I have to say, it's not going very well.

One of the maps we don't really have is a map of the parts created Kingdom of Westphalia. So I asked AI, create me a map of the Kingdom of Westphalia as it was in 1812. And it came up with something that looked superficially quite good until you stared at it and realized that they were still showing Holland and Oldenburg as neighbors. And I wrote back and said, no, they've both been annexed by France, which got me a long explanation from AI when they were annexed. Yes, I know that. It changed the color to match France, made other changes. And then I saw it had  two different Bavarias on the map! So, suffice it to say it's not able to do it well.

Oh, can I ask what AI you were using?

It was ChatGPT. And it is, you know, that I signed up for an account a couple of years ago just to see what my students would get out of it. And one of the first things I did, I asked to write a biography of myself. I gave it just my name, date of birth. What can you find out? It wrote about a two page biography in which I was a billionaire tech innovator, except I'd also died of cancer.

So then I gave it some more information about myself, and it created a whole new biography. This time I was an artist in New York. I'd also died of cancer. I had all kinds of information about my family, their background, my siblings. It was all complete hallucination. The only facts that were true were the ones I'd given it of when I was born and where I was born and things like that. So it's clearly not capable of actually finding any meaningful information on me. It's capable of regurgitating stuff, but I guess I don't have enough of an online presence that it found any of the true facts about me.

Well, that was my last question for you. Did you have anything else you wanted to add?

No, we had a couple of instructors, I think, use the game in the fall, and I'm really hoping we'll get back some feedback. because Phil and I run this game now, I guess, at least 10 different times. And so I know a lot of it, but of course, I may be seeing it blindly in terms of what I've already done and what I know as opposed to someone who's looking at it for the first time. And I'd like them to tell us; are there things we need to fix? I think overall it's a pretty polished game at this point because we got a lot of comments from the reviewers. And we were, I will say, meticulous about responding to each individual comment, even keeping a chart of what they said, what our response was, and how the text changed.

By Raymond Kimball, Microgames Coordinator

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to look at the recent announcements about Reacting 3.0 and BLORG 2.0. Not to be left out, I’m excited to share some important information about how Reacting Microgames are growing and evolving!

Microgames to Date

It’s been just over 3 years since we launched Reacting Microgames as their own category with set standards and processes. The response from the community has been amazing, and we are now tracking dozens of microgames at various stages of development. As of January 2026, there are:

• 3 Legacy Microgames (games created using earlier templates that will not be developed further, but are hosted on the Reacting website by community demand).

• 4 fully published Microgames (games that have undergone peer review, have authors signed to contracts, and are available free to members and via the Reacting Shop for others in digital format).

• 7 Microgames Under Review (games that have undergone an initial editorial review and are available to members for free for playtesting).

• 18 Microgames in development (games that have existing prototypes available from the authors, but have not undergone an initial review).

Perhaps most importantly, the above works represent the contributions of 29 different authors (some with multiple games). To me, this is the most important aspect of our progress with Microgames: welcoming contributions from diverse authors in various disciplines that serve many different kinds of classrooms.

Challenges and Concerns

Of course, any kind of change initiative is going to run into bumps on the road, and Microgames are no different. Below are some of the challenges and concerns that have emerged with Microgames, and how we’re addressing them.

Playability as a Microgame

Whether or not something is playable in a single session can be very subjective, especially in the early stages of development of a game. Something that the author can run in 75 minutes in one particular class context may not be feasible for the same timeframe under a different GM and context. This can be compounded by the fact that Microgames can be perceived as easier to write, since they don’t have a game book. In fact, the opposite is true: Microgames often require a far greater willingness to “murder your darlings” precisely because there isn’t time for players to experience all of the joys you have in store for them. To address this, we are:

• Further defining “single session” as 60-75 minutes, and requiring authors in their initial submissions of a Microgame to show that their suggested timing for the primary version of the game fits this mandate. That does not preclude variants or options of the game that could run into a second session, but the game must be able to meet its pedagogical goals in 60-75 minutes. In rare circumstances where there is a significant disagreement between the author and Reacting on whether the game is runnable in a single session, we will work to set up a playtest with the community to see what is viable. We do anticipate having opportunities to play Microgames at the Summer Institute - more to follow on that!

• Asking for playtest information prior to moving a game into peer review for publication. Authors should be able to show that their game has been run by multiple other GMs in other contexts. This is why it is so critical for Reactors using Microgames Under Review to fill out the Permissions Request Form — it makes it easy for authors and/or Reacting Central to reach out and solicit playtest information. We will also plan to feature multiple Microgames at the upcoming Summer Institute to provide additional playtests.

Template Use

Using standardized templates is a crucial part of the Microgames effort because we do not have the editing and typesetting support of a publisher to help process our games. The Microgames team can do some basic formatting fixes, but going through a document and getting all of the styles set correctly diverts energy and time away from the core functions of the review process. One thing we’ve heard loud and clear from the community on this point is that the more accessible we can make the templates, the more likely they are to be used. Therefore, we are:

• Changing the Header/Title style of the Microgame Templates from Lato to Arial. Members have told us that Lato isn’t always loaded on work computers, and importing the font can sometimes be a challenge. 

• Exploring use of Google Docs templates for Microgames. Candidly, the challenge here isn’t the template itself: it’s the handling and hosting of the resulting document, which requires a diligent attention to detail on permissions and storage. One possibility is having a template in Google Docs from which the author exports PDFs for review, with review markup and comments being done in that PDF by the Microgames Coordinator. We will make sure that this workflow doesn’t require authors to have PDF editing software. Look for more on this later this year.

Transparency of the Review Process

We walk a fine line on the review process of Microgames. On the one hand, we want to maintain a high quality product that is peer reviewed in its final form. On the other hand, Microgames should be able to move through a review process more quickly than Flagship games. Now that we’ve gone through two full years of peer reviewing and publishing Microgames, we’ve got a better sense of how to strike that balance. Going forward, we are:

• Integrating Microgames into the BLORG. Microgames were previously tracked in an offline spreadsheet that made it difficult for community members to know what was in work or being considered. With the launch of BLORG 2.0, Microgames now have their own space and will be tracked in a manner that the entire community can see.

• Update of the Microgame Framework. The original framework was the product of the Short Games/Microgames Working Group and had some necessary ambiguities about its process. Now that we have a more established method of publication, the Microgame Framework has been updated to more clearly spell out expectations at each level of review and what authors should expect.

Check Out Our New(ish) Toys!

All of the above means that we now have fresh Microgame Templates and an updated Microgame Framework on the Game Author Resources page. I’m excited to share them with you and get your feedback as we continue to grow and evolve this new frontier of Reacting!

By John Giebfried, Ph.D.

[A much younger version of the author, presenting the first version of the game at a Mongol history conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 2017]

In 2017, after finishing my PhD in Medieval History, I moved from the US to Israel to work as a postdoctoral fellow on the "Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia" project, led by Professor Michal Biran at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The project aimed to study the impact of the Mongol Empire on world history through the prism of mobility: why, how, when, and to where did people, ideas, and artifacts move across Eurasia, and what were the outcomes of these movements? To answer these questions, Professor Biran assembled an international team of researchers from America, Europe, Israel, and East Asia, working in more than a dozen languages from Persian and Arabic, to Chinese and Mongolian, and Latin and Old French (the latter two being my specialties). The project's central goal was the creation of a multilingual database recording information about individuals active in Mongol Eurasia. By the project's completion in 2017, the database indexed over 13,500 persons and countless additional categories of data points.

