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Witch Hunt 1649

History and games

Games offer a wonderfully immersive way of learning about history. Stepping into the shoes of someone from the past encourages us to engage actively with other perspectives, and to empathise with the particular challenges historical actors faced. Playing through historical events can be a memorable learning device, and games often offer insight into aspects of day-to-day life that don’t make it into text books. However, turning the messy complexity of history into a quick and accessible game requires compromise. We discuss below how elements of the game reflect, or do not reflect, historical realities.

The witch hunts are a serious and sensitive topic, and we have sought to avoid trivialisation. The games aim to reflect the realities of life in a seventeenth-century community, and include snippets from historical records and information about historical context. The characters in the game are fictionalised; we do not ask players to take on the role of a real person who was persecuted. We take the position that humans are capable of having fun playing a game while also recognising – and perhaps reflecting on – the serious themes underpinning it.

The Dregs of Days

The Dregs of Days offers a window into community life in an East Lothian village. It aims to show some of the hardships that might generate division, and explore the ways in which people might antagonise the church or their neighbours. It also looks at the accusations levelled against supposed witches. Some of these accusations – e.g. those about people falling ill, or food and drink being stolen – might have originated in neighbourhood tensions. Claims of contact with the Devil were typically introduced by elite interrogators after suspicion had already fallen on the accused.

We included allies to avoid making the game entirely dog-eat-dog. But early modern people also collaborated with those beyond their family groups! By giving players only one ally and setting them against everyone else at the table, The Dregs of Days overstates the degree of hostility in a normal neighbourhood.

In designing Asset cards, we aimed to include items that 17th-century households might conceivably own. Historical evidence is limited; there are few surviving inventories from normal Scottish households. (The English evidence is much richer.) But it is clear that compared to modern-day society, people owned very little. The average Scottish household was small and sparsely furnished.

We omitted a few basics – characters are assumed to have a dwelling of some kind and some clothing. And some of the assets in the game would be much more commonly owned than others. Almost every rural family would have a cow. Pigs were much rarer, and often banned for the damage they caused. A milk pail was another essential, whereas querns were owned only on the sly, grain-grinding being the prerogative of the local miller. Every respectable family was supposed to own a Bible, and the church would sometimes distribute them. However, the few surviving Scottish inventories suggest that this was a luxury item in practice.

We sought to reflect which assets in each category would be most and least valuable, but this is necessarily approximate. A byre was naturally more valuable than an ale cask! Some assets could conceivably belong to more than one category. A sieve was used for straining milk during cheese-making, but also to sort grain. Kilns were used to dry grain, but also to make lime.

The selection of assets a player comes to hold in an average game may not make sense – fishing bait was not much use without other fishing gear, for instance! In reality, asset ownership would be gendered; drop spindles were more usually used by women, fishing spears by men. The categories are somewhat artificial; ‘livestock’ were also part of ‘farming’. Asset card effects were chosen for gameplay purposes, and are not necessarily logical.

The Dregs of Days contains 7 characters, of whom 5 are female. This was intended to approximate the proportion of women relative to men who were accused of witchcraft. We didn’t specify much about characters because we wanted players to build up their own impression of their characters based on in-game events and asset purchases, but they are intended to represent the demographic most usually accused: people from the middling tiers of society, who might have a small amount of land, some possessions and some means of subsistence.

Fate cards explore some of the challenges facing early modern people. Many are inspired by evidence from church or court records. For gameplay purposes, Fate cards are negative (we found that including even a few positive ones made the game too unbalanced). In reality, of course, positive things happened to people as well! A game about witch hunting necessarily offers a bleak view, but early modern communities also enjoyed festivals, songs, stories, games and celebrations of various kinds.

Welfare in the game represents physical, mental and financial wellbeing, while reputation is about players’ standing both with neighbours and with the church. We tried to show that it could be difficult to maintain a balance; attending solely to one’s personal wellbeing might result in more strained relations with neighbours. We also tried to make welfare and reputation losses from Fate cards reasonably logical, but they are naturally gamified to a degree, and it is probably rather too easy to die or get banished.

