Democracy board-game - how to engage young people politically

Our project offers a provocative approach that builds on a popular practice among young people, namely playing board games. We want to invent, together with active young people, democracy as a game practice. We aim to incorporate democratic values, the basic logics of the political, the ways in which democracy can be practiced into a board game.

Throughout the process of inventing the game, we will involve different groups of young people to ensure that their interest in the game is not lost, but at the same time, we will actively involve experts to ensure the fairness of the game and its correspondence with real democratic values and practices.

The last step of our project will be to engage young people to actually play the DEMOCRACY game, so we plan to hold game tournaments and elect a democratic champion.

The DEMOCRACY board game will also be available for use in schools as an interactive learning tool within the civic education curriculum. Our hope is that the game will become so interesting that people from 9 to 99 years old will play it, and our even greater hope is that it will engage players subtly with the values and practices of democracy.


Within the first stage of the project the CLS team held information meetings and focus groups across the country. CLS experts introduced the project to youth communities and held discussions on the state of democracy in Bulgaria.

In the implementation of the project, CLS established a partnership with the National Youth Forum. Colleagues from the National Youth Forum assisted in reaching young people throughout Bulgaria. We received valuable feedback and assistance from youth centres in Burgas, Vratsa, Dobrich, Plovdiv, and Smolyan. The Municipality of Troyan also helped us in organizing a focus group with young people in the town. The contacts and partnerships built will be essential for the final stage of the project, in which the board game will be played by Bulgarian youth.

We are grateful to all of the young people and organizations that took part in the first stage of the project!


The initiative is implemented within the framework of the Rights and Values project and is funded by the European Union and the Open Society Institute - Sofia Foundation (OSI).