[The Mongol database indexed not just people, but thousands of textual references, including the various ways they died in the sources. This list kept growing as we encountered new sources.]

Like all the junior scholars on the team, I was expected to spend half my time on the database and half producing my own secondary scholarship. For the rest of my colleagues, that meant writing academic journal articles or book chapters. I wrote articles too, but I decided that one of the lasting pieces of scholarship I wanted to come out of my time in Jerusalem was a Reacting to the Past game about the Mongol Empire. In the database I was helping to build, my colleagues and I probably had access to more sources on the Mongol Empire than anyone else in history, and I wanted to use this treasure trove to tell a story about Mongol history that students could use. The game that resulted, Grandsons of Genghis: The Mongol Qurultai of 1246, was first playtested in Jerusalem in the Fall of 2017, added to the Reacting Consortium’s library in 2023, and is now under revisions for physical publication.

[This image and the ones that follow are from the introductory PowerPoint I made to accompany the game. You can find it here if you want to use it with your classes]

As I work on Reacting 3.0 revisions for the game, I want to use Grandsons of Genghis as a concrete example to showcase how Reacting to the Past is more than an innovative curriculum, but represents genuine academic scholarship, no less valuable or rigorous than the peer-reviewed articles and book chapters that came out of the same research project that this game did. 

I recognize that for those outside the Reacting community, this may be a strong claim. However, the game creation process contains the same interpretive labor as writing a monograph: synthesizing primary sources, adjudicating between competing interpretations, and making explicit claims about causation and contingency. Unlike a monograph, our games express these arguments through game mechanics rather than academic prose.

Picking the Moment Is Making an Argument

The first major choice for any Reacting game is choosing the precise time and place of the game. This choice isn't value-neutral. It's an interpretive claim about what matters, both for teaching and for our understanding of the past. My choice on when and where to set Grandsons of Genghis, is not just one, but two interpretive claims, one scholarly and the other pedagogical.

During my project-related research, I came across an article by the Korean historian Hodong Kim titled "A Reappraisal of Güyük Khan." Güyük is unarguably the most obscure of the Mongol Great Khans. He ruled for less than two years before his sudden death, and his reign is typically treated as a footnote between the regency of his mother Töregene and the eventual triumph of the Toluid line under Möngke. But Kim's article argued that Güyük's negative reputation was largely the product of Toluid propaganda. The sources that depict him as a drunk were written under Toluid dynasties that had seized power from his family and had every reason to delegitimize him. Other sources, particularly Christian ones, describe him as a stern, capable, and serious ruler. Reading Kim's article, I realized that the 1246 qurultai that elected Güyük was exactly where I needed to set my game. The obscurity wasn't a problem. It was the point.

For a game about the Mongol Empire, the more obvious choices for a game would have been the qurultai that elevated Temujin to Genghis Khan, or the one that settled succession among his sons. Both are well-documented in the Secret History of the Mongols. Both are dramatic and have clear outcomes. And both, for the same reason, would have made poor games. In both cases, there was no real contest, because the outcomes had largely been decided before the qurultais began. They were also smaller events in terms of who could be characters and what sources we have about them.

For different reasons, I also decided against the qurultais that elected Möngke Khan in 1251 and Kublai Khan in 1260. The former was a strong contender, with excellent source coverage and compelling characters, but by 1251 the Toluid ascendancy was largely settled. The drama was over. In the latter case, the election of Kublai was contested with his brother Ariq-Boke, but instead of meeting at one qurultai, they each held rival ones and then spent the next decade fighting a civil war that fractured the empire. So while Kublai is a very famous name, and I could have dragged Marco Polo’s father and uncle into the game, mechanically, this was not the best fit.

In contrast to these more well-known moments, the 1246 qurultai is different. It's the only qurultai of the United Empire period where the question of succession wasn't effectively predetermined. Multiple candidates had viable claims, and the factions were genuinely divided. Güyük's election was not inevitable, and the coalitions that formed around the succession question shaped Mongol politics for the next decade, leading directly to the ascension of Möngke and the Toluid Revolution.

[The three main contenders for the position of Great Khan in the Qurultai of 1261]

It also allowed me as a game designer to talk about the 1251 qurultai, by writing the characters whose objectives and potential alliances allowed that later qurultai to play out earlier in the timeline of the game. My design choice, therefore, allows instructors to talk about both events together and gives the players a sense of how the next stage of history would unfold.

1246 was also the first qurultai where we have truly international participation, a theme I wanted to emphasize. Mongol vassals had to come in person to the qurultai to pledge allegiance to the Great Khan; others like John of Plano Carpini, who traveled from Lyon as Pope Innocent IV's ambassador, were funneled there as a matter of course. Before this moment, the empire hadn’t had the post road system developed by Ogedei, which enabled this level of centralization to do this; and after 1251 (because of the civil war between Kublai and Ariq-Boke), the succession was never fully a global event again. Thus, this is a unique moment. For perhaps the first time in recorded history, representatives from the Atlantic to the Pacific gathered in one place to witness the same political drama, and we have their accounts.

As a result, what at first seems like a less intuitive moment in Mongol history to set the game becomes the best choice. This kind of counterintuitive setting choice isn't unique to my game; it’s a pattern in RTTP design.

Consider The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BCE. If you were designing a game about Athenian democracy, the obvious choice would be the golden age of Pericles: the Parthenon, the flourishing of philosophy and drama, Athens at the height of its power. But Mark Carnes and his co-authors set the game after all that, in the aftermath of defeat in the Peloponnesian War, when the democracy was fragile, and factionalism ran high. Why? Because that's when you can stage the trial of Socrates, the most famous and revealing “failure” of Athenian democracy. The post-war setting lets students grapple with the tensions and contradictions of democratic governance in a way that Periclean triumphalism never could.

The same logic permeates Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791. The obvious moments for a French Revolution game would be the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of the Bastille, or the Reign of Terror, guillotines and all. Instead, Carnes and his co-authors set the game between the Flight to Varennes and the Battle of Valmy. Those bookends might seem obscure, but they create the richest possible pedagogical experience, capturing both the idealism of the early revolution and the forces that would lead to its bloody radicalization, while leaving the outcome uncertain.

In each case, the designers chose a moment that looks wrong at first glance but turns out to be exactly right. The most famous moments are often the worst settings for games because their outcomes feel inevitable. The less obvious moments are where genuine contingency lived, where historical actors faced real choices with uncertain consequences.

This is where the pedagogical and the scholarly converge. The same reasoning that produces a good game also produces a historiographical claim. By setting my game in 1246, I'm not just creating an effective teaching tool. I'm advancing an argument: that we've underestimated this qurultai's significance, that it represents a “hinge” moment in world history, that the convergence of global witnesses makes it the first truly international political event we can reconstruct from multiple perspectives. On the Consortium's website, I open the description of my game by saying, "There is no more truly global event in the history of the pre-modern world than the great Mongol Qurultai of 1246." That's not marketing language, it’s a historiographical claim, and the game's existence is an argument for that claim.

While Kim wrote an article rehabilitating Güyük's reputation, I built a game that puts his qurultai at the center of world history. Both are scholarly interventions; the difference is in the medium, not the substance.

