A board game about language

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

• It's a guessing game about describing things by only using the 80 words in the board and some rules to change them.
• It aims to bring some of the fun of playing with language, and of speaking the 2nd most spoken constructed language after Esperanto.
• No previous knowledge required, no need to learn anything. Just speak!
• Varying difficulty: Family casual party game or nerdy super hard language challenge.

Musi Supa - the Fun of Desk

Toki Pona is probably 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 using the language is a lot of fun.

But what if you could have some of the fun of playing with language in this way, but right away? You just pull a board game and play directly with no previous knowledge. This is the aim of Musi Supa - the Fun of Desk, 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 year 2022, I featured a prototype in the largest board game fair in the world (Essen, Germany) and many people liked it.

I am in the process of finding a publisher, improve the aesthetics of the game and make this project a reality. Gathering a community of people potentially interested in the board game is important to be considered by a publisher. 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.

Mailing list & beta testing

You can add yourself here to receive important updates about the development of this game.

You can indicate if you would like to be contacted to play it when I do beta testing online.

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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.

While it is fun to just use Musi Supa to describe and guess things as an activity, this is a game, and I took this very seriously by designing its mechanics and point system to 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.

Musi Supa is a guessing game that shares some similarities with the game Concept: both are about explaining some notion from simple things. But Musi Supa explores a different dimension: in here you are speaking all of the time, and you play with words. The structure of the system allows you to say so many different things so that you can go from describing very very easy things to the most obscure references that often create a turn with magical moments. The structure of the game, rounds, points is quite different as well.

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

Motivated by some conversations I had in the Essen fair, I realized that the game is relatively easy to localize, that is, it’s not hard to make versions in other languages for other places. But not only that, 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 plan to try the same with other languages when I have the time.

My plan is to write, for many languages, 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” This is similar to the previous section but as an exercise for people that have studied and are studying a language. 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. For the challenge in the previous section, you don’t need to memorize the words though. 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. This game intends to be a great resource to spread the knowledge of the language.

It’s not hard to imagine how you could play Musi Supa with your non Toki Pona friends and after having tons of fun with it, they can get interested in the language and maybe they will learn it. They will actually already learn a little bit just by playing Musi Supa in English or in any other language.

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