Ellis Island Board Game
Ellis Island is a board game about immigration in the late 19th/early 20th century. In the game you control the members of a family of immigrants who have just arrived at Ellis Island and are trying to enter the United States of America. To do so, each family member must pass four checkpoints: a physical examination, a mental evaluation, a documentation check, and an exit interview. The resources you need to complete some of the challenges, however, have gone missing from your luggage and are hidden somewhere on the island. Find your lost items, pass the four challenges, and meet your family at the Kissing Post. Welcome to America - you're almost there!
Our original work on Passage was shaped by three main goals: design a narrative game about Ellis Island, which depended on player behavior to direct the narrative of the game, and which could be played on both large and small scales. To adequately meet all of these goals, however, would produce a board game of unacceptable complexity. Using the design philosophy of "Would my grandmother like this?", we started from scratch; building a new game where players navigate families through Ellis Island.
We focused on familiar abstract systems (card and dice games), which gives us a game space for showing how immigration into United States was shaped by both the social customs of the countries from which immigrants came, and the immigration laws of the time.
Rules of the Game
View a copy of the rules [PDF]