Alex Ashley ‘22 and Alina Sosa ‘22 want to play with how people think about board games.
The pair’s new game, “Fate of the Feds,” immerses players in a deeply complex and realistic crime system, asking them to navigate the system to eventually reach “heaven.”
“It’s a party game about life, death, crime, justice,” Ashley said. “Essentially, it mimics life. It mimics the world we live in today.”
Interaction is at the core of the game, and players contribute to its most immersive elements, like a “playlist portfolio” where winners can add their own songs or an Instagram “wall of shame” for when someone gets arrested in the game. “Fate of the Feds” even has a food and drink element.
“Depending on how far in the game you get, you can get access to the menu,” Ashley said. “The game has a drinking version, so we’re working on a cocktail menu as well.”
The rules of the game are interactive too, changing as more players play and responding to each individual player’s gameplay.
“You could point at someone and be like, ‘They’re the reason why that rule exists in this game,’” Sosa said. “The players are the game.”
Kwame Adu-Kyei ‘24, one of the first players of the game, said it could be best compared to “Dungeons and Dragons on a board game,” but “much more fun.”
Adu-Kyei also said he enjoyed the competitive gameplay encouraged in “Fate of the Feds.”
“Most board games you play are about pure relax,” he said. “But with this, people are out for blood, and that kind of just gets me going.”
Both Ashley and Sosa said they believe “Fate of the Feds” is unique in the board game world. They recently held multiple workshops at Lafayette College to teach students how to play the game, and have also brought the game to Boston and New York City.
“All my expectations, frankly, were exceeded,” Ashley said of his experience teaching the game at Lafayette.
The game has been more than a year in the making, the idea emerging when Ashley and Sosa decided to take the rules of Ludo — a dice-driven board game — into their own hands.
“When our friends would play with us, they would do things that we didn’t like,” Sosa said. “So we started making rules that they couldn’t do those things, and then that turned into us starting to write all these rules down.”
“It very much changed into us creating our own board game,” Sosa continued.
Although people can play “Fate of the Feds,” it is not yet sold in stores.
In relation to the “Fate” aspect of the game, both Ashley and Sosa believe that “everything that happened in the game was destined to happen,” and believe that this aspect really makes the game special.
“Everything comes full circle,” Sosa said. “I think that just is a really fun piece to it.”
