One Way Ticket Board Game

Play. Re-think. Un-learn.

What remains when the world as you know it suddenly ends? If you had to leave everything behind and begin again, who would you be?

One Way Ticket (formerly known as Ticket to Safety) is a human rights educational board game that puts that question in your hands. Designed in 2022 and developed over years of testing with human rights organisations and academic institutions, it challenges prevailing perceptions about migration and security, raises empathy for the people behind migration statistics, and reckons honestly with racial discrimination and other forms of othering.

As an in-person, multiplayer educational game, it takes players on a journey to advance understanding of migration issues and ask: who are the people behind the numbers? Who has the right to protection? Who can leave, and who is forced to stay?

How the game works

One Way Ticket imitates a simplified version of a long journey to safety, following the world's major mobility corridors. Trying to get from a starting point of insecurity to a destination of relative safety, players step into the shoes of people on the move and confront the scenarios, obstacles, and injustices that occur on real migration journeys.

While migrating, you can't predict the exact outcome of your journey, it depends on geography, migration policy, border control, integration programmes, the labour market at your destination, and sometimes, simply, luck. That unpredictability is built into the game: some players start with more privilege than others, and privilege compounds over the course of play, just as it does in the real world.

The game is built around real patterns of global mobility: war, climate displacement, systemic violence, and economic hardship are the four forces that shape every player's hidden migration story. It's designed as an alternative to the colonial and Eurocentric narratives that still dominate public conversation about migration, and to build openness to diversity along the way.

Topics that surface at the table include (but aren't limited to): the politics of movement, human rights, global interdependencies, the power of a passport, border control, the climate crisis, and gender inequality.

Gameplay Overview

In One Way Ticket, you step into the role of people on the move, navigating the world’s major mobility corridors. Each player begins with a set of Destination Tickets that define the migratory goals they must complete, along with an initial level of privilege that affects how easily they can move across the map. The game unfolds on a board depicting a network of migration routes, border crossings, and risk points that reflect real patterns of mobility.

🌍 Movement and Route Completion

On your turn, you perform one of the available actions:

• Drawing Mobility Cards: Draw 2 Mobility Cards from the deck or 1 face‑up Special Mobility Card (instead of two regular cards). Mobility Cards are the core resource used to claim routes.
• Claiming a Route: Play a set of Mobility Cards from your hand that match the color and number of spaces on the chosen route. The claimed route becomes part of your network and may help you complete Destination Tickets.
• Drawing Destination Tickets: Draw 3 new Destination Tickets, keeping at least 1. Any unkept tickets go to the bottom of the deck. New goals can earn high points, but uncompleted tickets at the end of the game result in Barrier Tokens.

Each completed route brings you closer to your objectives, but not all paths are equally accessible. Border conditions shift dynamically, influenced by random events, political tension, and your position within the system.

⚠️ Border Events and Mystery Cards

During the game, you may encounter Mystery Cards, representing the unpredictability of migration:

• Obstacle: a blockage, refusal, or catastrophe. You immediately receive a Barrier Token.
• Help: something works in your favor. Follow the instructions.
• Trade: a trading opportunity opens for all players, allowing free negotiation of Mobility Cards.

Mystery Cards may remain among the face‑up cards on the board, but they are always placed face‑down to preserve the element of surprise.

These moments reveal the game’s reflective nature: they show how invisible structures, politics, origin, family history, can simultaneously protect and restrict.

🧩 Strategy, Interaction, and Privilege

Although each player pursues their own goals, routes often intersect, and one player’s decisions can affect others. You may:

• block key passages,
• take advantage of open borders before they close,
• risk a more difficult route for a greater reward,
• support or hinder other players’ movement.

Your decisions also influence the Privilege Track, which mirrors real‑world inequalities in mobility. Helpful events, long routes, or entering high‑privilege zones may raise your level. Barriers, refusals, and blocked paths may lower it.

At the start of the game, each player also draws a Root Cause Card, defining their secret migration story and an additional objective: complete at least 2 tickets from the assigned category (War, Climate, Violence, Economic).

🎯 End of Game

The game ends when a player has 0–2 markers remaining at the end of their turn. Each player then takes one final turn, followed by scoring, the Mobility Score.

You earn points for:

• completed routes (1–3 ⭐ depending on length),
• high privilege level,
• the longest continuous chain of connected routes,
• fulfilling your Root Cause Card condition.

You lose points for:

• Barrier Tokens (each = -1 ⭐),
• low privilege level,
• failing to meet your Root Cause Card condition.

The winner is the player who navigates this world most effectively, a world where borders are forces shaping who may move, how far, and at what cost.

Why we're bringing this to Kickstarter?

Since its early development, One Way Ticket has been offered exclusively as a facilitated experience, hosted with organisations, schools, and community groups, always guided by a trained facilitator, because the topics on the table (racism, forced displacement, passport privilege) can bring up real emotion and deserve to be held with care.

That approach hasn't changed. What's changing is the game itself: we're investing in new, more inclusive custom illustrations and graphic design, moving away from placeholder art toward visuals that actually reflect the diversity of the people and journeys this game represents. Backing this campaign will help fund that redesign and bring physical copies of the finished game into the world for the first time, making One Way Ticket the migration-focused board game funded through a woman-led Kickstarter campaign.

We still believe facilitated play is the richest way to experience this game and if you're bringing it into a workplace, classroom, or community group, we'd love to help you host it (get in touch, details below). But we also want One Way Ticket to live on people's shelves: ready for game nights, dinner-table conversations, and the kind of informal, repeated play that builds understanding over time.

Our vision

We believe that through the power of games, we can help foster understanding and real change. One Way Ticket is a valuable learning tool, challenging and, yes, genuinely fun to play, built to bring more understanding for the difficult journeys taken by people on the move.

It's designed to take players on an educational journey centred on the right to freedom of movement: to enter a state of awareness, and to become more thoughtful toward the people navigating these realities in real life.

So we need your help to make this a reality! What your pledge makes possible?

Your support directly funds:

• New, custom-illustrated artwork across the board, cards, and components, moving beyond early prototypes into a visual identity that reflects the diversity of the stories being told
• Professional graphic design and production, so the finished game meets the quality bar of the mainstream tabletop games it will sit alongside
• Manufacturing and fulfillment, so backers actually get a beautifully made copy in hand
• Continued facilitator training, so every hosted session, whether run by us or by an organisation we've trained, holds this material with the care it deserves

Get involved beyond your pledge

Do you believe education is one of the most effective forms of changing reality? Are you an organisation, educator, or community leader who wants to bring One Way Ticket to your group? We'd love to host a facilitated session with you, as a stand-alone event, or combined with existing courses, team-building, or strategy away-days.

Get in touch: kucjudyta@gmail.com

Follow along:

• Website: onewayticketgame.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/one-way-ticket-game
• Instagram: @ticket2safety.boardgame

Thank you

However you choose to support this campaign, backing a copy, sharing it with your network, or bringing us into your organisation down the line, thank you for helping bring a more honest conversation about migration into more rooms.