Typically, those who were initially accused of witchcraft within a community were individuals who had built up a bad reputation through quarrels or other disagreements with neighbours. As trials progressed, the net was often cast wider, as accused witches named supposed accomplices. Many games will include this sort of snowballing effect, with several additional trials rapidly following the first one. However, we didn’t find a way to represent the specific circumstances that caused particular individuals to first be accused, besides the implications of neighbourly tensions that generally arise from Fate cards. (We experimented with triggering a witch trial when a player’s reputation fell below a certain point, but didn’t find a system that worked well from a gameplay perspective.)

The accusations on Black Mark cards are drawn from real trials, though people would most likely have more than three raised against them. We tried to differentiate between the kinds of accusations that generally came from (likely illiterate) neighbours, and the kinds that were introduced by educated men during the interrogation process, though of course this distinction was not always perfectly clean. Most accusations were about harmful magic, rather than liaisons with the Devil.

For gameplay reasons, we’ve increased players’ chances of survival (we found that playtesters didn’t like dying without recourse). We allow players to mount a defence, which means that we’ve given them more agency than accused witches generally had in local trials. Accused witches would not usually have legal representation unless they were wealthy and/or tried in a central court, so their participation in their own trials was generally limited to entering a plea. Usually accused witches would already have confessed prior to the trial – it was common for the central authorities to require a confession before they granted a commission for a trial, though this rule was circumvented on occasion. Pleas would often take the form of the accused confirming their confession, though sometimes accused witches did attempt to retract their confessions. For further information, see trial procedure.

The rule that one can’t be re-tried after acquittal is drawn from early modern Scots law, which typically would not permit people to be tried multiple times for the same crime. People might be tried multiple times when new charges were brought, though. For example, Janet Cook was acquitted of witchcraft in 1661-2, but new charges were brought and a retrial took place a month later, at which she was found guilty.

Lying Lips

Lying Lips reflects the significance of words in driving forwards the witch hunts. When investigating community conflict, the kirk session (local church governing body) often found itself meting out punishments for scolding or slander – both offences particularly associated with women. In the context of witch trials, these altercations took on new significance. Verbal curses might be evidence of magical practice. Calling a rival a witch might tarnish her reputation, though she might succeed in reframing the accusation as malicious slander. People also gossiped, spreading news of other witch hunts and sharing suspicions about unlikeable neighbours.

Juror 2

In Lying Lips, players trade using the assets from The Dregs of Days (discussed above). This is artificial in some respects. Payment in kind for goods or services was common, people would more usually trade livestock or consumable goods than possessions such as kilns! But the trading portion of the game does reflect how communities were bound together, with neighbours economically dependent on one another.

The Rumour card represents the spread of gossip within a close-knit community. The Rumour card is powerful; when you have it in hand you are controlling the village narrative, and can potentially win the second stage of the game. But gossipers, slanderers and ‘back-biters’ also made themselves unpopular, and there is a risk that your neighbours will turn against you. When the commissioners and jurors seek to identify the player holding the Rumour card, they are not identifying ‘the witch’, but rather the argumentative player perhaps most likely to be accused of witchcraft in an early modern community.

In the second stage of Lying Lips, players take on characters in a witch trial, with the most successful character from the first stage becoming the commissioner. Roles are intended to show the key figures in the courtroom, though a real (local) witch trial would involve a group of commissioners and a jury of fifteen, as well as administrators. We gave the commissioner the job of reading out dittays and death sentences, though these jobs in reality fell to the court clerk and the dempster respectively. Witnesses might be present in person, or might give evidence through written dispositions. Usually the lead commissioner acted as the prosecutor, and the accused did not have legal representation, though sometimes professional lawyers were involved. Usually the accused had already confessed, though this might be retracted in court. For more information, see trial procedure.