Nine Out of Ten Tabletop Games Are Made by White Men. With Rap Godz, Durham’s Omari Akil Is Working to Change That.

Play may be universal, but games aren’t.

Not tabletop games, anyway. Just two months ago, the academic journal Analog Game Studies, which examines games played with boards, cards, dice, and other physical means, published some depressing but unsurprising statistics on race and game design. Of the most popular two hundred games at the time on industry bible BoardGameGeek.com, white men designed 93.5 percent. 

Some reasons for this disparity are obvious. Games are a leisure activity, and leisure is a product of income, which favors white men. Others are subtler—gaming’s ingrained Eurocentric lore, its elves and dragons and white knights, isn’t exactly a welcome mat for people of color. And tabletop gaming is ultimately a social experience. If a white perspective shapes most of the games, then, of course, white players will dominate the social spaces where games are played.

All of this is just starting to change, though that’s probably too passive a way to put it. Rather, people like Durham’s Omari Akil, whose love of tabletop games and hip-hop music consummates in the forthcoming Rap Godz, are changing it. 

Played with vibrantly illustrated cards on a board that at once suggests a turntable, an astrology chart, and a graffiti-spattered Trivial Pursuit, Rap Godz pits two to four players against one another in a thirty-to-sixty-minute race to smash the charts with platinum plaques. But beyond the finely tuned mechanics of the card play, the metagame is a vessel for spontaneous storytelling, with each player portraying an archetypal rap persona and city. This is to say that the game is hip-hop in function as well as in form. 

By producing Rap Godz independently, with his brother, Hamu Dennis, Akil is making a concerted effort to bring more people of color into the tabletop world. But he’s also just doing what savvy entrepreneurs do—filling a wide-open niche. When he and Dennis, unknown and untested in the world of game design, raised more than $25,000 in a month for Rap Godz on Kickstarter, they knew it had been the right decision for the branding on the box to say Board Game Brothas, not Parker Brothers.

Born in 1986, Akil grew up in suburban Algiers Point, Louisiana, a ferry ride away from New Orleans. The youngest of three children, with his nearest siblings more than twelve years his senior, he lived there until he left for Norfolk State University in Virginia, where he earned a degree in computer science. Then, he was more into video games than board games, though in retrospect, he realizes they were already playing a role in his life.

“I have a cousin from Los Angeles, and every time he came to town, we would have an epic Monopoly game with my dad,” Akil says with an amiable laugh in a dim booth at downtown Durham tabletop haven The Atomic Fern. “Nobody was happy, but we’re doing it anyway, because that’s what Monopoly is.” His mother taught him Solitaire, his sister dominoes. “So all of my family members, I have this connection with each through a different game, and now, I’m making board games with my brother.” 

After college, Akil was on track for a career in video games, and he moved to the Triangle for a job as a programmer at IBM. But eventually, he realized he was less interested in the technical aspects of games than in their ludic, emotional core. He left IBM and spent several years working a variety of jobs, including a long stint as a business systems analyst at UNC. 

He was also, he realized, kind of lonely. He had friends from work and church, but he mostly gamed alone, at home, on the internet. Then he stumbled across TableTop, a web series about tabletop games starring sci-fi icon Wil Wheaton (aka Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation).  

“I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever,’” Akil recalls. “The games looked fun, but also the social interaction, cracking jokes on each other.” Akil went to Atomic Empire and bought two of the card-based games he’d seen on the show, Munchkin and Smash Up. Then he realized he had no one to play them with. So he found a welcoming Meetup group at Looking Glass Café, which was near where he lived in Chapel Hill at the time (he’s been back in Durham since 2017). Akil received a crash course in contemporary games—and a social scene—in a few months. But it wasn’t until his brother visited him in the spring of 2016 that his new passion shifted toward a new career. 

Hamu Dennis, fourteen years older than Akil, is a photographer and videographer who still lives in Louisiana.

