An Exchange of Gifts
A downloadable game
You are a traveler: your small ship carries you from planet to planet, where you encounter cultures and civilizations different from your own.
Using only a standard deck of cards, you learn about and exchange gifts with each culture before moving on. Record your observations and reflections in a travel log.
Inspired by "Alone Among the Stars" by Takuma Okada, and my own desire to practice models of meeting "the other" outside of the western tropes of colonialism, objectification, and exoticization that I grew up with.
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<Just to say i played this morning and i really liked it :) and, if you want, you can mix it with Exquisite Biome to add some fauna ^^
What an wonderful short game! I'm having a lot of fun using it to worldbuild. But I have to make a few small pointers. Decks of cards do not have a one, they only have an ace. Also, the booklet pages are scrambled. The covers are correct, but on the interior, it prints Culture and Gifts on page 2 instead of 3.
I absolutely adore the prompts through. I've created 8 species so far (with 2 more having been alluded to) and have continued to record myself talking about them for several sessions (with a bit of help from a few other tables and generators). I think that the 2 prompts that intertwine to create their culture are really evocative and the symbiotic relationship prompt is very fun.
Thanks for making this!
I'm so glad that this game is speaking to you!
I'll take a look at the layout -- I'm not very good at laying out PDFs, so I may need to do some futsing with it :)
The "western tropes of colonialism, objectification, and exoticization" that you grew up with? These tropes are woke terms that didn't enter the public consciousness in any major way until a couple years ago. You did not grow up with them. Prior to 2015 you wouldn't hear these things outside a university. And as for them being western, that's just standard progressive "white man bad" virtue signaling. Go to any of the objectified and exoticized people and you'll find they objectify and exoticize anybody different from them too. It's not a western trope. It's human nature. All humans have an ingroup bias. It's fashionable now to bash white people but psychological testing has shown that othering is done by all humans. If you were truly interested in exploring this phenomenon you'd have done some legitimate research on it instead of just buying into the white supremacy nonsense. It's too bad - I was hoping for a real game about first contact, not an excuse to virtue signal your leftist politics.
I sincerely hope that you find ways to be less angry at other people’s journeys, and feel less need to lash out and cause others pain or anger because you disagree with them.
I sincerely doubt that you care at all about whether I am angry at othr people's journeys, and are in reality insulting me in a cultural form. The problem for people such as yourself is that I'm actually something of a moderate which means I get into discussions with both sides and my experience has been only your side behaving in this manner. Had I addresssed a conservative, they would not say sincerely for example unless it was actually true. Our culture is not use "sincerely" in the figurative way that has become common elsewhere. Also, conservatives respond often with specific suggestions. This is one reason why I find your sincerity to not actually be honest. I find honest suggest hobbies or suggest ways to lower stress, and then often end with good luck. Your message, on the other hand, while perfectly polite in formal language was in reality far more rude and vicious than the sentence I sent you.
In my case, it is not fake politeness to mask being vindictive. I truly do hope you break out of your passive aggressive ways and are able to more genuinely express yourself. And yes I realize expressing things probably means I totally deserve you being a jerk to me. But it will be healthier for you than concerns about cultural apppropriations, which are almost invariably signs of deeper mental distress.