Running The Treaty Table

Students rule small cities and make treaties on their phones. Every treaty opens with the same formula of equality, but the cities start with unequal access to what everyone needs. The game is built so that students feel the gap between parity on paper and parity in fact, and then have to name it.

What you need

• A computer with a projector, set to Extend rather than Duplicate (on Windows, press Windows + P).
• Students’ phones on Wi-Fi or mobile data. The phones need nothing installed: they open a web page.
• Between 3 and about 100 students. Tables are formed for you.
• About 30 minutes for setup, three rounds and the Audit, and another 8 to 10 for the debrief.

Before the seminar

1. Go to Set up a game, type your invite code, and choose the settings. The defaults match the paper game.
2. Press Open the tutor screen. Keep this window on your laptop: the room doesn’t see it.
3. Press Open the projector, drag the new window onto the projector, and press Full screen.
4. Rehearse once with Open a test phone. Each press opens a separate phone in its own window. Three test phones are enough to play a whole game on your own.
5. Press Restart game (twice) when you’ve finished rehearsing, so the real game starts clean.

In the room

1. Students join. The projector shows a QR code and a room code. Each phone joins anonymously.
2. Quiet seats. Every seat is dealt at random, so the non-speaking seats are never a visible opt-out. A student who would rather keep the record, or work in a pair, can ask on their phone. Only you see the request. Requests made before you deal are honoured automatically.
3. Deal the seats. The big button deals tables of about five: four cities and a Chronicler. With four or fewer students, you chronicle the table yourself from your screen. After dealing, you can still turn a student into a Chronicler or a Scribe, or swap two phones, before you start.
4. Introduce it in three minutes. Each student rules a city. Their phone shows what it holds and what it needs by the end. Only what is sealed counts. A broken promise costs an OATH. There is no overall winner: on every treaty, they will have to say who gained more, and why.
5. Start Round 1. Each city proposes treaties to others at its table: goods now, goods promised for a later round, and a line of terms. The other city signs it, amends it and sends it back, or declines it. Talk across the table is encouraged.
6. End the round. The Deliver window opens on every phone. Each promise due is delivered or broken. When the window closes, anything unanswered counts as broken and the OATH moves on its own. Your button waits until the window has closed.
7. After Round 2, read the shock aloud. The phones have already applied it, and the projector names which cities were hit.
8. Round 3, then the final Deliver.
9. The Audit. Protect this above everything else. Each city answers, for every treaty, who gained more, and why? The phones work out what each side actually gave and got. The Chronicler judges each treaty even or unequal, confirms each answer gives a reason rather than just “fair”, and writes the table’s closing sentence. Your screen shows each table’s progress. If you are short of time, cut a round, never the Audit.
10. Finish the game. The projector shows the Parity Audit for every table: treaties sealed, judged unequal and broken, who ended short of what they needed, and who nobody treated with. That is the board for the debrief.
11. Download the Chronicles before you leave. The file holds every table’s round log, treaties, Cost Boxes, scores and closing sentence, ready to print or post to the VLE. The room is deleted 24 hours after it was set up.

Timings

Running late? Shorten rounds to 4 minutes when you set the game up. Turn off the gift of greeting. Cut the debrief to questions 1, 3 and 5. Never cut the Audit: a game with one round and an Audit still teaches; three rounds and no Audit does not.

What the phones enforce, and what they leave to people

The phones keep the record and apply every rule: the treaty limit, goods moving at the moment of sealing, the gift of greeting, promises falling due, the OATH changing hands, the shock and the scoring. Nobody has to argue about the rules.

They deliberately do not enforce promises. Breaking a promise is always a choice the city can make, at the cost of an OATH. There is no court and no army, because that absence is the lesson about a system without a ruler over it. And the judgement of whether a treaty was equal in fact stays with the Chronicler and the table, because that judgement is the analytical work the debrief depends on.

Debrief questions

Read the Parity Audit off the projector first, so nobody has to speak for their table.

1. What happened to the city holding the scarce good, and to the city that ended without it? Was it the same at every table?
2. Every treaty began “between equals”. How many did your Chronicler judge equal in fact? Compare your treaty with this week’s primary source: what does the source show that the game could not, and what does it hide?
3. Different people, similar results. What in the system, not the players, produced that?
4. After the shock, who broke a promise, and what did it cost? Was reputation enough to hold the system together?
5. What did you assume about how to play: to win, to be fair, to cooperate? Where did that assumption come from? Who did you not treat with, and why?
6. Where today do formally equal parties sign agreements that are unequal in fact?

Close with one or two tables’ closing sentences from the projector.

If something goes wrong

The rules, as students see them

What is stored

Each phone makes an anonymous random tag and keeps it in its own browser. The game stores those tags, the seats, the goods, the treaties, and what students type into treaties, Cost Boxes and closing sentences. It stores no names, student numbers, email addresses or IP addresses. Every game, and everything typed in it, is deleted 24 hours after it was set up. Download the Chronicles if you want to keep them.