The Grizzled

For this week’s review of a tabletop game suitable for classroom use, we take a look at a game that already has a proven track record of success in the classroom: The Grizzled (2015) designed by Fabien Riffaud and Juan Rodriguez, published by CMON games.

The premise of the game is to help six friends who are drafted into the Great War survive it and return home. This game is ideal for a social studies classroom but would also fit nicely in an ELA classroom (a unit on narrative perhaps?). The Grizzled is a cooperative, 2-5 player game and takes roughly 30m to play. The mechanics are simple enough - discard X number of cards per round, while avoiding a set of three like symbols - but the game is deceptively difficult. What makes this game great for the classroom is that it is a game about war with none of the - well, war. The game is about friendship, about helping another overcome something traumatic. To that extent, The Grizzled becomes a powerful vehicle for teaching empathy - and that is something that can (and should) fit into any curriculum. The designers of the game (and I encourage all of you to research their stories) developed this game with education in mind and go so far as to include a statement of intention in the rulebook about their efforts to design this game with respect towards a sensitive historical topic. I encourage any educator looking for a unique way to teach WWI, a tool for examining narrative structure, or for a mechanism that fosters camaraderie to investigate The Grizzled.