“Strategies, tactics and games to upend the status quo”: Sanity Clause 🧑🎄 recommends the Beautiful Trouble Card Box for your stocking
This is as close to Xmas product recommendation as we’re ever going to get… but we absolutely push this as the ideal present for the alter-native activist in your life. Beautiful Trouble has been elegantly filling the toolbox of creative activism for a decade now - and we think this is the loveliest (and most useful) object they’ve laid before us yet. It’s a box of Strategy Cards, which they explain below:
We hope this deck helps you tackle challenges you’re facing in your own life, community, or social change campaign.
Includes the new games:
Cards for Humanity • Cardstorm! • Radical Charades • Design a Creative Action • Divine the Future • Eternal Debates
Each card includes a unique “pop-up code.” Use your smartphone camera to automatically pop up a link to the full version of each card in the Beautiful Trouble online toolbox.
(Fine print: If total revolution not completed within 30 days after commencement of game-play, we promise to refund the full price of purchase, or, er, suggest you try another tactic!)
Even more info…
A web of ideas
Every card in this deck is actually a chapter in Beautiful Trouble. You can read more about each card online or in the published books Beautiful Trouble and Beautiful Rising, written by over 170 grassroots activists from across 5 continents in 7 languages, and featuring notable movement strategists including Arundhati Roy, George Monbiot, Vijay Prashad, and Mark and Paul Engler.
How many people can play?
These games can be played solo, or by a group of friends, or at a workshop by many teams at once!
How long does it take to play?
Anywhere from 10 minutes to a lifetime!
What makes it a game?
You can use these activities as collaborative teaching tools or turn them into competitive games by keeping track of time, points, and winners.
What are the suits in the deck?
Tactics: Specific forms of creative action, such as a flash mob or blockade.
Principles: Hard-won insights that can guide or inform creative action design.
Theories: Big-picture concepts and ideas that help us understand how the world works and how we might go about changing it.
Stories: Accounts of memorable actions and campaigns, analysing what worked (or didn’t) and why. Useful for illustrating how principles, tactics, theories and methodologies can be successfully applied in practice.
Methodologies: Strategic frameworks and hands-on exercises to help you assess your situation and plan your campaign.
Debates: Eternal controversies (such as, change the world or change yourself?) that must be constantly wrestled with.
Sounds like a good way to brew up possibilities while Omicron chases you off the street. More info here. (BTW we’re receiving no commission here - just a straight-up recommendation).