Glasnost The Game
| Publisher(s) | YL Games Ltd. |
|---|---|
| Players | 4 |
| Setup time | 5–15 minutes |
| Playing time | 3 to 6 hours |
| Random chance | High (1 dice, 36 cards, squares along a path) |
| Skill(s) required | Military tactics, Strategy, and Negotiation |
Glasnost The Game is a strategic board game, produced by the Cypriot company YL Games. It was invented in 1989 by neuroscientist Yiannis Laouris, with help and inspiration from his daughter Romina, and his friend George Vakanas in Tucson, Arizona. Glasnost The Game is a turn-based game for ideally four players. It is played on a board depicting a partly modified political map of the Earth, divided into territories, which are grouped into seven continents. The continents are surrounded by a path along which the token-ships of the players move. The Players move their tokens with the classical throw of dice. Players attempt to colonize bordering territories from other players. Once you own a territory, you may construct industries. In every round, your industries produce weapons for new armies, which eventually facilitate a player’s ability to make war and conquer new territories (again with the throw of dice). At any time, you may unilaterally disarm any country that belongs to you. The winner is the player who has the most points when the whole world is disarmed.
Equipment
Each Glasnost The Game game comes with a Board, one die, 36 cards and a number of differently colored tokens denoting armies and industries: Armies are dark, industries are light colored. Both types of token come in the following numbers and denominations: 25x1, 20x2, 5x2, 5x10, 5x20
History
The inventor witnessed the effects of Cold War while he was studying medicine in Leipzig, then East Germany, when the country was communist. The inventor moved to Göttingen, then West Germany at the time when Mikhail Gorbachev published his Peristroika and Glasnost books. While watching deadly wars in the news, and playing board games like Anti-Monopoly and Risk with his 7-year-old daughter, she was annoyed by the suffering of people all over the planet, and she expressed a wish to “demilitarize” the earth. As the father used the word “glasnost”, to explain the impossibility of a world without armies, she suggested the creation of a game that begins with wars and armies and the winner would be the player who manages to get rid of them.
Various newspapers covered Glasnost The Game publication.[1][2][3]
Newspaper articles on its release
- Fileleftheros Newspaper (Greek name = Εφημερίδα Φιλελεύθερος) . Glasnost also as a Game now: Creator a Cypriot professor researcher (Greek = Τώρα και παιχνίδι η Γκλάσνοστ: Δημιουργός του Κύπριος καθηγητής ερευνητής), 23 December 1989.
- Xaravgi Newspaper (Greek name = Εφημερίδα Χαραυγή). Glasnost, a new youth game (Greek = Γκλάσνοστ, ένα νέο παιδικό παιχνίδι), 29 December 1989.
- Alithia Newspaper (Greek name = Εφημερίδα Αλήθεια). Glasnost the Game of Transparency (Greek = Γκλάσνοστ το παιχνίδι της διαφάνειας ), 16 January 1990.
- Eleftherotypia Newspaper (Greek name = Εφημερίδα Ελευθεροτυπία). Glasnost makes it to children's games; Pioneering contribution of two Cypriots in the international marker place (Greek = Γκλάσνοστ και στα παιδικά παιχνίδια, Πρωτοποριακή προσφορά δύο Κυπρίων στην παγκόσμια αγορά), December, 1989.
- The Cyprus Weekly (Newspaper). Christmas Shopping – the profit and the loss, by Annie Charalambous, pg 23, Dec 22-28, 1989.