Feelinks

About this board game

Feelinks is an emotions game for 3–8 players that takes about 40 minutes to play. Each turn asks you to respond to a situation, express how you feel, and predict another player’s feelings.

To begin, pick a card and choose one of its situations to read aloud. Everyone selects the emotion that best matches their own reaction, then bets on how their partner will feel. Players reveal their choices, take a step on the emotion track, and then change partners.

1. Pick a card and choose a situation to read.
2. Select your emotion and bet on your partner’s feeling.
3. Reveal the choices, advance on the emotion track, and change partner.

Feelinks includes 50 cards presenting 150 situations from everyday life. Prompts may ask how you would react to waking up in the body of a person of a different ethnicity, or how you would feel if the Minister of Justice were caught smoking cannabis. These situations require players to articulate their own feelings while trying to understand someone else’s.

The game uses empathy to encourage debate and challenge preconceptions. Depending on the number of players, you can play for a set number of rounds, with the player farthest along the scoring track winning. Alternatively, without counting rounds, the first player to reach the final square of the emotion track ends the game.

Originally titled Feelings, the project won a call launched by the city of Poitiers as part of its fight against discrimination. Its goal was to create a simple, easily playable game built around situations and questions related to discrimination. One of its designers, Jean-Louis Roubira, previously developed the Dixit workshops of language with young people at risk.