“He got here and was shocked at the number of games I had,” Akil says. “It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is a thing, and you’re, like, a nerd in this way.’ Then he dropped it on me: ‘Oh yeah, I tried to make a board game a long time ago with my friend.’” 

Indeed, in 2007, Dennis and his friend, the rapper Tim Smooth, had drawn a prototype for a hip-hop trivia game on poster board, but it slipped onto the back burner, and then Smooth passed away.

“The idea sat and sat for all that time,” Dennis says. “Then, playing games with my brother one weekend, I realized his knowledge of games, and I had always wanted to play this game in my head so bad.” 

That weekend, Akil gave Dennis his own crash course in modern tabletop games, and they settled on two ideas that remain central to Rap Godz: the three kinds of currency (money, rap skills, and street cred) and the idea of storytelling progression. 

“My brother is hardcore when it comes to new projects, and he went home and basically started making it,” Akil says. “He sent me a picture of the board he made a couple of weeks later. I was like, ‘Well, OK, I guess we have to make a game now.’ To this day, I call this his baby, because it came from an idea he had ten years ago.”

Dennis also recalls playing board games with their family fondly, but there was always something missing for him.

“I wanted to be a rapper in a game, and I didn’t want to fight him, I didn’t want him to shoot people,” he says. “Rap lyrics are the lifestyles of the rappers, so I wanted to live all of that, all the elements of their lives we don’t get to see. But nobody had ever made that.” 

“Rap lyrics are the lifestyles of the rappers, so I wanted to live all of that, all the elements of their lives we don’t get to see. But nobody had ever made that.”

There are ways in which making a tabletop game is like making software: iterate, playtest, iterate, playtest. 

“First, we built a spreadsheet, like, ‘OK, what happens to rappers?’” Akil says. “We probably put six hundred items in there, and then we had to narrow those down and sort them into the story. Buying a limousine—what category does that fit into in a rapper’s career?”

In Rap Godz, you have fifteen turns in which to play cards from random draws, and you might confront an unusual dilemma: Do I want to win or play the game? When you begin, you choose a character—say, “She’s a G,” the gangster rapper persona. The decision that’s truest to your character may not always earn you the most points. 

“When you finish the game and look at the cards you played, it feels like that character,” Akil says. “That’s totally optional: You can play however you want. But when I see a card being played that fits with the character, I get super excited, like, it works.”

There’s also a “beef” mechanic that illustrates the unique challenges of creating game systems, where making a single change has an exponential effect. Because players are mostly developing their own stories with their cards, Akil wanted to add a way for them to interact with one another directly. Initially, beefing was an extra turn that could confer benefits or backfire, which is to say, it was realistic. (Just ask Drake.)

“Logistically, it was difficult to make that work,” Akil says. “If you have something outside of the norm, there’s so many more rules you have to introduce to prevent someone from using it in a way we don’t intend. You have this opportunity cost, and you have to incentivize it in some way.”

So beef became a core mechanic rather than an auxiliary one. 

“We made it work like every other turn, except you roll dice,” Akil says. “We’ve watched the game played a million times, and so many people are into the storytelling part that it doesn’t need to be so perfectly fair, perfectly balanced. I was at a convention in Los Angeles, and one woman was like, ‘I have these two cards I could play. One fits my character, and one gets me more points.’ She played the one that fit her character, because she was all in on the story.”

You can get a nice prototype of your game manufactured for less than $150, but traveling to conventions is the biggest cost for the first-time game designer.  

“The popular thing for developing games right now is Kickstarter, but if you want it to be successful, you have to be really physical before,” Akil says. By the fall of 2017, he and Dennis had a handmade version of Rap Godz they felt good about and started booking tables at game conventions. One of them, PAX Unplugged, in Philadelphia, has a module called Unpub for unpublished tabletop designers. Akil remembers demoing the game for upward of eight hours at a time. After building support at conventions, Akil and Dennis felt confident enough to start sinking more money into Rap Godz. Initially, they wanted to find a publisher to handle manufacturing, distribution, and marketing.

