"Should we make divine intervention happen more often?” a student asked.
"No!" someone shrieked. "It has to be rare. It's divine intervention."
"I spun for a divine intervention card,” another student said. 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," someone said. "You guys are my allies, so who should I take it from?”
"Marie Antoinette has the most money, so take it from her," another replied.
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.
With the smaller class size, she wanted to use a low-stress, high-reward approach—gamifying the midterm project. They would immerse and invest in the topics together. She wanted them to master course content and hone skills that future employers desire in job candidates: collaborate as a team while emphasizing individual strengths, communicate effectively, meet deadlines, and 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—how about a game?
Gorman’s students created an area-control board game that, at their request, mushroomed from a modest midterm project to something much larger. They named the game “May the Best Queen Win,” a mix of Dungeons and Dragons and Risk, featuring diplomacy, conflict, and conquest. Players aim to dominate a map ruled by powerful queens and warrior women from premodern history, but in a fantasy world. History, fiction, and strategy brought together.
“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,” freshman Melena Fischer said.
The students collaborated to create the game components and several pages of rules explaining the objective, components, setup, and how to play.
Powerful Queens and Warrior Women
Gorman said students had fun achieving the course objectives; they were more engaged and invested in their learning.
“This project was an extremely fun activity and made my engagement for learning stronger,” Fischer said.
In the course Powerful Queens and Warrior Women in the Premodern World, 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. Those themes are applied to a historical woman.
One course objective is to analyze historical contingency; students explored the worlds of leaders such as Empress Lü of China (241-180 BCE), Hatshepsut of Egypt (c. 1507 – 1458 BCE), Olga of Kiev (c. 890/925-969), Irene of Byzantium (c. 752-803 CE), Joan d’Arc (c. 1412 – 1431), and Lady of Mercia (870-919).
“Based on our in-class learning, our group made sure to include the power and dynamic struggles women experienced,” Fischer said.
Each student developed a 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 work of creating the world map, military cards, and game tokens.
"Excitement and passion dominated their learning throughout the semester," Gorman said.
"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."
Constant interaction meant constant collaboration.
“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," freshman Caiden Schuring said. "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.”
They taught themselves and each other, Gorman said, and developed analytical and problem-solving skills while designing and implementing the project.
“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," Fischer said. "We included the ideas of growing territory and military strength, and we focused on the power dynamics that occur through truces and allies.”
It was successful and fun, Gorman said—and might not have ended on its own.
"The biggest problem at the end 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," she added. "Of course, I thought the outcomes could not have been better for the individual students."