Mechanics as Historiographical Claims

The choice of 1246 is the largest-scale example of this design logic, but the same reasoning operates at every level of the game. Each mechanic, each rule, each victory condition involves a similar calculation: what choice will produce both the richest learning experience and the most defensible historical claim? Let me take one example: the religious debate.[The Three Phases of Grandsons of Genghis]

From the beginning, I knew the game needed two kinds of characters: Mongols who would drive the succession politics, and foreign dignitaries who would represent the wider world converging on the qurultai. But I had a structural problem in the succession debate; the Mongol characters naturally take center stage. They're the ones with claims to power, factional allegiances, and votes that matter. The foreigners can observe, advise, and scheme, but they're not the main actors. I needed a complementary phase where the foreigners could shine, where they would be the central performers and the Mongols would sit back and watch. The religious debate gave me that inversion. Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims would take the stage and argue for their faiths before a Mongol audience. The structure of the game would shift: first, the Mongols dominate, then the foreigners dominate, then, in the third act, they would mix more evenly. It was a pedagogical solution to a casting problem.

The second moment of clarity came when I read William of Rubruck's account of the religious debate at Möngke's court in 1254. We don't have detailed accounts of religious debates at Güyük's qurultai, though sources give us a colorful example of a failed debate during his reign, where a religious debate turned into literal hand-to-hand combat. But Rubruck gave me something remarkable: not just a description of what was debated, but an account of how the debate was structured, what rules the Mongols imposed, and what the three faiths debated. I could use this to fashion the mechanics for my game's religious debate, transplanting the 1254 evidence into a 1246 setting.

What struck me most, though, was how Rubruck's account ended. He describes the Christian delegation winning their debate, celebrating their rhetorical triumph, and then watching as precisely no one converted. The account concludes with William tallying the miles he traveled and noting, devastatingly, that he baptized only six souls, three of whom were the children of Christian slaves. For all the spectacle, the debate changed nothing.

I built the possibility for conversion into the game. Foreign characters could make their arguments, and Mongol characters had the option to convert written into their role sheets. The mechanics allowed for conversion. But I suspected, based on Rubruck's account, that it wouldn't happen through debate alone. The playtests confirmed this, and then taught me something more.

Over multiple rounds of playtesting with students and then hearing from other instructors about what happened in their games, a pattern emerged. Mongol characters rarely converted after the religious debate. The arguments didn't move them. But some did convert, and when I looked at why, it was almost always political. A Mongol character would convert to Christianity to secure an alliance with a Christian faction that would help them in the succession debate. Or they would convert to Islam because a Muslim character had promised support for their military objectives. The conversion was real, but it wasn't about theology. It was about power.

My students accidentally taught me something that scholars have long argued: most religious conversions throughout history happen top-down, driven by rulers making political calculations. The spread of Christianity in late antiquity, the Islamization of Central Asia, the conversion of the Mongol khanates themselves in the decades after my game is set: these were political decisions, not the fruits of theological persuasion. Religious debates were spectacles, not conversion engines.

I had read this in the scholarship. But watching it play out in my classroom made it vivid in a way that reading never had. By the fourth or fifth time I ran the game, the pattern was undeniable. Students arrived expecting that a good enough argument would win souls. They experienced what William of Rubruck experienced: the gap between rhetorical victory and actual conversion. And then, when conversion did happen, they saw it happen for political reasons, not theological ones.

The analogy I use with students in the debrief: it's very much like watching presidential debates in America. You may watch the debate, you may enjoy it, you may even have strong opinions about who won. But how often does watching a debate actually change who you vote for? Speaking personally, in two decades as a voter in the United States, watching a presidential debate has changed my vote exactly once. I suspect for most people the number is zero. And if watching a debate won't change your vote on a political question, how much less likely is it to change your commitment about the eternal fate of your soul?

The discovery went further. One of my colleagues on the Mongol project, Jonathan Brack, later wrote an article examining exactly this dynamic:

“Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260–1335” Past & Present, Volume 250, Issue 1, February 2021, pp. 11–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa002

Reading his work years after I had designed the religious debate mechanics, I found scholarly confirmation for what my students had shown me through play. He argues that when it comes to the divine, the Mongols only cared about tangible results. This explains both their famous religious tolerance and why debates never produced conversions: the Mongols weren't indifferent to religion; they evaluated religions by effectiveness rather than doctrine. As Brack puts it, the interfaith debate "represented more than the Mongols' pluralistic attitude... Rather, it represented the culmination of the Mongol religious logic." The khan's ability to preside over and judge these debates demonstrated his unique, heaven-granted wisdom. Religious representatives who wanted to convert the Mongols had to work within this framework, proving their religion's superior power rather than its superior truth. Conversion, when it happened, came through political alliance, not theological persuasion. My students, without reading Brack's article, discovered the same dynamic through play. The game had led me to conclusions that aligned with specialized scholarship I encountered only years later.

I went back and revised the teaching materials to lean into this fact. The Instructor's Manual now tells instructors explicitly: everyone expects the debate to produce conversions, but it won't. The conversions that happen will be political. This isn't a failure of the game; it's the point. The religious debate mechanic doesn't just describe a historiographical claim. It makes the claim testable. And when students discover for themselves that persuasion doesn't produce conversion, they're not taking my word for it anymore; they've lived the argument.

What We Should Do About It

However, while I strongly believe the case for games as a vehicle for scholarship, there is one glaring flaw in the argument. If game design is scholarship, where's the scholarly conversation? Historians argue with each other. They cite each other's work, challenge interpretations, and build on previous arguments. No one cites my victory conditions in their footnotes. No one writes response games challenging my interpretation of 1246.

This objection is valid, but it's an indictment of our practices, not of the work itself.

Right now, the historiographical arguments embedded in RTTP games are largely invisible. The Instructor's Manual gestures at some interpretive choices, explaining why certain mechanics exist or what historical debates underlie certain character positions. But this documentation is inconsistent and focused primarily on helping instructors run the game, not on making the scholarly contribution legible to other historians.

I think that going forward, we need something more deliberate: perhaps a companion essay for each game that makes explicit the historiographical work the design embodies. Not a defense of every choice, but an articulation of the major interpretive moves, and one that exists outside the materials of the game itself. What is this game arguing about its period? What historiographical debates does it engage? What choices did the designer make, and what alternatives did they consider?

 

[The four sons of Genghis, whose heirs make up the four central factions of the game]

This would serve two audiences. For instructors, it would deepen their understanding of what the game is doing at an intellectual level, helping them frame discussions and debrief more effectively. For scholars in the relevant fields, it would make the game legible as a contribution to their discourse. A specialist in Mongol history could engage with Grandsonsof Genghis not just as a teaching tool but as an intervention in debates about the 1246 qurultai, religious conversion, or the political dynamics of Mongol succession.

I would love to see the Consortium encourage this practice for new submissions, and I would love to see UNC Press consider publishing a collection of such essays for existing flagship games, a volume where designers lay out the historiographical work embedded in their designs. It would be useful for instructors and game designers, valuable to external scholars, and powerful evidence that this community produces serious intellectual work.

I am writing this blog post not only to make an argument, but to look for ideas. Others may have entirely different ideas about how to make game design legible as scholarship. How do you think about your design work? Do you see it as scholarship, and if so, how would you describe what kind? What practices have you developed for documenting the interpretive choices your games embody? What would help you articulate the scholarly contribution of your work to colleagues outside the RTTP community?

The work we do is intellectually serious. It's time we said so clearly and figured out together how to make that visible.

by David Harris, Curriculum Development & Community Manager

My first in-person Reacting event was the 2024 Game Development Conference at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. Like many new Reactors, I walked away from the conference deeply enthusiastic for the curriculum and brimming with ideas for my own games. It was in conversations there with Nick Proctor that I first heard a magical word: “BLORG.”

