A board game about language

Musi Supa - The Fun of Desk: a board game in development about language.

• Feel like a caveman with this guessing game about describing things by only using the 80 words in the board and some rules to change them. Two modes: (A) Speak the words (B) Use signs!
• No previous knowledge required, no need to learn anything. Just speak! Example: This to be a room, to move at water, to move many people. It is... a boat! Another one: You to able to move your body because of these things of color flame. It is... muscles!
• Varying difficulty: Family casual party game or nerdy super hard language challenge.

You can add yourself here to receive important updates about the development of this game (~ 1 or 2 emails ever). Indicate if you would like to be contacted to play it when I do beta testing online.

Musi Supa - the Fun of Desk

This is a board game project I have been working on for quite some time now and that I am trying to make into a reality.

This game is inspired by Toki Pona, which is the second most spoken constructed language after Esperanto. It is considered an artistic language: its main purpose is having fun with it and making art with it. It is a super small fully-functional language with only around 130 words. In order to say something, you need to creatively combine its words, and the combinations are a lot of fun.

My aim with this game is bringing the fun of playing with language and with Toki Pona without learning anything. As a result, I want this game to be a great entry point for people to discover and learn Toki Pona.

I am finishing up the game and I am in the process of finding a publisher, improve the aesthetics of the game and make this project a reality. You can contact me by email for anything related to publishing, for feedback, advice, or anything else here.

I still expect the game to change a little bit (especially the board layout and aesthetics), but eventually I will be able to share more about the specifics of this game with you.

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Features of the game

For party gamers & riddle lovers

Musi Supa - the Fun of Desk is a party guessing game played in teams in which you have to describe something by only making use of a few words, the ones that are on the board, and you have some rules to bend their meanings: One word can mean different things, you can turn any word into a verb, into a property, like “I to big a thing” or “this to be a watery thing”, etc.

The name of the game is to be creative and to be able to break down your idea into simple notions that you can express with the words in the board and that you put together. The descriptions at every turn will sound like a little riddle, and your teammates have to use their imagination to figure out what you mean.

You could say that Musi Supa is like Taboo but the other way around: it’s not like you are disallowed a few words, but instead you are only allowed a few words, and they are the same for every turn.

Its mechanics and point system make it a nice 30-minute party game that you can play with your friends or your family casually. But you can also play it not so casually at a very very hard level. There are three rounds of different difficulties, at each round teams alternate to describe 2 things each. There is a timer and if time is up, the other team can also guess and earn points. In the first rounds you will use words but later, you will also have to use signs for the words. Imagine charades but you are only allowed to make the 80 signs in the board and so you combine them to speak with them! This is the first board game about speaking a coded sign language.

It gets tricky, challenging and fun to express every concept in the world with just a few words, and in that way playing Musi Supa feels like you get the fun of speaking a new language without going through the pain of learning a new language.

For language lovers

It’s easy to make versions in other languages. Currently I have: English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. Motivated by some conversations I had in the Essen fair, a cool idea struck me:

• There are pictures next to the words, and so if I have played Musi Supa in my language a few times, I know where to find each word and what it means.

• I only need to use the 80 words in the board, and while someone is describing, they can point at the words while they use them, so I don’t even need to know them by heart.

• The game lets people speak however they want (with some rules to make words into verbs, adjectives…) so essentially it uses the grammar of the language one plays in. But it only uses a distilled version of this: verbs are never conjugated, prepositions are limited, many expressions are not allowed because their words are not on the board, etc.

• So... one can try to play in a language one doesn't know, after studying just a little bit!

I tried this as an experiment. I don’t speak Italian, I had never studied Italian. But I know my game. So I spent one hour or two checking Wikipedia to see how regular plurals, gender, and articles work in Italian. I also had to check 6 or 7 irregular past participles to turn some verbs into adjectives. And then I invited two native Italian speakers over, I translated the board with a dictionary and their help and… we played! I was suddently speaking Italian and guessing words with their Italian descriptions. I know Spanish so Italian is not the hardest challenge for me but I have also tried French and German with a lot of success (I speak a bit of French but no German and even though my grammar was broken sometimes, playing with native speakers worked!). More languages will be coming.

It will come with a description that is shorter than 1 page and that specifies all you need to know about language X in order to play Musi Supa in that language. And so as a challenge, you can use the board for that language along with the cheatsheet, and try to play in this language, that might be completely new to you. If you are interested in creating a version of Musi Supa in any language you want, you can drop me an email here.

For teachers

To my surprise, many teachers in the Essen fair approached me and told me that they thought this game would be interesting for them in the classroom. This was before I had even considered you could play in a language that you are not fluent in. Some things I was told were:

• “This game would be useful to teach how different languages work differently”. This comment was just about playing the game in your native language and having to use your language differently.
• “This would be really interesting as an exercise for my (<add here a second language>) classes” Students can practice the most basic vocabulary and they wouldn’t need to know all the grammar well to play it but they can practice the grammar that does appear in the game. I find this concept very interesting for language learning: You can practice with a subset of the grammar (e.g. no verb conjugations), and still be able to express almost anything through the game, and when you are comfortable with it you can add more elements.
• “I work with handicapped people and I am always making word games to use in my work. This would be very interesting to use in my classroom”. I have no idea about pedagogy, but it makes me happy that people liked Musi Supa for teaching in all sort of contexts.

For jan pi toki pona

One does not need to know Toki Pona to play the game and there is no Toki Pona grammar but playing Musi Supa - the Fun of Desk feels a bit like speaking Toki Pona in the sense that one has to be creative and split your concept into simple things and then the people guessing have to use their imagination in order to figure out what is being described. Actually, playing it in Toki Pona is quite fun as well!

But here is the thing. The Toki Pona community is growing exponentially. This is thanks to Toki Pona itself as well as to creators that have produced courses and content in Toki Pona, that attract people. My main motivation for creating this game is to create a great resource to spread the knowledge of the language. Your friends will have fun with it without having to study anything beforehand, and then many will be curious about learning Toki Pona!

tenpo kama la jan mute li musi e musi supa ni la ona li wile kama sona e toki pona. sina ken pana e sona e wile sona kepeken ni a.

Why this name?

The Fun of Desk is a good way you could use to say board game while playing the game. Similarly, with a quite literal translation, Musi Supa is how you would say board game in Toki Pona. It would not be capitalized but it is here, because it is a proper name. It is pronounced /musi supa/ (IPA), or: moo-see soo-pa.

The word musi comes from the Esperanto amuzi that means to have fun, and this ultimate comes from muse (as in Greek Muses). In Toki Pona, musi means fun, artistic, game, among other things. These meanings seem to be a bit unrelated, until you realize that even in English something so artistic as music and something so much fun as amusing come from the same ancient Greek word as well! Through different evolutionary paths.

The word supa comes from French surface, which yes, it means surface, but it is pronounced differently. In Toki Pona, supa means any horizontal surface, such as a desk or a board.

Art by David Revoy, www.davidrevoy.com