A Ukrainian patriot has launched a $25,000 crowdfunding campaign to fund the production of a self-designed board game that recreates this year's revolution on Kiev's Maidan square.
According to a note on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website, "Maydan" is a tactical board game set in and around Kiev's Maidan Square — the site of a mass anti-government uprising against former President Viktor Yanukovych earlier this year.
The fallout from Yanukovych's overthrow has seen East-West relations fall to their lowest point since the Cold War amid an ongoing conflict between the pro-EU government in Kiev and Moscow-backed separatists in the country's east.
Reflecting "real-life events," the game asks players to use their "social and cooperative skills to gather around patriotic-minded people and then unite together to overthrow the ruler," whose name in the game is Tyrant, the Kickstarter site said.
Players can choose one of four different parties: Right Sector, Svoboda (Freedom), the UNA-UNSO paramilitary group — all of which are far-right parties — or the left-leaning Spilna Sprava (Common Cause,) designer Dmitriy Berezhnoy said in an online address.
Trying to stop the patriots from defeating the "corrupt" parliament in the game are the Berkut riot police — a special forces unit that was disbanded earlier this year after being implicated in the bloody deaths of more than 100 Maidan protesters.
In an apparent political comment, the designer said the game was mainly tactical, and that though all parties would want to emerge victorious from the game, they should cooperate with one another.
"No fights between players. All [are] doing the same job!" the creator said, adding infighting would only result in either the Berkut or the government winning the game, to the loss of all parties.
In all, the game includes 112 figure soldiers and is played out on a board that features different places of strategic interest in and around Kiev's central square.
While nationalist groups featured prominently in the Maidan demonstrations earlier this year, far-right candidates fared poorly in the presidential elections, which were held in May and were eventually won by Ukrainian tycoon Petro Poroshenko.
Nationalist groups also achieved poor results in the parliamentary elections held last month, with Right Sector and Svoboda both failing to clear the 5 percent threshold needed to get into parliament.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Berezhnoy and his team had raised £323 ($505) out of a targeted $25,000 to fund the project. The group has 22 days left to raise the full amount.
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