I saw this article on top 10 board games with positive female representation online yesterday, and I thought I'd share it here.
Spoiler alert: Sentinels of the Multiverse makes the list. My wife says she probably would've ranked it higher because they're original characters with rich backstories. I'd probably agree, but it's great to see it on the list. We have often played with an "all-lady" team and we kick butt.
Agreed! I think it's pretty cool the range of representation in SotM. There's people from lots of different races, nationalities, classes, genders, orientations, etc. It's great!
At a GenCon panel I went to on diversity in games, there was a big call-out to Sentinels for its diversity. Not just for the obvious thing like the number of women on the cast, but the wide variety of other features that are well fleshed-out. In particular, one of the panelists had Ex-Patriette as a personal hero, because she was missing an eye, the same that the panelist was blind in. (It also helped that both the panelist and Ex-Patriette were female.)
I love the little things that add to the diversity like the fact that Unity is Israeli ,Parse is the only Aboriginal Superhero I've ever seen,Tachyon and Dr Medico are gay etcetera.It's the narrative filigree that turns characters from mere copies of the more famous ones into their own thing which makes the game better to play
We also have non-human and non-gender-binary people, as well as a decent age range. I'd like a little more diversity in body types, but mostly it's pretty good.
And disabilities - Fixer is blind, Expat has one eye, AZ needs to be in his suit or cryo chamber which is seriously restricting, Visionary essentially has brain damage that might kill her, Parse has Asperger's (arguably not a disability but it does cause problems in everyday life).
I'm beyond bored of the fact that so many other games out there stick to the old "straight white male as default" pattern. Those of us who aren't straight white males should be represented too!
Not if your powers are predominantly non-physical - you can be any body shape you like if you can melt people's brains or call down lightning or turn the ground underneath the enemy into lava.
And even within the description of "fit human", there are different shapes depending on the type of fitness. Take athletes - there's a huge difference between an Olympic long-distance runner and a sprinter and a weight-lifter. And my old aerobics instructor would probably have been categorised as obese, but she taught at least 3 hours of tough cardio classes a day and barely got out of breath, in sharp contrast to some of the smaller ladies there who looked much fitter but weren't.
Silverleaf your are 100% right in both your points, I guess "pretty fit" was a poor choice of words on my part,what I should have said is that I think Adam is going to a "heroic build" comic book style which limits body type
Yeah, I think you're right. And while I love his style, one way I think he could improve it would be to diversify a bit when it comes to body types, particularly for the females. I'd like to see an overweight female, a female with a slim frame that doesn't also have huge boobs, a muscular female, a skinny non-muscular male. We have "overweight male" covered already.
I’m getting a bit of deja vu. Does anybody want to dig through the forums and locate the thread where we’ve had this conversation before?
(I mean that I’m pretty sure that we’ve been discussing SotM’s diversity, mentioned body types, and then mentioned Scholar at least once before, and I find it interesting how this conversation is following the same path)
There wer also comments made on Miss Information's new design, with her immense cleavage front-and-centre. I'll just mention at this point that when it comes to the stereotyping stuff (includes the current discussion over in the Spirit Island area), I tend to pretty much agree with what Silverleaf says, but generally anything I think has already been said by the time I read the thread so I can never think of anything to post and I don't really want to just repeat what's already been discussed.