What is BARABAR?
BARABAR is a strategic card game – an innovation in human rights education. 5 clans (ecologists, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and activists) and 75 heroes from the past and present, including Albert Einstein, Emma Watson and Sadhguru, fight to save the Earth from an apocalyptic future. An alternative to boring or incomprehensible lessons for pupils, BARABAR entertains while educating and modernizing classic teaching.
Whether you are playing the game with your family and friends or you are using Barabar as an educational tool, you can enjoy quality time together as a group. It makes it easier for teachers and youth workers to reach children and youth on difficult topics concerning the values and attitudes of a democratic society. Additionally, it improves family time because you can do something meaningful together.
This is the next evolutionary step of the Infinite Opportunities Association team in the direction of gamification of human rights education and promotion of tolerance and diversity. The long road that brought us here started in 2014 with Tolerado, the first online human rights game, went through a series of detective games and escape rooms dedicated to various social issues and brought us to the moment where we can offer a game that supports the education of children and young people in a broader context.
Why BARABAR?
The word BARABAR exists in many languages such as Bulgarian, Russian, Albanian, and Turkish and can be traced back to Persian and Hindi. It stands for equality, together, side by side, doing common things and embodies the main idea of the game, which is diversity and solidarity, as TOGETHER we make the change and have a chance for a better tomorrow!
How and why did we create BARABAR?
The story of the Infinite Opportunities Association began in 2010 with the enthusiasm of a group of friends to create a meaningful and sustainable alternative for the free time of young people in Bulgaria. Over time, this enthusiasm transformed into various volunteer initiatives and actions, a travelling Caravan of Tolerance, a series of training and tools against hate speech and discrimination of various vulnerable groups, coordination of the No Hate Speech Movement, the Council of Europe campaign in Bulgaria, Pl@tforma for tolerance as an online collection of resources and the first steps in gamification as a tool for learning and knowledge transfer. Since then, a lot of has happened sometimes with a sweet, sometimes with a slightly bitter taste, to get us to the year 2021 and the appearance of BARABAR.
Here is a video showing how to play
Awards
BARABAR was selected as a good practice in the field of social innovation in the Education sector at the SOCIAL INNOVATORS conference held in the Republic of Croatia in November 2021.
BARABAR is a finalist and winner of an award in the LET’s GO contest for the Best Business Plan of an NGO, organized by the Bulgarian Center for Non-Profit Law.
The BARABAR prototype was developed in the “Platform for Tolerance 2.0” project with the financial support of the Active Citizens Fund of the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area 2014-2021.