A secret library of games beyond the posted library of games! A place where I could stake out my slice of the Reacting pie. And so, like many before me, I went home from the conference and prepared to make my first submission to the BLORG. Except, upon parsing its lines of excitingly titled games, I found one that was just like the one I envisioned! Stifling my disappointment, I reached out to the author, hoping to either get a copy of their game in development that I could use, or potentially explore c0-authoring it with them. However, weeks went by, and there was no response to my email. I wrote again, and continued to wait, but the months passed and still nothing.

If my experience sounds remotely familiar to you, then you have some inkling of an idea why we are starting of 2026 with a hard reset of the BLORG.



Simply put, up to now, the BLORG has been “dead” resource – only intermittently maintained by people outside Reacting Central – with little correspondence between its nearly 600 entries and games actually in development. The vast majority of entries functionally represent an idea someone had at a Conference, but never pursued any farther. When I sat down with Reacting Editorial Board Chair Kelly McFall to discuss the current state of the BLORG in Fall 2025, he estimated that fewer than one in twenty Level 1 entries ever made the jump to level 2, and only a slightly higher percentage of Level 2 entries made the jump to Level 3.

We weighed trying to reorganize the current BLORG, which would have meant reaching out to hundreds of prospective authors and finding out the state of their entries. However, given the upcoming announcement of Reacting 3.0, an opt-out approach simply did not make sense. Even if a given author had continued work on their entry, the vast majority of Level 2 and Level 1 games would be completed under the 3.0 templates, introducing a whole new set of issues.  And so, we decided that the best way forward was an opt-in approach through a hard reset.

The BLORG is Dead, Long Live the BLORG

To clarify, the old BLORG will remain linked on the website as an artifact of the Reacting 2.0 era, a place to go get ideas and potentially seek out co-authors. However, it will have no importance beyond being a window into the past of Reacting.

BLORG 2.0 is a currently a private document, which myself, Reacting’s interns, and members of the REB have been working on since last fall. BLORG 2.0 will be publicized to the community in early February 2026, after we catalog the initial flurry of entries that we anticipate will follow this announcement.

If you have a level 3-5 game that is currently on the website or published – there are no additional steps you need to take at this point. However if you have a level 1 or 2 game under development for Reacting and have not been asked to re-submit already, we ask that you re-submit your game if you are interested in claiming a spot on BLORG 2.0 and continuing work on your project.

As part of the BLORG relaunch, the REB has revised what it asks from authors at Level 1 and Level 2 to get an entry onto the BLORG. While these do not represent a fundamental break from what these levels have been historically, they do ask for a little more from the author up front.

For Level 1, in addition to the basic game information (location, time period, player count, etc.) that we have historically asked for, we are asking for a 250-300 word description that summarizes the structure of the game and its content and skills-based learning objectives. The goal of requesting this is to ensure more games submitted for level 1 have been brainstormed beyond the initial “I have an idea” phase, and will ultimately conform with many of the pedagogical and accessibility goals of Reacting 3.0.

For Level 2, we are now expecting the submission of game files. These will not go up on the website, and will only be shared internally. Asking for them ensures that the author has a working prototype that can be evaluated for further development support by the REB.

A Living Resource

The ultimate goal of the reset is to create a resource that is more useful to the community and supports the REB’s goal of fostering game development for Reacting to the Past

As a Reacting member, when you visit BLORG 2.0 you can be assured that every project you see is “active.” If it’s a level 2 game, there will always be files you can use if you are interested and email the author. If you are an author, you can be assured that other Reacting members can easily find your project, and thereby find play-testers and co-authors more easily. Moreover, your game in development being on BLORG 2.0 represents more than a line of text on a Google Sheets document, but evidences a level of investment in your project from Reacting Central and the Editorial Board.

Going forward, if you have a level 1 or level 2 entry on the BLORG, someone from Reacting Central (probably myself) will email you twice annually – during the summer and at the start of the spring semester – to inquire about progress on your game. This can be simply an opportunity to touch base, or can lead into a more detailed conversation to discuss the game’s development and share resources, depending on what the author’s preferences. The REB hopes to make use of a living BLORG to identify games in progress that are beneficial to Reacting to the Past as a curriculum (such as covering an a under-represented topic, or being playable by larger classes), and support their accelerated development to the benefit of the entire community.

Maintaining a living BLORG means there has to be mechanism for removing entries from the BLORG should the author stop communicating or stop development of their game for a prolonged period of time. The body that has the final say on this will be the Reacting Editorial Board, as that is the group best equipped to make rulings based on the inevitable extenuating circumstances that may arise in the course of game writing. Entries will be referred to the REB by the following policy guidelines:

If you have a level 1 entry, and you are incommunicative for a year (two check-ins), then your entry will be referred to the REB for potential removal. If you have a level 2 entry, and are incommunicative for two years (four check-ins), then your entry will be referred to the REB for potential removal. These policies are not aimed to punish potential authors for having life get in the way, but once again, ensure that the resource remains a living document that ultimately helps more than hinders game development.

There are sure to be many questions surrounding this reboot of the BLORG, and we welcome your feedback and thoughts. If you have questions or feedback about the policies surrounding BLORG 2.0 or game development in general, please email REB Chair Kelly McFall at reactingeditorialdirector@gmail.com. If you want to get in touch with me directly about submitting you entries to BLORG 2.0 or have questions about the submission process, you can reach me at david@reactingconsortium.org. 

by Nicholas Proctor, Executive Director of the Reacting Consortium

Since Mark Carnes began writing games in the late 1990s, Reacting to the Past has undergone significant changes. Some essentials have remained constant: the centrality of a clash of ideas, immersive roles, historical context, and the use of rich historical texts, have been and will remain hallmarks of the series. Encountering any of these elements has great pedagogical potential. Combined, they can be breathtakingly powerful.

And yet, many instructors and students express difficulty playing our games. This, combined with the onslaught of AI, declining reading proficiency, and various lessons learned from hundreds of playtests of existing games, led our Editorial Board Chair, Kelly McFall, and others to begin asking in 2024, “What’s next?”

To answer this question, he and I began gathering community feedback later that year. Together and separately, we conducted listening sessions at various conferences. What changes did people want to see? What was sacrosanct? What could we learn from the broader world of game design? We combined these thoughts with discussions that arose as the REB reviewed new games, ongoing conversations in Reacting’s governing board (RCB), online chatter, and many, many one-on-one and small-group discussions. What’s working? What’s not? What have people figured out? What challenges remain?

I gathered our notes together in preparation for a weekend-long retreat in October 2025, during which a dozen experienced Reacting instructors, drawn from across the community, created a series of templates. We then shared these with the full RCB and REB for feedback and editing. This ultimately yielded a draft document that we presented at the 2026 Reacting Winter Conference.

Going forward, the specifics will undoubtedly shift a bit – using them to build actual games is sure to reveal some rough edges, but I think the big changes have been made. Internally, we’ve been calling it Reacting 3.0 – new guidelines for games heading into 2026 and beyond that promise to keep our curriculum vibrant and relevant in the face of challenges both old and new. I’ve sorted the remainder of this blog post in an overview of the major changes we expect to implement going forward.

ROLE SHEETS

The first set of changes concerns the role sheets. These are the game materials players read most carefully. The elements of existing role sheets will all remain, but we’ve reorganized them to foreground the game schedule. This way, players can see exactly what they need to do during any given session in the game.

As part of this reorganization, we also decided to clearly define the difference between responsibilities and assignments. The former are tasks players need to complete for the game to function. These might include activities such as performing rituals to mark the beginning of gameplay, casting votes, or advocating for specific positions at designated points in the game. These are clearly integrated into role sheets.

