Michael Ram­s­ingh

The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion de­clared the COVID-19 a pan­dem­ic on March 11, 2020. Soon af­ter, many coun­tries around the world be­gan lock­ing their bor­ders in or­der to lim­it the spread of the virus. At present, COVID-19 has af­fect­ed over 20 mil­lion peo­ple and re­sult­ed in over 700,000 deaths world­wide.

Lo­cal­ly, the Min­istry of Health has re­port­ed the to­tal con­firmed cas­es at 552, with 11 deaths and this is es­ti­mat­ed to fur­ther in­crease over the com­ing days. Tak­ing per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, prac­tis­ing hand sani­tis­ing, and res­pi­ra­to­ry hy­giene and so­cial dis­tanc­ing are the main rec­om­mend­ed strate­gies for com­bat­ing the spread of the virus, since some in­fect­ed per­sons may not be ex­hibit­ing symp­toms as­so­ci­at­ed with the virus.

Dur­ing the re­cent lock­down, spe­cial needs aid Kim­ber­ly Joseph chan­nelled her cre­ativ­i­ty and work­ing ex­pe­ri­ence to ed­u­cate her fam­i­ly and her five-year-old daugh­ter Kayl.

Learn­ing through play, Kim­ber­ly said, was her way to get a se­ri­ous mes­sage across to as many peo­ple as she could in her own way to pro­tect her loved ones—by cre­at­ing a board game ti­tled Lock­down.

“Hence the name, it came from the lock­down the ini­tial game was de­vel­oped dur­ing our lock­down I was try­ing to oc­cu­py my daugh­ter and take her mind out of what was hap­pen­ing out­side, so I just drew up this Bris­tol board, we played it, she had fun, she un­der­stood what each spot meant,” Joseph told Guardian Me­dia.

As a re­sult of her daugh­ter’s en­thu­si­asm at play­ing the game, Joseph post­ed her ac­tiv­i­ty on her so­cial me­dia page.

“Be­ing on lock­down, you post what you were do­ing every day and peo­ple were re­cep­tive of it and they were say­ing ‘where you got that,” she said.

She took that feed­back and has now turned the idea in­to a phys­i­cal game that is now avail­able in all Mo­hammed’s books Stores and Char­ran’s in Val­park. Up to five play­ers at a time can par­tic­i­pate in the board game, which in­cludes cards, to­kens, die and an award that can be pre­sent­ed to the game-win­ner.

“When you play this game I think you would get an idea of what’s hap­pen­ing glob­al­ly. There is a spe­cial lit­tle piece that I in­clude called COVID-19 sur­vivor, you have it there to re­mind you that you are a sur­vivor hav­ing gone through this or still go­ing through this phase, which is very dif­fi­cult,” she said.

She said one of the main ben­e­fits was that this pe­ri­od had opened up a lot of in­no­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty across all sec­tors of so­ci­ety, bring­ing some­thing pos­i­tive out of time at home.

Joseph al­so has some ad­vice for par­ents who may be in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion try­ing to en­ter­tain and ed­u­cate their chil­dren. “Af­ter see­ing the process of what was hap­pen­ing, Kayl would see me draw­ing and im­prov­ing the game piece by piece and then the fi­nal prod­uct, that was enough to in­spire her and now she is draw­ing an ex­am­ple from me and now she is try­ing to de­vel­op her own games,” Joseph said.

When asked why a board game and not an app, she said, “Be­cause every­body on their phones, I in­clud­ed and when you’re play­ing a board game it forces you to sit and be a fam­i­ly, which may have been miss­ing but peo­ple are forced to be in that set­ting now.”.

One play­er, Kim­ber­ly An­del, ap­pre­ci­at­ed the con­text of the game, which is set in Trinidad.

“I like how it has re­al-life sit­u­a­tions, so it took some­one for in­stance, if you go to the beach and po­lice run you, it has that in the cards, so you have to go back home from where ever point and start over,” An­del said.

Joseph added, “I am hop­ing that this very unique Tri­ni-style game brings to life parts of what the Lock­down 2020 meant to us here in T&T and cre­ates mem­o­rable ex­pe­ri­ences for you and your fam­i­ly while learn­ing through fun.”

Her hope is that the game reach­es an in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket and be­comes as pop­u­lar as Lu­do and Mo­nop­oly in the near fu­ture.