Sixteen Tons

Sixteen Tons is a game for four players designed for a gallery setting, created by architect Nathalie Pozzi and game designer Eric Zimmerman. It also exist in a tabletop version aimed at dinner parties. On its surface, Sixteen Tons looks like a large-scale boardgame, in which players move very heavy pieces around a four-by-four grid, trying to maneuver their pieces into a winning position. The winniong position is pre the player to get her/his two game pieces orthogonally adjacent. This core gameplay is complicated by the fact that players can pay each other with real money. At the start of the game, each player takes out three one-dollar bills and this money is used to pay other players to move your pieces for you. Playing the game becomes an experience that critically blurs work and play, as the real value of money is grafted onto the artificial meanings of the game, and player identitiy shifts fluidly back and forth from cooperation to competition. Winning the game requires both strategic thinking and social smarts and the rules are intentionally ambiguous about whether players keep each others’ money after a game. Sixteen Tons is named after the folk song made famous in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford about coal mining and debt bondage.

In Sixteen Tons, four players play a strategy game using heavy sections of steel pipe as the pieces of the game. At the beginning of the game, players take out three dollar bills from their wallets. This money is used to pay other players to move your pieces for you during the game. The play of Sixteen Tons combines strategic with social thinking. The strategy game is simple to solve – but the socal game is impossible to predict.

The rules are ambiguous about what to do with the money in hand at the end of the game. Some players return the three dollars back to their owners. Other players decide to play for keeps – or even increase the stakes and play with bigger bills.