Disparity Trap

The Disparity Trap board game is like many of its kind, where your individual goal is to accrue as much wealth as possible. But where it differs is that you can have a team goal, and work with your fellow players to dismantle the Disparity Traps seeking to keep everyone in poverty, or you can have an individual goal and try to get to the top on your own. Within the game you will step into someone else’s shoes; to experience the economic disparities within a position different from your own. As you play, the dice roll correlates your identity in the game to real life statistics. So like life, the dice are in your hands, but the odds are not.

The Disparity Trap board game provides an easy way to have the hard conversations around race, wealth and privilege in the United States, and how those constructs impact society in systemically dominantTM (SD) and systemically non-dominantTM (SND) ways.

The most significant differences between SD and SND individuals are the privileges they’re afforded. These privileges can be given, received, inherited, earned, ignored, and compounded. They are, in many ways, transactional; a means of currency. And just like any currency, they not only make an impact with their presence, but also by their absence.

This game examines both sides of that proverbial coin, and sets out to challenge you, the player, to answer the questions: When confronted with your privileges, how will you respond to the Disparity Trap? How will you play the unfair game of life?”