The game of La Fallera Calavera seemed like an eccentricity and it is already a national best-seller that has turned the most international Valencian festival into entertainment that is enjoyed at home by many around a table, with more than 100,000 editions. The author of it, Enric Aguilar, is interviewed by this year’s Llibret of the Arxiduc Carles-Músic Gomis de València falla to delve into his work as a creator of board games. Pages later, the reader finds a similar proposal, due to its roots in Valencian folklore, devised by Juan Céspedes, philologist, secondary school teacher and coordinator of the Llibret of this commission. It is the game ‘De Traca’.
Juan Céspedes, its creator, explains that “the vice president, Rafa Soler, first thought that we could make a kind of Game of the Goose with Fallas illustrations, but in the end we thought it was better to flee from traditional games and go find others to create our own and searching the internet, documenting and observing, the idea came up”, details this philologist and secondary school teacher.
In the pages of the Llibret he has published the rules, objectives and description of this proposal inspired by ‘Muerte a la mejicana’, a board game based on the Mexican festival of the Day of the Dead and whose dynamics consists of collecting certain gadgets to reach as soon as possible to the paradise given at the beginning of the game, going through the various challenges of the lockers. “I thought that this game could be equated with the intention that I had, which was to make our culture known to the world and also to do it in Valencian, because the Fallas are not only Valencian, but are developed in Valencian”, the creator qualifies .
In this fallera version, Céspedes has designed the cards and the game board, which the commission distributed to the falleros of the commission a few weeks ago at the presentation of the Llibret. How is it played? Between 8 and 16 participants can take part, which invites you to develop the game as a team and with a lot of revelry, as the Valencians like. To win, the players or the team have to collect the four object cards: L’Ajuntament, el Casal, l’Ofrena and la Ruta Fallera.
And to achieve this, they go through various traditional squares: on March 14, Day of the Children’s Plantà, which invites them to roll the dice again; by the ‘Carrer tallat per falla’ box, which forces you to lose a game turn, or by the ‘Geperudeta’ box, which leaves the player who has participated at rest to “pray the sins”.
An ingenious work that is in tune with the script of the falla, dedicated to board games and entitled “Qui no juga… no guanya”. It will compete in First B prepared by the fallero artist Ernesto Cimas and will highlight, among others, the Queen of Chess, the hippo from Tragabolas or the mice that steal the cheeses from the popular Trivial Pursuit.
“Board games are very difficult to take hold if they are not given good publicity and in Valencian it is even more difficult, although that is also changing,” he reflects. With everything, Céspedes confesses that “I would like the falleros, and my friends, to call me and ask me any questions about the game because they don’t know how to advance or how to make a move, because it would be a way of seeing that the game has not born and will be burned with the Llibret”, but assumes that it was born as an extra document to contribute to the commission and that, like the Fallas, on March 19, it will be burned with the festival.
