WARSAW—Shopping in communist Poland was a dreary gantlet of shortages, rationing lines and—if you managed to buy something—Soviet-Bloc dreck. So Karol Madaj has turned it all into a board game called Queue.

The challenge: Buy everything on your shopping list. Players wait outside empty government stores, fend off line-jumpers and haggle with black marketeers. The 40-page instruction manual warns the game may inspire "tears of exasperation" and "the gnashing of teeth."

...