Assignments – the artifacts instructors use to assess student learning and assign grades – often vary wildly in practice. At present, individual instructors tailor these to their students, curricula, and learning objectives. Few people use the “vanilla” options, which appear in the published game materials. Consequently, students become confused by conflicting instructions from their instructors and the game materials. We decided it would be better to share these as editable addenda to role sheets. The game would still come with default assignments, but making them addenda makes them easy to edit and customize.

Vignettes

The concept of Reacting is difficult to introduce. Since its inception, Reacting gamebooks have opened with second-person “you are there” vignettes. When they work, these little pieces of historical fiction draw you into the game. When they don’t, they are discordant and weird. Most often, according to surveys I conducted, instructors do not assign them. Consequently, in Reacting 3.0 their use will be strictly optional. They now appear only as handouts in the appendix.

In their place, there are two short new introductions to the game. The first, What Just Happened? explains the immediate event that led to the beginning of the game. The Thirty Tyrants have been cast out of Athens. Now what happens? The second, The World of the Game, describes the immediate situation of the game, e.g., the political, cultural, religious, social, and economic context. In clever hands, these could be written in the style of the original vignettes, so it may be possible for all sides of the Vignettes debate to walk away happy.

PRE-GAME WORKSHOPS

Workshops are low-stakes introductions to roles, mechanics, and ideas. This is a term from recreational LARP, but it is not a new idea; workshops are part of many of the earliest Reacting designs. Sometimes these take the form of pre-game faction meetings. Other times, they are one-shot microgames, like the Hermitage debate in Red Clay. Since most people find them useful, these introductory Workshops are now required to ease entry into our games. Like most game elements, there are provisions allowing individual instructors to opt out of using them if they prefer.

Managing reading load

Most faculty have noted a decline in their students' ability and willingness to engage with lengthy or complex written texts. This is particularly vexing because rich historical documents and thick descriptions of historical context are so fundamental to Reacting’s approach to the past. Determined to retain both elements, 3.0 suggests the following:

First, these readings should focus on the player in the game. This means trimming discursive passages and interesting (but nonessential) details.

For the historical context essay, we encourage simplifying the vocabulary and limiting the use of proper nouns to those that appear in the game itself. For the documents, we encourage separating texts into those essential to play the game (“core”) and those related to a subset of roles (“supplemental”).

For the documents themselves, headnotes should be longer, glossing of unfamiliar ideas should be included, and elisions should be judicious. One hope here is that reading a curated version of the texts in the gamebook provides actionable information. Ample subheadings make it easier to parse the readings. They should also make them easier to navigate for people using e-readers.

Finally, we encourage authors to do what they can to break the wall of text. Diagrams, line art, and illustrations all aid comprehension. UNCP will work with us to incorporate these into our games that go to publication. I purposely added a bunch of these to the manuscript for my forthcoming game about the Reconstruction era in Louisiana. They were very helpful in figuring out how to integrate these into the text.

As is the case with most elements of 3.0, some games already use this organization and include these elements, and to good effect. Reacting 3.0 makes these approaches into requirements.

SCHEDULING WITH EPISODES

In classrooms, Reacting games get chopped up and recombined in all sorts of ways. This is because of differences in the length of class meetings, expectations about speaking and oration, and variations in class size. Consequently, the schedule laid out in gamebooks rarely survives first contact with the reality of our syllabi.

Consequently, 3.0 breaks games down into constituent parts or “episodes.” These may or may not correspond to a classroom instruction day (“session”). They usually culminate in a decision. This refinement to our terminology will aide newer instructors in implementing our games in their classrooms. The IM must provide advice on how to combine these, but ultimately, the decision is left with the instructor.

To help visualize, here is a default schedule:

Here is a modification that emphasizes debriefing:

Here is a third that emphasizes setup:

IM ADDITIONS

The Reacting 3.0 IM Template includes over a dozen small tweaks and optimizations. These stem from years of field experience by the people who put it together. The IM template will include significantly more direction, describing what should go where and why. This component also includes some significant additions.

Learning objectives are described in the 2.0 IM. In addition to describing those connected with content, the new version also asks authors to describe those associated with skills.

Every game picks pivotal moments, salient debates, and essential ideas. This means that they are historical interpretations. Consequently, the IM should now include a brief statement on the game's position in the historiography.

Instructors are sometimes surprised by the logistical demands that accompany certain games. These are never hard-and-fast requirements, but taking some steps ahead of time can optimize the game experience. Consequently, the IM should now include advice for pre-game preparations. Both what to do before the semester begins (What sort of classroom works best for this game? Are there particular props that aid the game? Do you need to build online resources?) and what instructors should handle two weeks before the game begins.

Other additions to the IM are components that many authors have already developed and included in their games. Given their positive impact in the classroom, these are now required. They include guidance on controversial content and suggested safety mechanisms to help players navigate through it. More general guidance that is applicable to all Reacting Games will be outsourced from the IMs to a document that we are tentatively calling the GM Bible. This document will be hammered out this year alongside the finalized version of Reacting 3.0.

Finally, as I mentioned above, there should be provisions for workshops. These might be faction meetings, which already appear in many games, dry runs of the game mechanism, low-stakes role-playing exercises, or microgames that help set the scene or debrief at the end of the game.

Exiting the game: The Debrief

Instructors regularly struggle with debriefing. Consequently, 3.0 asks authors to provide more guidance. Best practices in recreational LARP call for three stages of debrief. They begin with emotions. Players need to address questions like, “Who stabbed me in the back?” and “Why did I get executed?” Before they can exit their roles. This part of the debriefing might be best if it came immediately after the final episode of gameplay. To aid in “de-roling” authors might suggest a ritual or two, like tearing up name placards.

This can in turn lead into an intellectual debrief. At this point, players can step back from the action enough to think about the outcome of the game as a whole (rather than their individual fates), the clash of ideas, and the degree to which the game aligned with and diverged from history. The “What Actually Happened” and “What Happened Next” parts of the 2.0 IM fall here.

Finally, instructors should encourage their students to have some level of integrative reflection. This should help them connect their experience with their preexisting knowledge.

TEARSHEETS

"Tearsheets" are instructor-facing, quick-reference guides to game mechanics and specific episodes. They largely replicate information from the gamebook and IM, but in quick-reference form. No longer will you need to fumble around trying to figure out the odds for a tribute-gathering expedition! Bring the tear-sheet for the final session of Threshold of Democracy, and it is at your fingertips. Going forward, we expect game materials to make ample provisions of tearsheets where the mechanics call for them.

NEXT STEPS

We are close to finalizing 3.0, but some work remains. Over the spring semester of 2026, we will continue to refine the design based on community feedback. The most important source will be the handful of authors who are working to align their games in development with 3.0 standards. This is where the rubber meets the road. We expect that this will result in some judicious tweaking, reorganization, and editing, but I think the broad contours are set.

At the end of spring, the Reacting Editorial Board will take over. They will then decide how to interpret the templates, oversee their implementation, and decide how far to extend the grandfather clause for 2.0 games in development. They will also help to identify older games that would most benefit from new editions in 3.0 format.

I’ve taken the lead on this because, at some point, having one set of hands on the tiller made things more efficient. This should not obscure the fact that 3.0 is a set of standards created by the Reacting community. I sincerely thank everyone for the many hours they have put into making this significant step forward possible. While much has been accomplished already, making Reacting 3.0 the best it can be can only be accomplished through continued input from the Reacting Community. To that end, we welcome feedback, so if you’ve read this blog post and you have something you want to share, you are welcome to email it to reactingeditorialdirector@gmail.com. Otherwise, you can expect to hear more details about the final shape of Reacting 3.0 throughout 2026!

