Palimpsest

Overview: Palimpsests occur when a piece of parchment (typically used as writing material in the past) is scraped to remove the top layer of writing. It was a form of erasure that allowed for reuse of the piece of parchment for a new piece of writing. Then, writing materials were difficult to come across and labor intensive to create, leading to the practice of scraping that resulted in the faint appearance of previous text. In recent years, the concept has been used by social scientists trying to explore and understand how the past continues to influence the present in variety of fields. It calls us to reflect on how we inherit institutions, laws, policies, neighborhoods, ideas, and histories from the past and how these influence the present. Gameplay: In this game you will be playing the role of a scribe trying to leave their mark on history. Each turn you will erase a letter and come up with a new word. If you cannot create a new word or there are no spaces able to be erased, you are lost to history. Players will continue doing this, passing their card around clockwise at the end of each turn, until there is only one person remaining. The last player able to make a word is the winner. —description from the designer