World Games — Amor Fati — Four Winds — Adinkra — AW Crossing-Borders
Amor Fati is a board game for 2 to 8 people, in which you embark on a journey through a colourful landscape full of symbolism, picking up intercultural visions and mythical wisdom about the journey of life along the way. How the picked wisdoms enrich your vision on life, you share with your travel group, so that you deepen each other’s insights.
The intercultural art of living
With the help of a Game Guide, a group of friends, family or team can make a journey across the game board — a colourful landscape full of happiness in life — if one of the players wants to be the guide as a game and dialogue facilitator.
It is also possible to practice the art of living of Amor Fati under the guidance of a game supervisor from the Quest for wisdom foundation.
Amor Fati introduces players to themes of the art of living, captured in symbolic signposts to different wisdom traditions from the four cardinal directions.
Dialogue with oneself and others
Each concentric circle on the playing field represents a theme of life, which is addressed by means of the six symbols in each circle. As a player, you bring the intercultural meaning of the symbolism into a dialogue with your fellow players as a travel group; and you harvest the meaning after each game round on the game sheet.
The power of play lies in the dynamics that arise from the dialogue with oneself and in exchange with the travel group. The symbolism appeals to the imagination and the game assignments are appealing to harmonize the moral compass. This dynamics contributes to a deepened understanding. It is precisely the tapping of all the sources within oneself that forms the basis for a wise handling of the questions that life asks us!
Finding your destiny between freedom and determination
Players practice Amor Fati as they wander along the paths in the game to the elemental happiness of the quintessence, in the centre of the game board. The journey meanders in the existential tension between the coercion of destiny and the freedom to shape life yourself.
The art of living consists of the call to reconcile these two poles and to embrace being ‘thrown’ into life: one does this by throwing the dice, giving meaning to the assigned symbol as a significant place in the labyrinth of life.
Around the gaming table, one goes from outside to inside through seven stages (game rounds):
- Pregame Round; players choose one of the four natural elements and a basic attitude in life, visible in the figure with the arms down for an alert following or the arms raised for a sensitive entrepreneurial life-based attitude.
- The outer circle of Authenticity shows eight starting positions in the game as frames of thinking with a principle of happiness. These positions connect the roads in the game to one of the natural elements and the corresponding basic symbol eye, heart, spiral, hand.
- The orange circle of Bildung (Education): to find a good course in the dynamics between nature and culture, players are given philosophical tool, by means of six symbols that depict intercultural perspectives from different wisdom traditions.
- The green circle of Ups & Downs; heading towards the centre, players pass one of the six mythical places, which connect the good life with the tragic side of life, in order to align the inner compass.
- The purple circle of Ordeal; players continue their journey and find themselves in one of six landscapes of elemental imbalance, where they are tested with a moral dilemma.
- In-between Round of Encountering ‘the strange other’: here, the question at stake is whether you tend to ‘keep everything under control’ in a crisis situation or whether you are willing to accept help. Do you want to meet the mythical creature or animal that lives here and can offer you a different perspective on the journey of life?
- The inner circle of Destination. What does it mean to you that the centre with the four quadrants are of the same colours and show the same symbols as the outer circle? Are you back at the beginning or is your perspective tilting from having to being: how does your basic element opens the gateway to the quintessence?
Game and book
Amor Fati is a board game with 7 card sets, playing figures, rings, lucky elements, dice, hourglass, spinning top and a game guide: ISBN: 9789492127167
Duration: depending on your wishes and possibilities, two to eight half-days, in a small group of 4 to 8 players.
The book of the same name provides background to the game about the art of living for global citizenship
Playful wisdom for world citizenship
Amor Fati (game and book) wants to appeal to people with an open mind and a warm heart for the world. People with an interest in wisdom in traditions and wisdom that arises from good conversation, meeting and teamwork. Encounters between people ensure cross-pollination between their cultures: a vital lifeline for the cosmopolis. This ideal of ‘the cosmic city’ – the ‘polis’ of citizens connected as a community across national borders – has ancient roots. It is the city of and for people who feel connected to a larger whole. Global citizens who, in the words of freedom fighter Rosa Luxemburg, “feel at home in the whole world” and are touched by human tears and the ‘small’ good and beautiful. People who feel that we need the wisdom from cultures worldwide for the questions of life in the global city – and who want to contribute with dedication and love for this ideal.
Amor Fati is the motto of the classical art of living to bow to one’s fate. Although the name seems to indicate a fatalistic attitude to life and wallowing in fate, this ancient philosophical art rather aims to strengthen the good life as a community and mastery in life as an individual: by mildly greeting whatever comes your way – it is not neither to combat nor to appropriate, but to embrace and let go with love and inquiry. This requires people to open their hearts to full life, including tragedy – the ‘counterpart’ that is inextricably linked to happiness in life, like shadows in the light.In the book of the same name, Amor Fati: Playing wisdom for the cosmopolis, Heidi Muijen provides background to the game about the art of living as a world citizen and sheds light on the QfWf philosophy about the Wheel of the Intercultural Art of Living. This full-colour edition of 499 pages with English intercultural reflections by Greg Suffanti on his watercolour series gives the reader – together with the visual work of other artists around the mythical-philosophical themes of Amor Fati – a surprising route of the imagination through the book.
Amor Fati is a co-production with publisher Garant
NL/EN 2024, ISBN 978-90-441-3970-9
Update 2024-12