Click here to see the PowerPoint from Nick Proctor's Presentation on Reacting 3.0 from the 2026 Winter Conference (also: Reacting3-WC-2026.pdf ) 

For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of Reacting Games being played at the event. For our third and final interview, Reacting Intern Jocelyn Edwards sat down with Dr. Joseph Sramek, author of Politics, Religion, and the Birth of the Public Sphere: England, 1685-1688.

So, first things first, how did you get introduced to the world of Reacting to the Past?

About eleven years ago, I had a class in the Spring of 2015 – Modern European History. I had about 30 students, nobody wanted to talk, and it left me really frustrated. So about mid-semester, I was looking at all kinds of primary source readers to try and reanimate the class, and one day the Norton textbook representative came by asking for spring semester orders. I said, “do you have anything for me?” She said, “Come to think of it, we carry this curriculum you might enjoy called Reacting to the Past.” She put me in touch with professors in nearby universities, I started emailing them, and next thing you know I was going to the summer conference at Barnard. I remember that summer the French Revolution and the American Revolution were both being played. By the end of that weekend, I knew what I was doing for my course, and the rest, as they say, is history.

For The Birth of the Public Sphere, could you give me a quick elevator pitch?

So, the game itself is an immersive experience set inside a coffee house. London, in the late 17th century, had about fifty of these. According to a scholar named Jurgen Habermas, Coffeehouses in many ways represent the birth of the public sphere – the concept of modern civil society. What you have here is the origin of modern, vibrant civic culture where people don’t kill each other for different ideas, but discuss them.

This is coming in the late 17th century, right after those religious wars in Europe, and right after the problems England experienced throughout the 17^th century. One king had been beheaded, another king overthrown, and you have a lot of turmoil. On the primary source end of things, I wanted a game that focused on authors like Hobbes and particularly John Locke, considering how normal he is nowadays to us. I wanted my game to capture an earlier moment when he was controversial.

What do you think makes the Birth of the Public Sphere unique in the Reacting library? What draws people into it? 

We still need a lot of games to fill open niches in the Reacting library, like games set before the 18th and 19^th centuries. We have a lot of games that are modern games, and in contrast my game covers early modern Europe. Additionally, we also need games in cultural settings – that really think about power and what power is. Games that feature less direct forms of power, or how the power is mediated and experienced by less elite actors. A lot of our games are male-heavy, so how do we get female roles into games? How do we get more historically marginalized voices in our games? Perhaps more cultural settings are the way to do that.

The last thing I would say is we need games with modular structures – kind of mix and match games. And one of the things that I did in my game design is that because it is a coffee house, it can be a versatile setting. When I was writing this game, I got some feedback from the community, from professors in English departments, that wanted to teach early modern literature in the setting of my game. It was also obvious that I needed to do something with early modern science because of the contemporaneous Scientific Revolution. It was a really low-hanging fruit to add that in.

So, I have created my game as a modular structure. There is a core group of characters, but only about 12-13 are needed in the game to get the basic debate going. As you go beyond those core roles, I have 50 additional roles which I divide into “character packs.” So, if you want to beef up your early modern science, I have science people. If you want to beef up your literature, I have people for that. If you want to talk about Empire, slavery, etc., I have characters for that. I want to model this for the rest of the community, as a way you can do games that could be used in multiple types of classrooms.

Of all the characters in the game, do you have a favorite?

It is so hard, I have a couple. I have always enjoyed the Marquis of Halifax, because he is such a moderate in a period of extremes. I also find the character of John Churchill, Winston’s infamous ancestor, fascinating. He famously switches sides, and I always like seeing what students do with his utterly pragmatic, principle-less personality.

What comes next? Any other projects or ideas you’re working on right now? 

I am working on a game set in the UK that is called, Social Democracy Versus Market Liberalism in Britain, 1976-1979. I want to play with the idea of: “What if Margaret Thatcher never came to power?” When she becomes Prime Minister in the late 1970s, it is a sea change in economic policy. In the leadup to this era, John Maynard Keynes was a very prominent economic thinker, and many believed that the most important thing was to avoid unemployment – to avoid the Great Depression of the 1930s. Therefore, the government should step in to regulate the economy as necessary during times of economic downturn, such as during the late 1970s. But in real history, these ideas are toppled by more conservative ones, and Thatcher’s side ultimately prevails, but it is a narrow run thing. It is never as triumphant as her supporters seem to think it is. I want to explore this clash of economic philosophies and see how things might have unfolded had events played out slightly differently.

If you want to try out Birth of the Public Sphere for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium's 2026 Winter Conference!

For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of Reacting Games being played at the event. For our second interview, David Harris sat down with Dr. Linda Mayhew, author of Russian Literary Journals, which recently went to publication with UNCP this year. 

 I’ll start off with the most basic question, how did you get introduced to Reacting to the Past?

It was with Larry Carver and Paul Sullivan. Larry Carver was the director, the former director, of the program I work at in Liberal Arts Honors here at the University of Texas at Austin. And Paul Sullivan is the co-author of the Shakespeare and Marlowe game. And so Paul was, at the time, stepping down from his position in Liberal Arts Honors, and they wanted someone to come in and teach Reacting. They reached out to me about the position and said it involves teaching, come visit a class and see what you think. And I was like, okay, sure, I'm interested.

I still remember, sitting in that classroom – and it was 16 years ago – it was the Athens game, the student was the Herald, and she was had her pig sacrifice, and she was walking around the room sprinkling pieces of paper everywhere. And I was kind of confused, but so intrigued. And then, you know, there was just this amazing debate and discussion with the students, and I just kind of fell in love with that idea of constant interaction in a classroom.

So, to someone who's not really familiar with Russian history, what is this game about? What classes is it a really good fit for?

The game is really about different writers and trying to publish at a time when there is censorship and some intense debate about how Russia can move forward. So there's a lot of discussion about different political structures, the Russo-Turkic war, and how involved Russia should be with other countries and the issues that they have going on. There's a big discussion about how Russia relates to Western Europe, and so those are kind of all these things that are happening in the country right now.

And what the game is looking at is, how do authors, how do people talk about this or write about it when there is censorship and some of these things are not legal to publish about? You're not allowed to criticize the Tsar, or, you know, be very critical about anything that's going on. There's a list of rules that's something like 10 pages long of what's acceptable.

I think that people who aren't wanting to teach a class about Russia would still find use for the game if they're wanting to look at writing, that's the big thing. Almost everyone in the game is a writer, and so students in their roles have a lot of opportunity to play around with different kinds of writing. They can do editorials, they can do different kinds of creative writing. If they want to do poetry or short stories, there's a way to work that in. And then there's also traditional literary analysis or historical essays that students could do as well.

So it's really adaptable for whoever's using the game to like focus on some kinds of writing or the others, and the game book has all different all kinds of examples of those different kinds of writings in there for students to work on. But I also think it would be good for people that are wanting to look at literature in context or to place an influential author like Dostoevsky in a social, political, and historical context.

Do American students kind of struggle with adapting to writing under censorship as they have to do in the game? Or are there any other interesting student reactions to the social situation in 19th century Russia?

Well, it's we've had some interesting conversations with students who are making connections between what was happening in 19th century Russia and what's happening in contemporary Russia. You see the continued influence of religion, the clamping down on rights and things in contemporary Russia. You can see some clear parallels in that.

