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Expel dumb kids to meet funding goals in satirical school management sim

The problems with the nation’s school systems are wide and oft the subject of a good argument, so of course someone is making a satirical game about it.  No Pineapple Left Behind is a charter school-funding sim from the devs who previously made Neocolonialism, a digital board game about devastating the global economy. This one sounds equally socially focused, although on a local scale, as you play as a sinister principal in charge of overseeing that your students perform admirably on standardized test lest they change from well-mannered pineapples into noisome kids. (Thus the “no pineapple” pun.)  The game is…

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Factorio gives the middle finger to SimCity’s vision of industrial utopia

SimCity is about building a flourishing biome where citizens can live without dying of smog. Factorio, contrarily, says screw that. It is a game about wrecking the environment by building sprawling, Rube-Goldbergian, obscene, waste-shitting factories out of conveyer belts and tens of thousands of claw arms.  Judging from the new trailer, it loosely fits alongside games like Papers, Please and Prison Architect inside the very trendy space of legitimately good games making a statement for a social cause by having you make awful choices to win. And the cause here I suspect is pollution, as you can see in the…

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Riot aims to politicize the board game with, what else, riots

We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is erupting into violence. The rules and design behind this unorthodox take definitely looks interesting, and as we’ve seen with great games like Papers, Please and Cart Life, the structures of injustice can make for some very compelling and unconventional play—you know, unlike actual riots.  The designers are…