Ararat is an immersive thematic game about immigrant miners travelling to the Victorian gold fields in the 1850s. The unit was developed in collaboration with the Year 5 teaching team, who were keen to provide students a richer way of engaging with this historical content.

The game was developed and piloted in 2025, my goal is to refine it with further playtesting, and potentially publish it for other schools to use. Unlike other classroom games I have developed, it relies heavily on professionally printed cards (a class deck of over 400 unique Tarot-sized cards) making it much less feasible for teachers to pick up and run with. Having said that, if you are keen to give it a go in your class, I’m very happy to share the mateirals I have developed.

The game as it stands was designed to fit the Australian syllabus, though much of the structure would be relevant in other contexts – most obviously the Californian gold rush.

Game Structure

Ararat is designed to be played in a class, with each student taking on the character of an individual miner. The game relies heavily on the teacher narrating the journey as the characters travel from their country of origin to the town of Ararat in the goldfields of Victoria, then mining for gold over the course of several seasons.

This structure reduces the need for students to internalise any rules, as they are being guided through the expeirence – similarly to a novice roleplaying group being led by an experienced facilitator. Comprehensive slide decks were created to assist teachers with this process of guiding students though different steps in the game.

We ran the game over six sessions of 60-90 minutes each. Broadly speaking that looked like this:

• Session 1 – Character development
• Session 2 – Voyage to Victoria
• Session 3 – Mining, and protesting the mining tax
• Session 4 – Mining, and the treatment of the Chinese
• Session 5 – Mining, and life after Ararat

The teacher-led story approach produced was that while each student could have a different journey, the narrative structure of all their journey needed to follow roughly the same beats. Also, the teacher was not able to give individual feedback to players as they would in a roleplaying game. This was addressed through the use of several sets of large (Tarot-sized) cards that could be handed out with unique information for students.

The first set were the Character cards. Each card was unique, and provided the back story of a miner from England, Ireland, California or China. These were allocated randomly to students, who then transferred the details into a diary they used throughout the course of the game. Rather than having them roll for attributes, the three numbers on the right hand side of the card could be allocated as they wished to grit, cunning, and health.

The second set of cards provided backstories that made the characters more distinct. Students were grouped by their country of origin, and three Backstory cards specific to that country were dealt out for each student. Students drew straws (literally, because that’s how things like this were decided in 1855) and then took turns drafting the backstory cards they wanted.

Once they had their three backstory cards, they made appropriate updates to their diary – this might involve adjusting attributed, gaining or losing money, adding possessions or skills and so forth.

They were now ready to set out on their journey to Victoria. They had already done some reading about sea voyages in the nineteenth century, and realised it would not be a pleasure cruise. An important decision was deciding whether to travel in a cabin or in steerage. This was one of the areas in the game where we were able to explore the issue of class.

Class, poverty and priviledge were cruicial to an understanding of the peroiod, but poorly appreciated by the reasonably homogenous and affluent students we were playtesting with. These ideas had already been introduced with the characters, where very distinct (admittedly stereotypical) differences between the Irish and the English had created rich conversations.

In planning their journey, students chose between very affordable passage in steerage or very expensive cabins – for many of the Irish and the Chinese this was not even a choice.

The next set of cards were the Voyage Events. For each month at sea (two or three, depending on the port of origin and the vessel taken) students recieved a random event. Some were purely narrative, others had mechanical impacts.

Importantly, each card had two ‘sides’, to be read by rotating the card depending on whether they were travelling steerage of in a cabin. By literally juxtaposing the different experiences of different classes of passengers ‘side by side’ students realised the impact that wealth and status had on people’s everyday lives.

As with the other cards, student kept the cards and stored them in a wallet at the back of their diary. At the conclusion of each play session they woudl write a diary entry, and their growing collection of cards provided rich inspiration for these narratives.

Arriving in Victoria, we introduced one of the other important aspects of the unit – the treatment of Chinese immigrants. About one quarter of the class had characters who were coming from China. We had set the expectation that things would be more difficult for them, and looking back those students had some of the most profound experiences during the game.

When they got to Melbourne, everyone was able to disembark – except the Chinese. Teachers explained that in response to protests from local miners, Victoria had implemented a ten pound ‘poll tax’ which they would need to pay. Otherwise they would need to travel onward to South Australia, disembark there and travel back, resulting in more of the dreased Voyage Event cards.

To explain the situation, teachers read an actual article published at the time, describing the Chinese as a ‘horde of barbarians’. While they were aware of the racial prejudice of the period, hearing the language that was used in mainstream media at the time brought home how extreme and entrenched that prejudice was.

The process of travelling to the goldfield felt like a very mechanics-light roleplaying game. Students were engaged by development of their personal narratives, and the arrival of unexpected events.

In the final three play sessions, they began mining. This was achieved with a simple roll-and-write mechanic. Students would decide which of the different ‘leads’ of gold in the area they would mine, and would recieve a Gold License for that lead. Each month they would roll two dice and look up the result on their license – unless they rolled a double this woudl give them two choices of outcome. They would claim the resulting cards (Gold Cards, Diggings Events and Camp Events) and cross out that square on their license. 

The focus of historical learning for the final three ‘mining’ sessions was twofold. Firstly, while the mining mini-game was very straightforward, it was wrapped with opportunities to introduce material. There were narrative beats produced by the Diggings Event and Camp Event cards. The teacher also prefaced each month of mining with discussion of the seasonal changes, and the costs the miners would have to pay that month – runaway inflation pushed up food prices and gradual attrition sapped away the miners’ grit, cunning and health.

The second way that key historical ideas were introduced was through a whole-class ‘dilemma’ that was introduced at the conclusion of the paly session, after several months of mining. These were led by the teacher, who outlined an evolving situation and presented a number of options. For the first mining session, this was the unrest in response to increasingly prohibitive mining license prices. This dilemma was inspired by the iconic ‘Eureka Stockade’ in 1954, and students had to decide whetehr to ignore the issue, or to protest. the votes of the students were tallied, and depending on the propotions the whole class recieved a particular outome.

At the end of the second mining session, student responded to growing hostility toward Chinese miners – a dilemma loosely based on the Lmbing Flats Riots. Would the Chinese miners aquiesce or resist? Would the European miners oppress them, support them, or ignore the issue? Again, the decisions of the class as a collective produced a shared outcome. The result was rich conversation and teachable moments – both during play and in debriefs afterwards.

At the end of the final session, the dilemma was a more personal one – would each of the miners continue to work the increasingly unproductive fields of Ararat, or perhaps travel to South Africa where there were rumours of much greater finds? Would they return home, or start a new life in the thriving city of Melbourne.

As a final exercise, each student wrote a diary entry set five years later. tehy looked back on their time at Ararat, the decision they made, and their life since. 

Sources of Inspiration

Ideas for this first iteration of Ararat have come from lots of different, sometimes unlikely, places:

• The idea that a huge, complex game can be manageable if it is made up of lots of discrete systems and you carefully guide the player from one to the next, from John Company (Second Edition)
• Collective moments of decision in response to problematic dilemmas (and the nifty ‘reversible’ Voyage Event cards) from The King’s Dilemma
• The immersive importance of compelling diegetic (in-world) game components, from The Vandermist Dossier, and the beautiful work of Tim Hutchings and Shin Yin Khor.

AI Disclosure

While I generally try and avoid using generative AI in the games I develop, there were a couple of places where I did so here, and I’d like to be transparent about that. I wanted the character cards to include photographic images as I thought that would help students identify immediately with the characters – those period portraits were generated using Midjourney. I also used ChatGPT to suggest some suitable events that became Voyage and Event cards.