Authors

Discussion

The history of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe has been told with a focus on politicians and experts. Rarely is neoliberalisation understood also as a cultural process, and even less attention is paid to material objects as a historical source. Exploring the material culture of neoliberal transformation after the fall of state socialism, this paper will study board games from East-Central Europe of the 1990s with overtly neoliberal themes, including privatisation, investment, and entrepreneurship. 

The board games were an opportunity to learn about the mechanisms and concepts of the market, from the general principles of running a business to the specifics of the privatisation process in the given country. They also cultivated the players’ ideas of the new economic agents, simulating what it was like to be a broker, a businessperson, or a manager, among others. The rules, objects, and characters of board games thus naturalised the possibilities and constraints of neoliberalism in people’s everyday lives.

The paper will focus on several board games from Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. While some of these board games were a local version of Monopoly, others were original concepts inspired by the ongoing economic transformation. While the former are mainly interesting for their content, the latter are also worth studying for their form, which reflects the logic of neoliberalism in its unique historical moment.