At first the tabletop game Train seems straightforward: Players are tasked with cramming a boxcar full of tokens and transporting it to the other side of the board. Soon, though, they discover that the destinations are concentration camps, and the tokens are Jews. The last page of rules is even scrolled onto a vintage Nazi type­writer. The Settlers of Catan this ain’t.

Train isn’t something you’ll find on store shelves. It’s a one-off artifact pains­takingly hand-painted and play-tested over several years by veteran game designer Brenda Romero. She made Train in 2009 as part of her project The Mechanic is the Message, which depicts some of history’s darkest moments. “Games can get us inside of topics; they make us complicit,” says Romero, who runs the master’s degree program for games and playable media at UC Santa Cruz. “But can game designers actually capture difficult emotions the way music and film and photog­raphy do? Not in a cutscene, but in the mechanics themselves?” Most testers chose to stop playing Train after the big reveal. Some tried to liberate the game pieces. Many cried.

Other games in Romero’s series tackle equally grim topics. The New World puts players in the role of slave traders trying to navigate the Middle Passage. The forthcoming One Falls for Each of Us reenacts the Trail of Tears with 50,000 hand-painted pieces representing the Native Americans forced into the 1800’s death march. (Romero has painted 30,000 of them so far. She insists on doing it all herself.) “We hear about the crazy number of people affected, but it’s difficult to visualize,” she says. “People ask, ‘Why don’t you have one piece represent 10 people?’ No, fuck you, you will see the way it really was.” Moving her game pieces will be infinitely more arduous than shuffling a metal shoe past Marvin Gardens—and that’s the point.