Page 26 - spielbox_0717_EN

FEATURE
Missing three turns at court
Ferry vs. Tunnel
Growing up close to the German-Danish border, I enjoyed frequent family holi- days in Denmark. And while my dad suffered from road rage, watching the stoic, slow Danish drivers, we kids spent the journey looking out for sex shops, which were non-existent on our side of the border, at the time. At our destination, we all enjoyed the free and easy Scandinavian culture with its hospitality and child-friendliness.
six times per crossing (three times on each space). That is anything but hospitable and child-friendly; it is neither commer- cial nor game, and if we wanted to evoke clichés here: totally un-Scandinavian.
What was meant to hurt the competing ferry company is now frustrating the trav- elers of tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow: The grand opening was ini- tially planned for 2021. Nowadays, 2028 seems more likely – provided the building permission on the German side is granted on time. Apart from legal action by the German ferry line TT, who considers the Danish state’s support for the project a violation of EU competition rules, there are still several thousand objections by cit- izens of the county of Schleswig-Holstein.
I Closer together falls short Under these circumstances, the legal action against the game rules does not really carry much weight and might be unsuccessful. But it conveys – rightly or wrongly – how far Scandinavian reality has deviated from the cliché of child-friendliness and hospitality, when a simple children’s game is used as an
arena for a confrontation among adults. Instead, a commercial game for a Euro- pean tunnel should introduce the regions it connects, evoke the desire to visit each other, present the tunnel as a citizen-led project, and maybe in that way, take the wind out of the ferries’ sails. But it seems they are already too far removed from the citizens to be concerned about their
welfare.
The waiting times of
the ferries are men- tioned as an essen- tial advantage of the tunnel in this game, weirdly enough only at the Feh-
marnbelt.
All that was half a century ago, but came back to my mind this year when the largest Danish ferry company, Scandlines Danmark ApS, wanted to obtain a court order against the rulebook of a board game, of all things.
The background is the planned con- struction of the 18 kilometer long Feh- marnbelt tunnel. The state-owned Danish company, Femern A/S, advertises in a children’s leaflet that their project con- nects Germany (Hamburg) to Scandi- navia (Copenhagen, southern Sweden). The booklet contains puzzles, games, col- oring pages and a simple roll-and-move game: Komme zuerst zum Ziel (Who gets there first) – roll the die, move spaces, skip turns, move again. All that would be nothing to speak of, if it were not for some special spaces, which, on the one hand, create rule ambiguities, and on the other hand, caused the competitor Scan- dlines to file a lawsuit.
Scandlines demands that Femern,
following: “Manufacture games meant for children and minors, where rolling a ferry has negative consequences.” More specifically, this is about the special ferry spaces, Rødby and Puttgarden, on both sides of the Fehmarnbelt: “When you land on this space, you have to miss three turns, because you are catching the ferry.” The corresponding text for the two tunnel spaces is: “You have decided to go through the tunnel – this makes your journey faster! Move forward four spaces in your traveling direction!”
You could even go faster by rolling a six at the right time. In that case, you neither “decide” on the tunnel nor the ferry, but fly over both of these travelling options.
For a promotional game, this is more than just poorly crafted. The rules also leave open if the text on the spaces equally applies after crossing the Fehmarnbelt. The rules indicate it, but theme-wise, it makes no sense to “catch the ferry” after having already crossed the Belt. With a bit of bad luck, it means you may have to
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