But the censorship, what I think is hard for students – I think the tendency is to see it like, “Oh, I'm not allowed to say this, so I'm just not going to try and say this.” And so as an instructor, you have to kind of nudge them. “But maybe, what could you say? That is a little bit of a gray area that you know – do you want to push the boundaries in that case?” And so that's something that they get to play around with.

So obviously, your game includes a veritable who's who of the Russian literary scene in the late 19th century, names that most people are familiar with, like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. But with that said, Who's your favorite character in your game?

I really like almost all of the female characters in my game, because those are people that aren't talked about as much. One of my favorites is Elena Shtakenshneider, who is the hostess of the literary salon – I just really like her. She hosting this literary salon and bringing all these writers together. So obviously she's like an important figure in that way. But she also wrote these huge, or very lengthy, at least, memoirs about her salon. Because they were like personal memoirs and she wasn't trying to publish them at the time, they weren't censored at all. But they're this great history looking back on how hard it was for writers to sometimes publish; how arbitrary some of those decisions were, how easy it could be to attract the attention of a committee that would reprimand you.

I also love some of the female revolutionaries, and I think they would be really fun to play, because they're just so dedicated to their cause. They’re willing to do just about anything for the larger goal that they have, for a more fair government, and a more equal Russia.

Speaking of doing anything to make a better Russia, as it were, how often do students try and assassinate Alexander II in the game?

Almost always there is always someone who has tries. The radicals try really hard to make that happen. And the game is designed so they have a good chance of success, because that is what was happening historically. There's a lot of information out there about the eight or nine different assassination attempts on Alexander II before they finally succeeded. But they can easily be foiled if they get infiltrated by people that are not sympathetic to their point of view.

So the way the game works, many of the radical revolutionaries are working very covertly, and they don't talk about what they're trying to do very often in class. They don't lay that out there for everyone, because they know if they talk about it, there could be a censor overhearing things who then flags them for something. So for some of the students, it is really a surprise when that assassination attempt happens that they weren't expecting it, because that hasn't been part of the debates.

Are you going to be the game author who finally writes the Russian Revolution game for Reacting?

I don't know. If I did it, I would sort of do it through like a literary lens. There is a game I'm helping co-author now that set in the 1905 Russian Revolution. And that's the Markov versus Nekrasov game that Chad Curtis is working on and Sungju Moon, one of his colleagues at Nevada State. I'm helping to translate some of the documents that aren't available in English, that are just in Russian, and then also add a literature component to what's really a game about statistics.

But that's the 1905 Revolution, so I don't know about the 1917 one. That may just have to remain the Reacting white whale for now.

Are there any other projects, Reacting or otherwise, that you are working on at the moment?

I have some other ideas for some smaller reacting games. There's one I’m working on about artists at the same time period that's called The Wanderers. That came out of this game, broadening to look at the visual arts – I just think it would be fun to examine the art from the period a little more.  

I would also like to translate the memoirs of Elena Shtakenshneider more fully, because there's so much interesting information in there – I only ended up using small fragments for the game. And so I've been kind of playing around with the idea of translating all of that. I think her memoirs might need annotations for somebody who wasn't already knowledgeable about that time period, to help people appreciate all her references and literary connections in there.

If you want to try out Russian Literary Journals for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium's 2026 Winter Conference before December 21st!

For the 2026 Winter Conference, we are featuring a series of interviews with the authors of the Reacting Games being played at the event. For this one, Intern Kyla Toombs sat down with Dr. Rebecca Livingstone, co-author of Versailles 1919, to ask  questions about the game and Livingstone's involvement with Reacting to the Past.

Can you introduce yourself for me and tell me how you got involved with Reacting to the Past?

I'm Rebecca Livingstone, and I am a professor of history at Simpson College. I've been at Simpson since 2007. I got interested in Reacting because of Nick Proctor who is heavily involved in Reacting. During my first year teaching at Simpson, I was wondering ‘what is this Reacting thing?’ so Nick invited me into one of his upper-level history classes that was playing the French Revolution. He gave me a role to play – an Indeterminate, I think – with the students. I got killed pretty quickly…. But I was intrigued about this highly engaging pedagogy.

To someone who's unfamiliar with the Versailles Peace Conferences, what is the Versailles 1919 about and why should they play it?                                                          

Versailles 1919 is about the Paris Peace Conference that meets in 1919 to figure out the diplomatic conclusion to World War I. What is to be done to settle the war and ensure that such a war won’t happen again? The game centers on questions about the justness of war, the ethics of warfare, and what should be done with emerging new nations and establishing borders based on nationalism and national identity. There are questions of reparations and war guilt for this horrible war - who's responsible for the fact that ‘we’ had a war and do ‘we’ punish them? – and as a result, what agreements can nations to make waging war the absolute last resort for settling problems. The Paris Peace Conference challenges students to make decisions by consensus rather than simple majority voting.  So it requires students to have to listen to each other as well as weigh different types of influence and power as they seek to find common ground. 

The game involves the Great Powers –  the United States, France, Britain, Italy, and Japan, but has a lot of smaller powers like smaller European states, newly emerging nations, and British dominions. It makes for a really interesting combination of actors debating what we expect for going forward. How should nations deal with each other when they have conflict? What role do these small nations play? Should we care about their opinion or not, or should we just go and make decisions because we're the ‘Great Powers’? So the Paris Peace Conference is dealing with a lot of these issues that are coming from the outbreak and waging of the war itself but also with questions of how to create a lasting peace.

Who is your favorite character in your game?

There are a couple of different answers. I like the Borden character. He's the Prime Minister of Canada and I'm Canadian. So I was excited to be able to write a Canadian into a Reacting Game.

But I think if I really had to think about my favorite character I can't pick just one; instead, I can pick a category - the delegates coming from the Small Powers, like Belgium, Canada, Poland, Czechoslovakia. They're trying to figure out who they are and who they can be in relation to the Great Powers. I like them is because of what their roles are; they're have the idea of ‘we have or want a nation state for our people and here’s what we think our people deserve’ but are rubbing up against what other nations want, particularly the Great Powers who are playing a sort of chess game and see these smaller powers as pawns in the larger game of re-establishing world order. They’re not Indeterminate roles as they multi-faceted agendas of what they want to achieve so I like the pluckiness that these small power roles embody.  I also like how I’ve seen students play them, especially if you put some competitive students in these roles; if they want to win, they have to get their voices heard, just like the historical actors. And sometimes that is annoying to those playing the Great Powers, just like it was historically.

It's often said in design/creative spaces that you have to kill your babies. Was there a concept, character, or mechanic that you desperately wanted to be in the final game but didn't make the cut?

There's a lot of stuff that I cut because it's so complicated. There are so many different issues, and you have to make choices as an author. I could have students talk about this issue or that issue, but had to stop and ask if was really getting too technical, too in the weeds? Did it really serve the main purpose of the game? Or was it a mechanic that is just like, ‘yeah, that's fun’, but not really doing much else. Assassination is one of those game mechanics where students always ask, ‘can we kill people in this game?’ No matter what the game is, I always get asked that. I did think about it, but ultimately, sorry, no assassinations in Versailles 1919 – it just doesn’t serve the game as a learning tool.

Okay, are you working on any other projects, Reacting or otherwise at the moment?

I think every person who's designed a game or two has thought, ‘oh, I have an idea for that.’  I always have ideas, but I’m not always sure how to translate them into a game.  I’ve been working on a project set later in 18^th century Britain centering on questions of liberty and tyranny, but I am still feeling my way through it. I also have an idea for a British suffragette game. I think that there might be some other people that have games in the works on that though, but I don't know where they are in the process. But yeah, I've got an idea percolating about that.

