Board Gaming the System: A Comic Series

In the last installment of Adam Bessie and Jason Novak’s Board Gaming the System comic series, we head down the road to sweets and inscrutable surprises.

Franz Kafka would have loved Candy Land. While the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial died well before the game’s 1948 release, he would have appreciated the gameplay: before the game has started, the verdict is already in, the winners and losers decided, though neither knows. To discover their fate, players pull colored cards that tell them what colored boxes they must move to. In this fashion, players make their way on a single track to The Castle, and upon arrival, it all starts over again, and again, and again. They are stuck forever in an absurd search for an elusive Lost King. You don’t play Candy Land; it plays you!

 

Missed the last installment of the Board Gaming the System comic series? Check it out here.

About Adam Bessie

Adam Bessie is a writer whose cartoons and graphic journalism have been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the Project Censored book series. Bessie is a professor of English at a San Francisco Bay area community college and the father of a kindergartener.

About Jason Novak

Jason Novak is a cartoonist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, and Harper’s Weekly, and more.

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