Are you a board game player? Personally I am not. However I understand there is a huge board game community out there. These game enthusiasts meet in small coffee shops and attend large gaming conventions. I read that 35% of Americans say they play board games several times a month. Think about how many board games you may have laying around in your own place, even if you’re not a hard core gamer.
Recently an avid board game player sent me an email asking if I was aware that there several mining related games. That was a surprise to me. Who would create a board game about mining and for what demographic market?
Curiosity took over and I had to check out the links sent to me on the Board Game Geek website. Here’s a few of the games and what they do. Now that Germany may be moving back into coal, the first three games may come back into fashion. The 4th game listed is a bit of a head scratcher.
A few of the mining board games
Game 1: Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining (2015)
This game is part of a coal-mining game trilogy created by Thomas Spitzer in Germany. The players take the role of farmers with opportunities to exploit the presence of coal in the Ruhr region of Germany. During the game, players acquire knowledge about coal, extend their farms, and dig deeper in the ground to extract more coal.
Players must select the correct tasks while being mindful of quickly accumulating pit water, for it can stall efforts and prevent extraction of coal. The game info link is here.
Game 2: The Ruhr: A Story of Coal Trade (2017)
In the second game of Spitzer’s trilogy, you are still in the Ruhr region in the 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The Ruhr river presented a transportation route from the coal mines. However, the Ruhr was filled with obstacles and large dams, making it incredibly difficult to navigate.
The players transport and sell coal to cities and factories along the Ruhr river in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the beginning, players have access only to low value coal but can gain access to high value coal. The players also build warehouses, locks, and export coal to neighboring countries in the pursuit of the most points.
The info link is here.
Game 3: Schichtwechsel: Die Förderung liegt in deiner Hand (2021)
This game may still be in German text only. Players are the administrator of a coal mine, and experience competition while living through a piece of Ruhr Valley history.
They bring coal and overburden from underground to the surface, let the miner go through a “shift at the colliery”, produce coke, or build the typical colliery settlements.
The info link is here.
Game 4: The Cost (2020)
This game takes on a more negative view of the mining industry. It is described as “A bold take on the economics in the brutal industry that is asbestos.” The game players assume the role of a global asbestos company.
Players make their fortune in mining, refining, and shipping. Whoever ends the game with the most money wins. The last part of the description is the gem “When players mine or refine asbestos, they must choose to either maximize profits for short-term gains or sacrifice their hard-won money to minimize deaths, thus sustaining the industry.” That’s every mining executive’s dilemma; profits or deaths. The info link is here.
Some of these game boards look more complicated than the actual industry. To find other games you can go to the Board Game Geek website and search for different themes. Most mining games listed there are not realistic but are more about dwarves mining gems or they just have an activity called “mining”. Here’s one called Copper Country.
Free Excel Mining Game
In 1983 my brother, at the age of 10, got his Commodore 64 computer and was eagerly learning to program in BASIC. He was always looking for ideas on what he could write programs about. I had graduated from McGill in Mining Engineering a few years earlier, so I suggested he write a simple computer game about mining as his project.
I provided him with the logic and in no time he had it written and functioning. That game is long gone, likely at the bottom of a landfill stored inside the chips of his Commodore 64. Some 40 years later, my brother is still coding as a software development manager. I guess I managed to convince him the mining industry wasn’t a career path.
Over the last few months I decided to learn VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). VBA is a programming language the works with Microsoft Office products, mainly Excel.
I always enjoyed programming. In university we wrote FORTRAN programs using stacks of punch cards to feed the machine the code. I had also learned the BASIC language, from my brother’s VIC 20 and Commodore computers.
A good way to learn something is to watch a few pf the many tutorial videos on YouTube. An even better way to learn VBA is by taking on an actual coding project from scratch. So, what worked 40 years ago, would work again. Rather than write something useful, I decided to re-write the mining game from 1983, albeit enhanced with the Excel application capability and more years of personal mining experience.
This coding process would force me to learn how to write code, figure out logic, create loops, if-then statements, and handle debugging. Already knowing Excel makes the entire process easier. Combining Excel functionality with VBA delivers capabilities that would have been difficult to do in BASIC alone. Note: It appears that BASIC is no longer in use, having been replaced by Python as the preferred programming language.
Download it.. if curious
If you are curious about the capability of VBA, the Excel mining game can be downloaded. A descriptive overview of the game is included in the PDF file at this link.
Junior Mining CEO game screenshot
The very simple game is called Junior Mining CEO. The object is to find gold, raise the share price, and not go bankrupt given the pitfalls that often befall the mining industry. The input parameters have a lot of optionality, although I have protected the macro code itself for this edition. You can borrow money and issue equity to fund your mining activity.
The Excel file can be downloaded at this link. The was written using Excel 365 but it may also work on older versions of Excel.
You will first need to save the game to your computer to run the macros. Since there are macros, many computers will disable such Excel files because they can contain viruses. You may need to toggle the file Properties in File Explorer to unblock the file to allow the macros to run.
Is there a junior mining corporate sponsorship opportunity here? Sure. For a small fee, I will add your company logo to the game and pre-set all the input parameters so that everyone is a big winner all the time.
Conclusion
Mining has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Being born in Sudbury, many of my family members have been, or are currently involved, in mining through a variety of occupations, including my father who I idolized. However, I never knew my true interest in the industry until my 11th-grade technology class. I had a teacher who was passionate about the mining industry, and he created a project that involved developing a very basic mine design.
Before my first year of university, I had a summer job tramming at Macassa Mine in Kirkland Lake Ontario, which has been in production since 1933. My mentality was to get the boots on the ground and get the job done, whatever it took (with proper safety precautions of course). Using rail systems, dumping ore cars manually, jackleg drilling, etc. gave me the perspective that mining was archaic, mining was rough, and mining was only about the ounces.
To change the negative view around mining, I believe the main focal point should be electric equipment and the ability for remote operation/work. With all this newly developed technology at our fingertips, I know that future operations will be safer and more sustainable, which should be better portrayed.
Even creating a mining simulation video game where you can run through a story of being a manager, excavator/scoop operator, truck driver, etc. would get the thought of mining brought into the coming generations at a younger age. This would increase the talent pool from the more typical operator because more and more youth are getting skilled at remote operation through video games due to their increased screen time.
People get comfortable and people are afraid to leave home, so selling a career that allows for boundless flexibility in job tasks and constant stimulation while living wherever you desire could allow a shrinkage in the current technical gap.
So do I think the mining industry is archaic…. not anymore.
Firstly, I would like to thank this engineer for taking time to write out his well formed thoughts, and for allowing me to share them.
Its the right thing to do
The company gets a chance to learn about potential employees and also gets productive service from them.