But then they changed their minds and decided to publish the game themselves.  

“[A traditional publisher] was less scary,” Akil says. “You make a good game and hand it off. The turning point was when we decided we want to do more than make games. You want to be an example and enabler for other people who want to make games, especially in the black community.” 

Twenty-five grand is a lot for first-time game designers to raise in a month, which speaks to both the brothers’ charisma and Rap Godz’s unique appeal.

“A lot of people supporting us are people who met me or my brother and were like, ‘You guys are passionate about what you’re doing, but also, we need more games like this,’” Akil says. “There’s very few hip-hop games. There’s very few music games. It’s a lot easier to get into designing games now, but until this point, the path was paved primarily with only white males. But I think it’s changing. At my first PAX Unplugged, I felt like I was the only black designer in the room, but when I went back the next year, there were three black designers in the room at the same time.”

One of the games Akil saw that day is revealing of the kind of perspective designers of color can uniquely bring to the space. In Check Your Privilege, you draw a selection of cards describing your profession and race and then debate, say, who would be most likely to be harassed by police in a certain scenario.

Akil says he saw people of different genders and races playing Check Your Privilege and having a blast, but the question hovers: Should white people play Rap Godz? Akil admits he’s encountered skittishness from some white gamers—perhaps because the subject matter is unusual for a board game, perhaps because of fears of cultural appropriation, perhaps because of racism, and probably for a nebulous combination them all. 

“I’m sure some of it is that they’re uncomfortable putting themselves in this position,” Akil says. “We’ve definitely had conversations about the stereotypes that exist, and we have some of those concepts in the game, but we balance it with all the positive things about hip-hop that people don’t see. But yeah, we have African-American-vernacular English that you have to read out loud. If I was a fly on the wall watching four white people playing this game, what would it look like?”

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine a racially mixed group of friends playing Rap Godz together, but to imagine four white people playing it alone is to cringe. It’s a fundamentally black game, in the same way that Settlers of Catan is fundamentally a white one—anyone is welcome to play, but some will find the cultural touchstones more familiar than others. Until game design demographics are more balanced, it will feel off-kilter, if collegial, to play in each other’s worlds.

None of this is to say that Akil isn’t grateful to the traditional game and design scene that nurtured him in the Triangle. In particular, he says, video and board game designer Brian Sowers has been a mentor since they met at Akil’s first Looking Glass meet-up. But he’s also reaching beyond the traditional gaming sphere, taking Rap Godz to places like Durham hip-hop festival Beats n Bars, where it earned cosigns from local luminaries like G Yamazawa and Defacto Thezpian. 

Board Game Brothas incorporated at the beginning of 2018, with Akil as lead game designer and Dennis, who drew Rap Godz’s copious character artwork, as art director. The game is currently available for preorder for $40 on Kickstarter or RapGodzBoardGame.com—but only until the end of this month. It’s scheduled to ship in August. Akil anticipates ending up with about fifteen hundred copies. 

As he prepares to see his first big game through production, he’s playing in the game night at Atomic Fern every Monday from 7:30 p.m. to midnight. He and Dennis are also working on a new game, Graffiti Knights, a fast, party-style card game where you crew up and tag spots around the city. 

Dennis, meanwhile, is hosting a Rap Godz game night with his friends every Friday night. 

“Grown men show up like poker night and play this game on a pro level,” he says, laughing. “It’s ridiculous. I can’t win. But I’m already winning, with the feeling that I get from watching people play and have a good time. This is a game that I am in, you know?”

Contact managing arts and culture editor Brian Howe by email at bhowe@indyweek.com, by phone at 919-286-1972 ext. 142, or on Twitter @brian_gray_howe. 

Corrections: Akil is the youngest of three children, not four, and he is playing in the game night at Atomic Fern, not hosting it.