You hear the excited rumble of voices. Not the voice of the teacher, but the voices of students.
"Should we make divine intervention happen more often?” asked a student. Shrieking came in response, "No! It has to be rare. It's divine intervention."
"I spun for a divine intervention card,” said another student. Collective groans of commiseration. "It says a landslide destroyed one of my cities. I have to pay two coins."
"My card says I can take three coins from my enemy. You guys are my allies, so who should I take it from?” asked one student. Another student replied, "Marie Antoinette has the most money, so take it from her."
At the beginning of the spring 2026 semester, Vanessa Gorman, Aaron Douglas Professor of Ancient History and Classics, told her HIST/WMNS 125 students that they would be traveling all over time and places. They’d be bouncing between ancient Greece, China, and Egypt; pre-modern Africa; and Medieval Europe, West Asia, and Constantinople.
And since the class size was small, she wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to use more low-stress, high-reward pedagogical methods like gamifying the midterm project to help students learn through immersing and investing themselves in the topics together. She wanted her students not only to master course content, but also to hone skills that future employers desire in job candidates, such as the ability to collaborate as a team while emphasizing individual strengths, to communicate effectively, to meet deadlines, and to apply creative approaches to what had been esoteric topics. In addition, she wanted the class of mostly first year students to feel a sense of community and belonging here as they adjust to college life at UNL.
So, what better way to achieve these learning objectives than by making a game?
Gorman’s students did exactly that, immersing themselves in their learning by creating an area-control board game that, at their request, mushroomed from a modest midterm project to a much larger project. They named the game “May the Best Queen Win.” A mix of Dungeons & Dragons and Risk, it’s a game of diplomacy, conflict, and conquest.
Players aim to dominate a map ruled by powerful women in premodern history. It is a Risk-style board game in which powerful queens and warrior women battle for world domination. Based on real premodern women, yet taking place in a fantasy world, the game combines history, fiction, and strategy to create a unique, competitive game night. Freshman student Melena Fischer said, “Throughout this process, it was critical to ensure the game modeled the life events and challenges that historical, premodern women experienced, as we learned in class.”
Students did everything, working with each other to create all the game components -- the map, cards, money, board -- plus writing several pages of rules explaining the objective, components, setup, and how to play.
Course Objectives
Gorman said students had such fun achieving the course objectives that they were more engaged and invested in their learning. According to Fischer, “This project was an extremely fun activity and made my engagement for learning stronger.”
Course objectives for the course Powerful Queens and Warrior Women in the Premodern World required that students explore the lives of notable women who made history by manipulating or discarding the expected social norms of wife and mother. Students were to identify and discuss the common themes that enabled those powerful women to assume and to exercise power, as well as the motivations for the opposition to that power. Finally, they were to apply those themes to a woman of their choosing in an individual or group creative project; the students choose to do a group project, resulting in the “May the Best Queen Win” strategic game.
Historical Contingency
One of the course learning objectives is to analyze historical contingency. Gorman said the students’ strategic board game brought history alive to the students. It motivated them to enter the worlds of Empress Lü of China (241-180 BCE) and Hatshepsut of Egypt (c. 1507 – 1458 BCE). It inspired learning about Olga of Kiev (c. 890/925-969) and Irene of Byzantium (c. 752-803 CE). It stimulated them to explore Joan d’Arc (c. 1412 – 1431) and Lady of Mercia (870-919). Fischer continued, “Based on our in-class learning, our group made sure to include the power and dynamic struggles women experienced.”
Each student developed a particular character card, with a brief history of the character's life and influence and a numerical designation for her diplomatic, charismatic, military, and religious skills. Students divided up the general work, with one creating the world map, another pair developing military cards, one coming up with game tokens, and the like. Excitement and passion dominated their learning throughout the semester about more than 10 notable female leaders.
Teamwork
"Did we decide it cost five or six coins to buy vacant land?" asked a student while they played the game. Another student answered, "It was five, but we changed it to 6, so that we could split it evenly if people attack jointly." Gorman said teamwork and collaboration were other important learning objectives her students achieved by interacting with their classmates during the class game project. Freshman student Caiden Schuring said, “I feel like the game was fun because we were able to be super creative while we were learning about all of the queens and powerful women we included into our game. I think this was a good assignment because it allowed us to all use our strengths to best help the greater good of the game.”
Analytical and Problem-Solving skills
They taught themselves and each other, Gorman said. They developed analytical and problem-solving skills while designing the project and then implementing it. Fischer said, “We ensured that traits like charisma and diplomacy were included, and we recognized that much of our learning centered around historical women who had had to channel their power to gain control. We included the ideas of growing territory and military strength, and we focused on the power dynamics that occur through truces and allies.”
Conclusion
Engaged and passionate learning emerged out of the students’ gamification collaborations about Njinga of Ngola (c. 1583-1663) and Cleopatra of Egypt (69-30 BCE), about Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) and Boudicca of the Iceni Celts (died c. 60 CE). All in all, instructor Gorman and her students deemed the gamification project a successful learning experience -- and one that was quite fun! "The biggest problem at the end," Gorman admitted, "was that they created a game that was inherently competitive, and yet they played it with so much cooperation that it might have lasted indefinitely, without winners or losers. Of course, I thought the outcomes could not have been better for the individual students."
