The Maine Gamer

The Maine Gamer  would like to introduce the Maine Game Designer as our first recurring feature. Our first featured Maine game designer has combined an obvious interest in history with that of boardgames. Bowdoin College Associate Professor of History Patrick Rael is the creator of Plantation, a game in which players compete in building plantation empires in the New World.

Plantation is a deck based game designed for two or four players. Each card in the deck represents a colony, complete with several plantations of sugar, wheat, indigo coffee, and tobacco. Players take turns discovering, settling and harvesting these colonies, and taking other actions intended to construct the most effective plantation society.

Rael also created the railroad-themed, card-drafting game Iron Horses where each player starts with an engine and works to enhance their train by adding cars. Cars are produced by one of four player-owned manufacturing companies. Players score points by adding cars to their train but may also purchase private stock in another player’s companies as a way to bolster their score.

Patrick Rael is a specialist in African-American history, who earned his Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995.  He is the author of numerous essays and books, including Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (North Carolina, 2002), which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.  He is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature (Routledge, 2001). ^[1]