as much,” Pinçon-Charlot said. “It’d
be more.”
Kapital! follows a simple, snakes-
and-ladders-style trajectory. You roll
and then move your game piece the
corresponding number of spaces along
a winding road. The path—eighty-two
squares, for the average life expectancy
in France—begins at birth and ends in
a tax haven. If a dominant player lands
on “General Strike,” she has to skip a
turn and forfeit 30K in financial capi-
tal; a “Revolution” means that the wealth
in the game gets redistributed. Every
round, each player draws a card from a
designated pile and reads it aloud.
“You buy a newspaper: who bet-
ter than oneself to promulgate domi-
nant opinion, n’est-ce pas?” Pinçon-Char-
lot read. The card instructed her to
surrender 10K of her financial capital
and to collect 10K each of symbolic
and social capital.
Kapital! has been described as the
“anti-Monopoly,” which goes to show
that Pinçon-Charlot is likely correct
when she attributes the game’s success
to “being perfectly in tune with the po-
litical moment, in France and every-
where else—the whole world is under
the same globalized capitalism.” The
game that became Monopoly, it turns
out, was first conceived, in 1903, as a
left-wing protest against the privatiza-
tion of property, but the allure of rack-
ing up hotels and railroads was so strong
that the critique was lost on players.
Kapital! risks no such ambiguity. “In
France, ten billionaires possess almost
all the media,” a pedagogical factoid,
printed in red italics at the bottom of
the card, warned. “The news that one
receives and the manner in which it’s
presented reflect their vision of the
world and their interests, not ours.”
It was the visitor’s turn. “It’s your
birthday: you receive season tickets to
your city’s theatre, and that brings you
10K of cultural capital,” the card read.
A butterfly flew in through an open
window. Pinçon-Charlot rolled again,
profiting socially from a promising en-
counter at a rallye, a kind of débutante
party for pedigreed teens. The visitor,
meanwhile, was having car trouble and
had to cancel her summer vacation,
costing her a cultural arm and a sym-
bolic leg.
—Lauren Collins
antfer
(Antfer)
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