All in Fun or Promoting Stigma? Card Games called The Looney Bin and Tourettes

sThe name itself is stigma-promoting, and the cover art for the game isn't so swell, but lets get past that. What do you think of the game itself, and it's expansion, Looney Bin: The North Wing, from Board Game Geek.com?

The Looney Bin:

The Looney Bin is a deduction game with fast action - reaction card play that depicts the uproarious occurrences of an insane asylum. The object is to be the first to heal all the patients in your ward by treatment with various therapies. Non phasing player action ability keeps everyone involved for very little down time. Contains 35 patients, 90 staff and action cards, 35 symptom tiles and plenty of therapy chits.

Looney Bin: The North Wing:

Looney Bin: The North Wing allows you to continue the insanity by expanding The Looney Bin game for further fun. Expansion set includes 27 new patient cards and 36 new staff and action cards. One more therapy, Rorschach Ink Blot, doubles the amount of possible cures with 70 new symptom tiles. Also included are more therapy tokens for up to 10 players.

There have been other hospital-based games like Theme Hospital for the computer, and a similar version for Facebook, called Simply Hospital, or something like that, that have "funny" brain or "mental" illnesses; things like King Syndrome, where the person thinks and acts and looks like Elvis, etcetera, and has to get cured by the shrink.

Those two computer games, I've had much more experience with Theme Hospital than Simply Hospital, but I was starting to get bothered by some of the "mental" cases in the latter. In Theme Hospital there were so cartoonish as to be so far removed from real life, although I suppose there are mental patients who believe they are all kinds of famous people, I guess. At least I've seen illness portrayed that way in the movies; I don't know if it's really so.

This Looney Bin game, on the other hand, seems to be much more stigmatizing than the computer games. Then again, I've played an online game called The Asylum for Cuddly Toys; it's in my right-hand sidebar. You try to cure a soft toy of a mysterious mental illness using various therapies. You have to try and deduce things based on what behaviors the treatments cause. Is this game stigmatizing or fun or somewhere in between?

Looney Bin just seemed to set off something in me though. Let me know what you all think, about any of it!

Edited to add: I just found one called Tourettes, which I think is DEFINITELY stigmatizing, or at the very least EXTREMELY tacky.

Description:

Tourettes is a game of quick thinking and quicker blurting.

Players take turns flipping over the top card of the deck. The card will have a letter, number, prefix, or symbol, and everyone tries to shout out a word that starts with the same letter as whatever is on the card. The fastest person wins the card.

Collaborative Games

I've been enjoying some collaborative games. One my sister has is called Break the Safe, a game where you are taking back some items that have been stolen and placed in a museum-like place, but they were taken from you so you aren't stealing. Or so it goes, to make it "okay". Anyway, you cooperate together, trading the solutions to solve the booby traps that get revealed beneath red pieces in various rooms, if there's not a key beneath the red piece; you trade for the solution to that particular booby trap. You also get each other out of jail if the dog or guard has seen or smelt you on their rounds; you roll two dice, one is for the guard or dog to get out of their rooms, as well as that same die is your movement die. The other die is the movement die for the guard and dog.

If the "let the guard out of his room" comes up on the one die, you don't move anywhere and the guard comes out and moves how far his movement die says; same for if it says the dog comes out. There's a line of sight rule on the guard, and you have to be more than 6 spaces away from the dog or in a room to avoid detection by the dog. There may be line of sight with the dog too, but it can smell around corners within 6 spaces.

Anyway, you are all cooperating to get to the various rooms to work on the booby traps and you aare doing all this against a timer on the safe in the middle of the building. You decide at the beginning of the game if you want hard, easy, or medium level game, which decides how much time you get. Last time we went medium, and we would've just beat the hard time by less than a minute, it was a nail-biter!

What I quite enjoy about these cooperative games is that its a nice flip on the usual competitiveness and even sometimes greed that can come out when playing regular games. Not that there is anything wrong with regular games, but sometimes people can show some of their . . . let's say not the best of themselves under those circumstances. So it's refreshing to play in a manner that reinforces good communication, positive interaction, and all around fun without that level of competing against each other, because you are competing against the game!

The newer game that I've just found, I bought with birthday money. It's called Forbidden Island and it's by Gamewright Games. The island is sinking beneath you as you play and you continually have to shore up the various tiles the island is made up of as you play. If you don't, you risk losing critical places like the places you need to collect the treasures, your extraction point, and such, The goal is to collect four treasures from the island before it sinks, and you get to use action points each turn for various things like giving treasure cards to other players, moving, and shoring up pieces of the island. Also sometimes for special actions based on the special abilities each archetype you get to play, gets, which are all different, and help make the game different each time you play.

The gameboard is set up differently each time you play since you shuffle the game tiles, ie, the tiles that represent the lagoon, the caves, the temples, etc. and the board is then all different each time.

The rule book encourages you to give each other ideas on how you should use your actions each turn; I like that the book acknowledges this. I really like the positive interaction and communication and teamwork that this, and these kind of games foster.

Plus, they're really just plain fun. This particular one is challenging. I hope to find more cooperative games in the future; if you see any, let me know!