CDU awards prize for innovative party work to a simple race game
The CDU elected not only a new chairperson at its digital party conference but also awarded the prize for innovative party work. The winner was the Rheinberg city association with a simple race game. Neither the game itself nor using it in election campaigns is particularly innovative.
The Rheinberg Christian Democrats want to take new approaches in their election campaign and are relying on an age-old game principle. The Game of the Goose was already known in the Middle Ages. Numerous dice and race games are based on it, including the CDU’s Rheinberg-Spiel. The mechanism is as simple as it is familiar. Roll the dice and move your pieces towards the goal. The first to reach it wins. Event spaces send pieces back or catapult them forward. The 25 event spaces in the CDU game focus on local traditions, customs, historical and geographical features, as well as things that enrich city life in Rheinberg.
“The game says a lot about what we as the CDU in the Rheinberg city association stand for. We’ve included many important topics for us in the game,” says city association chairperson Sarah Stantscheff. “The topics are illustrated in event spaces and numerous hand-drawn illustrations that bring the game to life.”
“Image boost even among Digital Natives”
The CDU produced 15,000 copies, packed them in C4 envelopes and delivered them to letterboxes. However, without dice and pieces. These were only available at campaign stands. “The game is a great example of how, in times of advancing digitalisation in party work, a traditional and classic project can achieve an image boost for everyone, even among Digital Natives,” the jury explained their decision. According to CDU general secretary Paul Ziemiak, the city association won a €500 voucher for the CDU shop as a prize. There, you can buy ballpoint pens and notebooks, as well as card games – with either French or German suits.
It is surprising that a race game won the prize for innovative party work. Not only is the game mechanism widely known, but the idea of using games to convey political messages is also nothing new. A quick internet search, for example, leads to “Zusammen mit Bürgern” (ZmB). In the 2016 local election campaign, the electoral association published the board game Rodgau ärgere Dich nicht and distributed it to 18,000 households. The game principle: players roll the dice and move their pieces towards the goal. Along the way, they encounter event spaces with local political topics. The only relevant difference from the Rheinberg game: ZmB uses an OpenStreetMap map as the background, while the CDU had its game professionally illustrated.
The Federal Agency for Civic Education has also been using games for some time. The card game “Wahlzeit! Warum wählen” was published in 2009. If you want to go back even further, you can look at the First World War. Judith Fritz writes on the website Die Welt der Habsburger:
Building on the long tradition of war toys and strategy games, the theme of war shaped most new releases and reissues between 1914 and 1916. Toy soldiers, trenches and cannons, prisoner transports and field hospitals in miniature moved into children’s rooms. Existing games were reissued so that graphics and narratives had a clear war connection. The adaptation of board games was particularly evident, with battles now being re-enacted. The war-oriented design of the games served a clear educational purpose: graphics, terminology and the design of the game pieces were intended to convey a new world order and historical narrative, the war was aestheticised, soldiers were depicted as heroic role models, and virtue, duty and obedience were presented as central values.
By the way: In addition to the Rheinberg city association, the Mittelsachsen district association also won the prize for innovative party work. The award went to an electronic voting card that enables voting on candidates at election events using tablets.