If you want to try out Versailles 1919 for yourself, and find out about the exciting changes coming in Reacting 3.0, be sure to sign up for the Reacting Consortium 2026 Winter Conference before December 21st!

A coup in progress during the playtest of Brazilian Constituent Assembly at the 2025 GDC

by Eduardo Magalhaes

While I teach Political Science, I was exposed to Reacting through my colleague in the history department at Simpson College, Nick Proctor. Intrigued by what I saw, I started using Reacting in my own classes at least 15 years ago. Soon after I started using Reacting, it was clear to me that the history of the 1988 Brazilian Constituent Assembly would make a good Reacting game. It provides several clear decision points regarding Constitutional issues, clear characters with a variety of perspectives, and was something that actually overlapped with my own life. My father was a Brazilian who was forced to leave Brazil after the military coup in 1964 and then returned with our family when the democratization process started.

I began working on the Game about five years ago, after Nick encouraged me to submit it to the Big List of Reacting Games. In 2022 a colleague in my department was teaching a Comparative Constitutions class for the first time, so I volunteered to let her use the Constituent Assembly game….even though it was barely a concept at the time. This self-imposed deadline forced me to actually develop some game logistics and character background. At around the same time, someone reached out to me from Jacksonville University for permission to use the game in his History of Brazil class. Again, I was able to add some additional clarity since I was essentially forced to!

That first version of the game was astonishingly thin. I had accessed the template for Gamebooks, so I tried to minimally follow that model. I had a brief overview of the game, an extensive timeline, but essentially no narrative whatsoever! In fact, the main element of that initial Gamebook was the basic framework of the game – the resolutions to be debated, the actors participating, assignments, and the schedule for the game. I did have some minimal descriptions of parties (so that students would at least have some sense of what their roles were about) and some vocabulary terms. There was only one core text, a few sample speeches, and a link to the Spanish constitution. While the game was usable, it was extremely bare bones at this point.

However, over the next year I was able to add much more detail to the logistics of the game, because to be honest, that was the part I was most excited about. I added more background information and had much more detailed role sheets – adding in detailed victory objectives. By 2023 I was far enough along that I was able to use a sabbatical leave to really dive into developing the game. Thanks to translation work done by my brother, I was able to dramatically improve the details – adding significant new elements and much more detail in the Role Sheets. This put me in a position to submit my game to the Game Design Conference this past summer, where I received even more feedback and guidance on improving the game. One of the other things I learned at the GDC was that the Reacting Editorial Board would be accepting submissions for consideration to be moved to Level 3 in mid-September.

So, when the semester started, I embarked on a feverish, two-week sprint to get the game as fully fleshed out as I could so that it would be ready to submit. It was the most intense writing experience I’ve had since the time I wrote half my dissertation in the two weeks before the deadline to submit it! And I loved every second of it.

When I first started this project, what I was most concerned about was that my Gamebook, Instructor’s Manual, and Role Sheets were not exactly in line with the template provided by Reacting. Ok, they were a long way from being in compliance with that template. So, the first thing I did was to create the table of contents required for the Gamebook and Instructor’s Manual – following the order and topics from the template. I thought it was going to be difficult to convert what I had done but it turned out to be much easier than I expected. Generally speaking, I either had to rename sections I had developed and/or simply move them to a different place.

Then I was in a position to flesh out (or create from scratch) the sections of the template that I hadn’t previously done (for example, relationships with ideas, etc. in the Role sheets). This actually leads to another great thing about this writing experience. While traditional research writing does provide some variety (you can go from working on the literature review to working on the conclusion), working on a Reacting Game gives you much more variation in the type of writing you are doing. When I was tired of working on the narrative, I could move to the game mechanics. When I was tired of working on the mechanics, I could work on the parts of the Role Sheets that were missing. This made it much easier to keep working because I was always able to work on something new and fresh.

By the day the submission was due (conveniently at midnight!), there was still a fair amount left to do. As I reviewed each piece – the Gamebook, the Instructor’s Guide, and the Role Sheets – I tried to remind myself how much I had added, rather than what was still left. I was also comforted by the knowledge that even if the game was not approved for advancing to Level 3, I would have made tremendous progress towards that goal (progress that I could continue pursuing while the game is being reviewed), and I would receive valuable feedback from the process and that I would be in a very strong position to submit the game again in January. This knowledge helped me to fight through those moments when I felt like quitting and just submitting what I had. By midnight (yes, I worked right to the deadline – just like when I was an undergraduate!), while I knew the submission was not perfect, I was extremely pleased with the final product.

Overall, I really enjoyed working on my Reacting game to get it ready to submit to the Reacting Editorial Board. If any of you have been reluctant to devote your time and energy to finishing your game – because you think it’s too far from being ready, or maybe you’re not sure it’s really as good as YOU think it is, or whatever – I would encourage you to make the effort. I think you will find that it is an extremely rewarding process and experience and well worth the sacrifice.

The submissions have been read. The judges have conferred. And we are now ready to announce the honorees of the 2025 Game Jam!

Before I make the big announcement, there are some people who need to be thanked:

• Huge kudos to Allen White, who conceived of the Game Jam last year, championed it this year, and built the itch.io spaces which made it super easy for contributors to submit!
• My sincere personal appreciation to Trey Alsup and Jonathan Lawrence, who joined me as judges for this year’s event. Each of them brought a different perspective, all of which helped us see these games in different ways.
• And of course, thanks to the 13 authors who submitted 15 different games for consideration. We had a huge increase in both submitters and submissions for this year, which bodes well for the future of Reacting Microgames!

Without further ado, the honorees are:

• First Place: The National Garden of American Heroes by Aaron Cowan. Aaron will receive a free one-year membership in the Reacting Consortium.
• Honorable Mention: Pachamama v. Production: The Constitutional Conflict over Los Cedros and the Rights of Nature by Alexander Rolnick; Reclaiming Bayreuth: The Battle for the Soul of Wagner, 1924 by Chad Curtis; and Speak Swiftly: Reputation and Celebrity Political Endorsements by Jennifer C. Edwards. Alex, Chad, and Jen will each receive a discounted registration for the 2026 Reacting Game Development Conference.

Every author will receive detailed feedback from the judges later today (check your spam folders!). The judges also wanted to collectively share with the community some impressions for authors thinking about writing a microgame:

• Beware of the temptation to cram a 90-minute game arc into a 60-75 minute timeframe. Make sure you include sufficient time for both prep and debrief. If you find yourself tweaking minutes here and there to make your game “fit” into the timeframe, you may want to consider the Short Game format instead.
• We loved the various innovations in microgame approaches, not only by the honorees, but by many other submissions as well. Card adaptations, applications of music, utilization of online scaffolding: all of these and more are welcome “tinkering” with the Microgame format as it continues to evolve.
• We wanted to particularly commend the “Learning Objectives” section in Pachamama v. Production. The explicit listing of goals in multiple disciplines is a great model for other microgame authors to copy.
• One very real challenge for microgame authors is the additional challenge of giving students context for a game setting that is far displaced from their experience. From a practical sense, this means that it is more challenging to write a microgame set in an older context than a contemporary one. This should not be taken as discouraging authors from writing microgames for non-contemporary settings; just recognize that those games may have to be less ambitious in the amount of material they cover because players may need more scaffolding to adapt to the setting.

Yours in ambitious gameplay,

Raymond Kimball

Reacting Microgame Coordinator