Gold Rush Era a historical storytelling board game that invites players to revisit the history of Chinese immigrants in the States as discovering how Chinese American culture was seeded and developed.
Hyunwoong Yang, Vivien Kong
Description
Wandering around the oldest Chinatown, I constantly heard Mahjong sounds in between alleys through the inner Chinatown. Later I found that there are at least forty Mahjong club rooms hidden within — the Mahjong gambling culture has carried through since the 1850s.
I redesigned the Chinatown map by adopting Mahjong's elements. Moreover, the board game serves as a combination of Mahjong and monopoly: four players would have different character identifications and storylines based on the effects of historical events. Instead of rolling dices, the players will take turns and push the buttons on the board to let the LEDs indicate where the characters should go. Once arrived at the location on the Chinatown map, the avatar will trigger “the switch”(by connecting the copper tapes) of the location and the historical story of this place sill unfold as the p5.js projecting the visuals along with the audios (mahjong playing noises) I recorded in Chinatown.