Racing to the stage with Santimanitay

The game is centred around Trinidad and Tobago Carnival and is a traditional roll-the-dice-andmove game. There is a singular path that everyone has to follow.

However, since his target audience is locals who live abroad and have children that are not very aware of the culture of their parents, he did not include street names or landmarks that would date or place the game.

Le Platte told Sunday Newsday the idea came to him about three years ago. He was reading a comic book and noticed that the publishers created a simple board game using some of the comic’s characters and the idea for a local game came to life.

Being a video gamer, Le Platte first thought to create a digital game for mobile phones or computer.

However, he did not have the necessary skill set nor the time to dedicate to experiment and learn those skills.

However, as an illustrator and graphic designer, he knew a board game was within his reach so he started sketching and brainstorming game ideas. “I didn’t want it to be something generic. It had to relate to Trinidad and Tobago so it was always going to be a toss up between Carnival and Folklore - those are the two major elements I am most interested in,” he said The decision was made when he heard a heated argument between two individuals who were actively involved in Carnival. They were arguing about the traditional Carnival character, jab-jab, whether it was “the one with the horns that is covered in black oil” or “the blue one that blows fire.” They, of course, were both wrong as the jab-jab’s wears colourful garb and carries a whip. There were mixing it up with the jab molassie.

“With that I said, ‘Alright, Carnival it is,’ and I decided there had to be some kind of learning aspect to the game,” he said.

Le Platte said he has always loved mas. He played in primary school and in secondary school he helped make mas for his Art teacher’s mas band. The teacher suggested he visit Peter Minshall’s mas camp where, in 1996, he started helping out with the making of costumes. He then moved on to designing costumes for children’s bands, and later started photographing and documenting Carnival, producing several Carnival photo books.

“I have always been involved in Carnival so coming up with this new creative outlet, I was excited about it. At the time I started I had no idea where it was going to end up. I just played to my strengths,” he said.

Le Platte noted that originally, Santimanitay was a personal project for him and his friends to play. However, as the design of the game developed, and as those who played the prototype gave enthusiastic feedback, Le Platte decided to have it made professionally.

“I got some internal momentum from that and began to push to get the visual stuff done. I wanted it to be a product of Trinidad and Tobago, not just my product.

Thankfully I know a lot of talented artists and I got James Hackett and Nabeel Mohammed involved,” he said.

Play It Le Platte said he wanted individual player pieces that the players would get invested in, pieces that people would fight over, not generic plastic pieces.

“I like good stories and I like telling stories so the characters had to have back stories. Each has a reason to get to the stage first. Whether you can relate directly to the character or you know someone like that, you would want to play with that particular piece, so the game would be more immersive. Also I did not want the person to play an actual Carnival character but a distinct piece, related to mas in some form,” he said. The characters include male and female masqueraders, male and female tourists, a mounted police officer, a corn soup vendor, that person that jumps up in every band that passes, and the man picking up glass bottles ‘because conserving the environment is important.’ Le Platte credited 12-year-old Eric Jones, a second generation Trini living in the United States, for helping him develop the character’s attributes. Jones visited his mother’s homeland last year and experienced mas for the first time. While here, Jones played the game and loved it, and with that limited experience of TT Carnival, he was instrumental in the development of the game pieces.

For example, if “D Piper”, the bottle man, lands on a Midnight Robber space, he is not challenged because he has nothing the Midnight Robber would want. However, if he lands on a Snow Cone space, he has no money to buy any and so he has to go backwards.

“Apart from learning about Carnival, players take on the roles and develop their own stories as the game goes along. It makes for very funny, very memorable interactions,” stated Le Platte.

Some of the spaces include The Midnight Robber, where players have to win a challenge to move forward; Hard Luck, where players have to return to the starting point; and Snow Cone, which he described as “the bacchanal space”, where players can roll the dice again and move forward by that amount or send someone back by that amount. “That is where friendships start to get tested,” he laughed.

Then there are the cards, Warrahoon (Wild Indian) and Pierrot Grenade, which are the action and trivia cards. When a player lands on certain spaces, they can access to those cards which include “doh back back” and “vex money”.

What next? Already, Le Platte has plans for the future of the game. He envisions game editions based on different types of Trinidad- styled Carnivals around the world, like a Santimanitay Caribana edition, with aspects specific to Canada.

Also, people have already begun asking for a digital edition of the game or a cell phone app. “I’m not sure about just doing a digital version of the game because I was trying to get away from that being on your phone thing.

The kind of ole talk you can get involved in around a table is not the same because an app is usually a solitary thing,” he said.

However, he is considering a companion app to make the board game more interactive, such as a timer for questions, keeping track of characters, or an augmented reality app where persons could scan the board and things would pop up on their devices.

Unfortunately, Santimanitay: Race to the Stage is not yet available for purchase as the shipment of games was delayed. However, persons can learn more about the game at www.

leplattestudios.com.