Doubt Is Our Product

About this board game

Doubt Is Our Product is a two-player board game played in about 90 minutes, modeling the twentieth-century conflict between the tobacco industry and the movement opposing it.

In the game’s historical setting, cigarette smoking has been linked incontrovertibly to lung cancer, while the industry continues selling a deadly and highly addictive product. The Company uses its economic power, lobbyists, and marketing to resist regulation and avoid responsibility, while the Movement works to change public opinion and address an unprecedented health crisis.

This is an intentionally asymmetric design: each side has a different game, with distinct mechanisms and components. The Company plays an economic deck-builder, preparing for large turns, chains of actions, and substantial profits.

The Movement instead plays a political tableau-builder. Its scientists, grassroots activists, politicians, lawyers, and public health officials gradually come together, organize, and advocate for legislation and regulation.

• The Company: Build an economic engine around coordinated actions and profits.
• The Movement: Develop a political tableau to organize opposition and pursue change.
• The disinformation war: Contest the spread and removal of misleading claims.

The two sides intersect most fully through the disinformation war, which illustrates Brandolini’s Law: refuting falsehoods requires far more energy than producing them. The Company can easily muddy the water, while the Movement must work harder to clear it away.

Designed by Amabel Holland, Doubt Is Our Product presents a focused game about corporate influence, public health, political organization, and the long struggle to limit tobacco advertising and establish regulation.