The Great Welfare Empire Conspiracy - Page 01

What Is This Welfare Game All About, and How Is It Played?

Ron Pramschufer, the co-inventor of the game, and I intended the game to be a parody of government liberalism, with a special focus on the able-bodied loaferism, welfare fraud, and social chaos its domestic policies promote. The object for the players of the game is to accumulate as much money as possible in 12 circuits around the board, each lap representing a month, as they move back and forth between the "Able-bodied Welfare Recipient's Promenade" and the "Working Person's Rut."

The able-bodied welfare recipient collects money through such methods as having illegitimate children, playing the lottery and the horses, drawing "Welfare Benefit" cards, stealing hubcaps, and making profitable side trips into the four "Saturday Night" crimes: drug dealing, gambling, prostitution and armed robbery.

Players unfortunate enough to land on one of the "Get a Job" blocks have to move out of the Welfare Promenade and into the Working Person's Rut. There, they usually experience an unending series of bills, meager paychecks, discrimination, welfare taxes and other assorted "Working Person's Burdens."

Both able-bodied loafers and those in the Working Person's Rut have opportunities to land a high-pay and no-work job for their other playing piece, representing their live-in or spouse, on the "Government Cakewalk." To mirror American reality, we made it so that the only way a player's live-in or spouse can be removed from the lucrative Cake Walk is to land on the square that says, "You are conscience-stricken. Quit government job."

The "Jail Jaunt" rounds out the liberal reality represented by the game. Able-bodied loafers turned Saturday night criminals must move there if they get caught in one of their illegal acts. Players in the Working Person's Rut do not experience the Jail Jaunt, because they are too busy or too tired to engage in criminal activity. The Jail Jaunt, as most of the rest of the game, mirrors the reality of liberal government policies: one roll-"Lawyer gets you off on technicality," for example-and you're right back at the welfare office ready to collect a fistful of dollars and resume your strut on the welfare promenade.

The game wasn't meant as a 100-percent accurate, thorough critique of American social policy, but as a lampoon. The "research" for it consisted of television and newspaper reports, observations and conversations, and one visit to a local Maryland welfare office where an administrator was very candid with us.

Our spoof was based on street knowledge and common sense. Ron and I saw ourselves more as packaging experts than game inventors. We often told people, "We didn't invent this game; government liberals did. We just put it in a box."

We designed the package for the impulse buy in high traffic locations. We felt we had a large, natural market for the game with everybody's "Uncle Charlie," or "Aunt Bea" who complained about welfare. We expected some criticism, certainly, but not much more than a political cartoonist might receive.

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