I have been designing games for 5 years. In that time, I have learned so much about the board game industry. One element of game design that instantly stood out to me and is thankfully being addressed by many publishers and designers is cultural appropriation in games. I remember how disappointed I was after my first play of Puerto Rico. While the game had so many interesting mechanics, the theme was not representative of what I knew my culture to be and greatly distracted me from the fun. While I didn’t know it at the time, my experience with Puerto Rico planted the desire in me to make a new game that shared a more holistic picture of my people.

My first experience of designing a game set in a culture that wasn’t my own was with Holi: Festival of Colors. The design that became Holi was originally pitched to Floodgate Game with a completely different theme, but Floodgate had been wanting to do a game with this theme and when they pitched the idea to me I was onboard. However, I urged them to have cultural consultants involved, so that we could be sure to do right by the theme. As it turns out, that was their plan all along and ultimately they did a great job incorporating and representing the theme in my game.Throughout that process, I learned that spending the time and resources to get that right made the game better and that there’s so much benefit that it should be a no brainer for all games that use real world cultures as a theme to make sure they bring in cultural experts.

As I became more confident in my skill as a board game designer, that desire to design a game about the culture that I grew up in, grew in me, but I was hesitant. I knew that just because you are part of a culture, does not mean that you are an expert in any way or form and I didn’t want to make mistakes due to my own blindspots. That meant that the research necessary to do it right was going to take a lot of work. So, I knew that in order to get it right I would need to do extensive research and I’d need to go back in time over five hundred years. Why did I go as far back as the late 1400s? Because that is where it all started for us Puerto Ricans.

Historical education is not very strong in Puerto Rico, or many other places for that matter. I always found it odd that while mostly everyone acknowledges that the Puerto Ricans lineage is mostly composed of Spanish, African and Taíno, the latter goes almost completely unmentioned. While growing up, I was taught very little about the Taíno culture. 

As I grew up I began to understand what happened to many native cultures around the “New World.” Whether good or bad, I was educated through a specific lens like the one in the animated movie “The Road to El Dorado,” which  featured the native people as a fictional blend of Mayan, Aztecs, and Incan cultures, Even though this movie has a killer soundtrack, great story and characters, funny execution, likable Spanish protagonists, and a native antagonist, the ending left much to be desired. From the start, there was an underlying tone of darkness in the form of Spanish conquistadors and their leader Hernán Cortez, who only had a couple of lines in the movie, but very quickly showed that he was going to achieve his mission of finding gold and glory by any means necessary. Maybe it was the fact that the studio was a North American one that was disconnected from the South American source, but with that, they told a truer story that as a child made me wonder. Hernán Cortez made the native antagonist seem so insignificant at the end of the movie that I just knew, “If they had so much trouble with this guy, they are probably not gonna fare well with this other one”. Needless to say, it sparked some questions of the story I was being taught of the Taíno native and the righteous Conquistadors in the history of Puerto Rico.

Similar to the movie’s story, the Taíno also thought that the Spanish were gods, but after years of suffering the Legend of the Drowning of Diego Salcedo has it that they had to figure it out. The legend goes that 20 years after the Spanish arrived to the island, the Taíno were fed up with all of the changes that had happened. The encomienda system, the exploitation of gold, and the diseases that the Taíno were suffering all compounded and finally sparked a doubt; maybe the Spanish weren’t gods afterall. Their growing doubt made a few brave Taínos willing to risk their lives, willing to risk angering these “gods,” to see if they just might be mortal after all. They came up with a plan to drown a single Spaniard to see if after dying he would come  back to life after three days–their understanding of Christian teachings– So they did. They drowned Diego Salcedo, they waited and watched for three days to  make sure he didn’t rise from the dead. It is said that on the third day they realized he was indeed mortal after all and it is believed that this new information sparked the Taíno Rebellion of 1511. Interestingly enough, there is a huge mural of this legend in the library of the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, where I got my degree in engineering. I guess this could be chalked up to one more of the little things from my life that implicitly encouraged me to make Borikén.

Over the last few years, the more I thought about the Taíno people, the more questions I had and the more I wanted to use my skill set as a game designer to tell their story. The story of my people. Once I set my mind to it, I knew that I wanted to make a historical learning experience, one that I could share, not just with my own culture, but with the whole world. Knowing that it was going to be a big undertaking kept me from diving in, but in late 2020, the Zenobia Award was announced, and this presented the perfect excuse to focus on making Borikén. I just couldn’t pass up this  opportunity to highlight the underrepresented Taíno culture in a historical board game. Not only that, but the best part of participating in the Zenobia Award is that designers are assigned a Mentor that helps guide the designer through the process.. My mentor was Iván Cáceres, designer of Santa Cruz 1797, and from the Canary Islands, which is a Spanish Archipelago off the Northwest Coast of Africa. His mentorship was crucial in helping me focus on the elements that were most important and what I wanted to do with the design. If participating in the Zenobia Award program is something that you are interested in,, I  recommend it 110%. Keep an eye out as I think they will be running it again in 2023. Without Iván’s help, and by extension the Zenobia Award, Borikén probably would not have come to fruition. So I owe a huge thank you to them and in my next article we will dive into Borikén’s gameplay so you can see the fruit of that process and my preliminary work with GMT. Stay tuned!

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