Rosenstrasse is a historical tabletop role-playing game created by designers Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington and published in 2022. It centers on the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest in Berlin, when roughly fifteen hundred non-Jewish wives of Jewish men gathered in the street for days to demand their husbands' release after a Gestapo roundup, an act of open civil defiance that ultimately forced the men's release. Players take on two pre-generated characters each, drawn from four married couples, and move between scenes that trace the couples' relationships as Nazi policy strips away Jewish civil rights in the years leading up to the protest. The design is explicitly educational, aiming to teach players about a little-known moment of resistance, to prompt reflection on everyday courage in the face of oppression, and to open conversation about activism more broadly. The game was recognized within the tabletop role-playing community, earning a nomination for the 2023 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming and a nomination for the 2022 ENNIE Award for Best Writing, and it was featured at IndieCade in 2017 and at XOXO Festival in 2019.
Facts
Origin YearWikipedia infobox (Rosenstrasse (game)): date='2022' Game TypeHistorical indie role-playing game 1 Sport
Game Type (category) Sources
1. Rosenstrasse (game) (Wikipedia)
Lead paragraph, first sentence
Rosenstrasse is an historical indie role-playing game by Jessica Hammer and Moyra Turkington that explores the erosion of Jewish civil liberties in Nazi Germany, culminating in the Rosenstrasse protest, an uprising in which nearly 1,500 non-Jewish wives of Jewish men saved their husbands from deportation.
Infobox, date field
2022
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