A Word of Warning

Terra Fabula is in beta. Our ambition is to create a free-to-access, shareable toolkit for educators who want to run Terra Fabula in their classroom… but we’re not there yet.

At the time of writing, the game has been piloted once with a cohort of about 80 Year 4 students in NSW. We are now working on a number of other opportunities to further playtest the game.

In the future we are planning to create resources for educators who are running the game, with detailed instructions, supporting content, links to relevant syllabus outcomes, and guidance on ensuring the wellbeing of students during play. While the game does not explicitly simulate any specific historical context, we are also hoping to work with Indigenous groups here in Australia (and perhaps in other countries) to get their feedback on ensuring that the game is appropriately respectful of any culturally sensitivities.

Given these caveats, this page provides an outline of the game as it currently stands, as well as a detailed description of how it is played and downloads of required materials. If you’d like to pilot the game at your school, please get in touch, as we’d love to help make that happen.

An Overview

Terra Fabula is a game designed to give students a powerful, immersive experience of the impact of colonisation, primarily through the eyes of Indigenous communities. Players create a land which they then populate with a pre-industrial community. They imagine a culture for this community, and connect with other neighboring communities. Without warning, the game changes tone as colonising explorers and settlers arrive, often with dramatic impact to the lives of the community the player has built.

Around the world, many school curriculums now include content on Indigenous people and European settlement. Terra Fabula is not intended to be a substitute for this content, or a way of delivering this content. The setting of the game is intentionally abstract, and no explicit connection is made between the game and actual historical events until after the activity is finished. Rather, the intent is that students play Terra Fabula before a unit on Indigenous history and colonisation. Playing the game provides them a personal lived experience provides them with a source of understanding and empathy that they can bring to their exploration of actual historical events in their local context.

The game is a ‘lo-fi’ experience, with much of the gameplay made up drawing an evolving map of the land, and writing short narrative pieces to elaborate on the experience of the community. In the early chapters, players are completely in control of their land, inspired by short booklets that guide them through each chapter. As the colonising explorers and settlers arrive, players begin to use dice to determine the fate of their land and community.

In the final session of the game, players write a ‘resolution’ to describe how the conflict that has emerged will be resolved.

The Game in Detail

The game is made up of eight chapters, each designed to last roughly 45 minutes. Each chapter is accompanied by a booklet which walks through the gameplay for that chapter. In addition to the booklets, players will require an A3 sheet to map their land, as well as a pencil, black pen, and eraser. For Chapter 4 they will require pieces of card to create a headpiece. For Chapters 6 and 7 they will require dice and card stencils for drawing farms and towns.

At the beginning of each session, the game facilitator gives an overview of the chapter, and walks through the tasks to be done. To assist with this during our pilot we created a video of what each of these initial segments might look like.

In Chapter 1 | Landscape, players create a land by drawing a map on their A3 sheet. The booklet walks them through creating a coastline, adding mountains, rivers, vegetation and other natural features.

In Chapter 2 | Arrival, players are invited to imagine a small community of people, traveling to find a home. They invent a backstory to explain where they have come from, and how what make them decide to make a home in the land. They describe the animals and plants that they encounter, and how they survive.

In Chapter 3 | Community, the player adds to their map, creating a village of dwellings for their people. They identify other locations of importance, create paths and add additional dwellings, as well as placing dots on the map to represent each member of the community.

In Chapter 4 | Culture, players give names to natural features of the land which have become important o their people. They construct a headpiece featuring a symbol that represents their people, and describe one of their community celebrations.

In Chapter 5 | Connection, players consider what resources are plentiful and scarce for their people. They connect their map with one of their classmates, and decide how the communities might trade or collaborate.

In Chapter 6 | Contact, technologically advanced explorers arrive from a distant land. They begin to map the land, renaming landmarks and building roads. Some of the community may die as a result of skirmishes or disease, depending on dice rolls.

In Chapter 7 | Conflict, settlers follow the explorers. Depending on dice rolls, the settlers may decide to clear the land and raise cattle or farm crops, to mine for resources, or to establish a town. Any of these requires changes to the map, with little regard for the original community and their culture. Finally, a dice roll determines the fate of the remaining people.

After further disease they may continue to live amongst the settler, they may be forced into reservations, they may have to leave the land to find neighboring lands where they can live, or they may face at the hands of the settlers, with the few remaining people forced to hide in remote mountains or forests.

In Chapter 8 | Resolution, the player regains control of the narrative. They are presented with aa range of potential futures, and decide what path they want for their land and their people. They conclude the game by writing a narrative that begins “In the generations following the arrival of the Settlers…”

Following the final play session, we conducted a debriefing session where players shared their feelings about the game. They were invited to make connections between the stories they had created and other stories, or real life events. We acknowledged the parallels with the European colonisation of Australia, and invited them to keep this experience in mind as they began their next unit of inquiry, looking at that period of history.

The Materials

You can download the printable materials used for the pilot here. As indicated above, these are not in final form, and are provided with no guarantee of correctness or completeness.

The materials are made up of:

  • seven booklets (named as Chapters 1 to 7) which should be printed as A5 booklet (this means printing them in ‘booklet format’ on A4 sheets)
  • a double sided Resolution sheet and a single sided Art sheet for Chapter 8
  • a Stencils file of two A4 sheets to be printed, stuck onto thick card, and cut to remove the indicated areas

These are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.