The Triumphs of Turlough is a board game for scientific discovery created by LEME-USP’s research group Middle Ages and Digital Humanities (IM-HD) in partnership with Interactive Archaeology and Electronic Simulations (ARISE). Its development started in 2019, endured the difficult first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was finally released in 2022.
The game is an output from the PhD thesis of Dr. Vinicius Marino Carvalho, who analysed the effects of the period of climate change known as the Little Ice Age over a series of wars that beset Ireland between 1276-1318. To identify possible connections between different kinds of extreme events, the project made use of an agent-based model (ABM): a genre of electronic simulation that virtually recreate historical scenarii and submit them to experiments. Although it is a technique that showed great promise, its applicability to historical research stumbled upon a crucial challenge: it is very hard to validate the assumptions and parameters of a computational model, ensuring that data gathered from historiography and sources have been correctly implemented.
Turlough was an answer to that need. The game is a tabletop version of the computational model that allows players to explore, discuss, and modify its fundamental ideas.
Translating an ABM into a board game, ensuring that its rules neatly matched the code was no easy task. It demanded the effort and keen eyes of ARISE and IM-HD throughout many playtesting sessions. Due to the pandemic, these meetings had to be held virtually via the software Tabletop Simulator.
Ensuring that is mechanics adequately represented the historical agency of characters was only part of the task. The team also took care to guarantee that the project’s visual identity corresponded to the material culture of 13th and 14th centuries Ireland.
The team also wrote a didactic guide aligned with the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC). This volume comprises a historical introduction, suggested class activities, glossary, and recommended bibliography. The booklet was made with the help of LEME-USP researcher and school teacher Dr. Victor Borges Sobreira.
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