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How this game came about and our thinking on sustainability.
The idea for this game was born in the GDR prison in the 1970s. As is so often the case, such things do not happen in a planned way, but are written by life. When "Uncle Schulz" was our guest, he told us about a game idea at the kitchen table. We were so enthusiastic about this game and together we began to integrate the story of "Uncle Schulz" into this game, wrote down the rules of the game in numerous hours and developed a suitable design for the game board, the game box and the game instructions. It was clear to us from the beginning that we wanted to create a parlour game that was "Made in Germany" and had to be produced sustainably.
Made in Germany and sustainably produced
- Print products produced climate neutrally in Germany
- Pieces produced from sustainable forestry PEFC, FSC certified.
- Plastic-free packaging of the entire game
THERE IS ANOTHER WAY!
Our values
This game consists of 100 % produced components "Made in Germany". We place great value on quality and make this our top priority when selecting our suppliers. High-quality processing of all parts, constant optimisation of our production processes to create the best possible playing experience, as well as adherence to strict environmental guidelines allow us to rightly mark our game with the "Made in Germany" seal. Likewise, our game supports the aspects of social and ecological sustainability.
A word ...
A few words from "Uncle Schulz" - free spirit, bon vivant, loyal to his opinion.
Dear Reader,
There won’t be any consequences for you if you don’t read this brief explanation of our board game ”Knastmacke“, or if you stop reading at any point. My family, pretty much made me contribute a few introductory thoughts on it.
A few explanations:
Minimalism in the spoken and written word is a huge, nearly insoluble challenge for me and will probably never sit well with my personality. It’s likely why some of my acquaintances occasionally disappear as if by magic from my field of view. Some might even scurrilously claim they’re avoiding me … But there I go again, waffling on about yours truly. Time to put a halt to this and get down to business.
It’s very important to me that you understand that this ”proof of origin“ (in the broadest possible sense) for the present game in no way constitutes any kind of valuation, political or otherwise, for individuals or contemporary history! My purely personal and rather informal description and interaction with imprisonment (custody/detention centre) in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) clearly cannot be compared with MfS (Ministry for State Security) detention, which was an entirely different matter. I was never in ”Stasi custody“. If I had been, I don’t think I’d be even thinking about making these rather humorous comments about prison life, or they’d vanish from my consciousness as soon as they’d occurred to me.
It was in the late 1970s that subordinate bodies of the ”ruling class“ (people´s dictators, as I would now refer to them) decided to classify me as an unworthy member of their society for the first time, and I was briefly excluded from the socialist human community (imprisoned). I didn’t necessarily view myself subjectively as a ”gangster of the republic“, rather as an individual who deviated somewhat from the norm of a ”socialist human being“, a kind of apostate. Since this anomaly likely required closer investigation in the state of workers and peasants, I subsequently found myself in pre-trial detention.
It was only many years later, during my last sojourn in a ”detention kindergarten“ in 1988, that prison management finally diagnosed a pathological view of global politics or a misinterpretation of the internal political development within the fabric of the socialist state etc. Fortunately for mankind and my fellow detainees, I was placed for several months in solitary confinement in order to prevent the outbreak of a further epidemic of free thought. To this day I remain convinced that these measures were necessary to protect both myself and others – see the specialist literature on ”Mental illnesses and the risk of contagion in contact with the normally developed species of socialist-communist homo sapiens“.
Back to the 70s:
Anyway, in the late 1970s I found myself in a pre-trial detention centre as part of a larger group of innocent (or at least, presumed innocent) detainees. In these kinds of exceptional situations, young people or adults easily fall back into childlike patterns. It’s amazing what playfulness comes to light to pass the time. Board and other games aren’t uncommon in prison situations – they’ve never been entirely frowned upon and are probably right on trend again now – so we came up with ”Knastmacke“.
There was enough trouble and aggravation in this place, but it needed something more ... a ”Macke“ (”craze“). Add to this the location of the ”carrier or transmitter“ of this game and you get ”Knastmacke’ (”Prison Craze“). There may well be other manifestations of ”prison craze“, but we don’t need this to be a scientifically substantiated interpretation of the term, merely an attribution as the name of the game.
My personal interpretation of the term ”prison craze“ is that – depending on the temperament of the player, the variety of moves and the extreme twists and turns over the course of the game – it may not necessarily drive you crazy (”prison crazy“), but there is at least the risk of suffering a ”moderate nervous breakdown“.
I hope you enjoy the experience you’re about to have, and remain yours eternally in play, ”Uncle Schulz“.