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Articles

Sophie’s World: The Boardgame!

Chris Bloor spends a Summer afternoon wisely with white wine, some friends and a pair of dice.

Can you offer a working definition of hermeneutics? Could you guess which German philosopher had a poker brandished at him by Ludwig Wittgenstein in a Cambridge common room? Can you talk entertainingly on the subject of animal rights for one minute without faltering?

If so, you would enjoy Sophie’s World: The Boardgame, produced by Sophisticated Games Ltd. It is a spinoff from Jostein Gaarder’s novel, but don’t let that put you off if (like me) you have mixed feelings about the self-styled ‘history of philosophy that thinks it’s a novel’. Lacking its big sister’s pretensions, the game doesn’t think it is anything other than an enjoyable way to pass time among friends, and is all the better for it.

Sophie’s World begins when the player whose name is closest to ‘Sophie’ rolls the dice, but after that there are no references to the characters in the book. It soon emerges that the game is an entertaining combination of Snakes and Ladders, Trivial Pursuit, and pub philosophy (pub optional).

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