Jordi Casamitjana, the author of the book “Ethical Vegan”, interviews Rory Cockshaw, the UK vegan activist turned entrepreneur who is making veganism fun with his vegan tabletop games
I’m glad it is happening.
When in December 2021 I wrote an article titled “The Rise of The Vegan Boardgamers”, I made a prediction of sorts. After concluding that there was such a phenomenon of vegans and gamers getting together and creating something bigger than the sum of their parts, I predicted that we would see more vegan gamers appearing and getting organised. Not only because that is what you would expect when the population of vegans continues to grow, but because there is some sort of synergy between these two groups that I think is very fertile.
Sure enough, when I chatted with Rory Cockshaw at his stall at the Vegan Party Conference in London a few weeks ago, he confirmed it was happening. Not only had he started what is believed to be the first fully vegan tabletop game company in the world — and he was already selling his first vegan game there — but he had already been in contact with other vegan gamers who had already moved the vegan game space closer to the mainstream arena.
That did not surprise me, as a few months ago I participated in the Climate Healer’s VCOP-18 online meeting giving a talk titled “Using Boardgaming to Test Strategies to Get to the Vegan World,” and joining a panel discussing veganism and gaming that included Ray Kowalchuk, Patrik Baboumian, and Ethan Kowalchuk, three of the vegan gamers Rory mentioned.
I had met Rory before at several other events, and I had written a short article about him when, after meeting a turkey called Harriet at an animal sanctuary, he decided to raise awareness about the plight of these gentle birds by running from dawn till dusk for almost eight hours on the 2022 winter solstice. I wondered how this running vegan activist ended up running a vegan game company, so I thought that perhaps I should interview him and find out. It turned out it was quite an interesting story,
Rory’s Vegan Journey
Compared with me, Rory is a relatively young activist in his 20s, so I thought that his vegan journey would probably be quite boring as it would be both short and uneventful. I was wrong. I found it a fascinating story — and amazingly precise. You’ll see what I mean when you read it:
“The first time I probably thought about animals being killed was when I was about 16 (I’m 23 now). So, seven years ago. At the time, my then-girlfriend was a Muslim, and I was very Christian because of how I was raised — my dad was a priest in the Church of England. So, I began thinking, ‘Well, one of us must be going to hell, right? because one of us has to be wrong.’ I then set out to figure out who was wrong and who was right, or whether both of us were wrong.
One thing I hit upon was the fact that, as a Muslim, she doesn’t eat pork. So, I found that a bit strange. I asked her, ‘Why do Muslims not eat pork?’ And she said, ‘Because, well, you know, pigs are very clever creatures. They’re sentient, they’re conscious, they’ve got all these emotions, they’re cleverer than dogs, don’t you know? And you don’t eat dogs, do you?’
And I was like, ‘Sure. Yeah, fair enough. But, surely, if that’s your metric, where are you drawing the line? Why do you not eat pigs, but you do eat cows, for example? You do eat chickens and turkeys and all this.’ And she was like, ‘Oh, well, you know, everybody picks and chooses sometimes.’
So, that was the first time I really thought about it. And then I just kind of parked it because I was more interested in the theology and the philosophy than the ethics. So, I carried on my merry way.
My next girlfriend, about two years later, was a vegetarian. And so, I was interested in that. I was kind of scientifically and philosophically inclined, and I’d learned about climate change and science at school. I was going off to university to Cambridge to study natural sciences, and so I was inclined to go the vegetarian route anyway.
When meeting her, I was like, ‘Yeah, I can be vegetarian for the sake of our relationship.’ So, I went vegetarian, kind of a bit flim-flam at first, mostly for environmental reasons, and also partially because I think there’s an incentive when you go to university to try and recreate yourself and form a persona. So, I chose to be vegetarian (I was a pescatarian for like one week. I just cooked a big salmon and just chopped it up into different salads and things and then went vegetarian).
Whilst dating her, in January of my first year at university, studying natural sciences in Cambridge — I was doing geology, some evolutionary biology, doing all this kind of stuff — I went along to this talk by a guy called Alex O’Connor (or Cosmic Sceptic) — No longer vegan now, but this was in 2020.
It was 25th January 2020 at about 8 p.m. at Newnham College in Cambridge. I went to the talk mostly because this was somebody who I had followed on YouTube for four or five years. He was initially really influential in me stopping being a Christian — I’m no longer religious. Alex O’Connor had put out this video saying, ‘A meat eater’s case of veganism,’ and then he went vegan. From then on, all his videos were about the ethics of veganism. I started thinking about it a bit more, and I was a vegetarian, so I went along to the talk mostly because it was the first time I’d ever get the chance to meet him.
The talk was pretty much just about what happens to animals in farming situations, or in animal experiments, or whatever else, and some of the ethics and philosophy behind why that’s so wrong and what we can do about it. I left the talk as a vegan, as an ethical vegan. I was just convinced by it. I left and never ate animal products again — with the exception of some chocolate things that my mum had already sent me in the post. So, that was when I went vegan. It was about 8 pm on the 25th of January 2020.”
From Professional Vegan to Vegan Entrepreneur
Rory has been vegan for over four years now, so although this does not sound like a long time, this represents most of his adult life, which is quite a lot. What about his activism journey? What about his professional background? What about his business career? Well, he has done quite a lot already on these fronts. He explains:
“I’m quite young. I’m still in the early stages of my career. I graduated from university in 2022. I’ve only had a career that’s about two and a half years long so far.
The first thing I did, when I was at university, was go vegan in my first year. Then the second and third years, I just got more and more interested in what I, as a vegan, could do other than just eat plants. What campaigning work can I do? What activism can I do? And so, I started slowly dipping my toes in the water, doing a bit of outreach here, posting some stuff on social media there, and writing some articles for my university magazine.
I was torn in lots of different directions when I was graduating. I applied for a job as a maths teacher, because I’ve always loved maths. I applied for a job in the Royal Marines, of all things. I also applied for a job as a campaigner at a charity called Viva! I got all of the jobs, and I chose to go to Viva! to essentially be a professional vegan because that was the thing that I cared about the most. I figured trying to put an end to animal agriculture, or actually doing so, would probably be the best thing I could do. So, I was at Viva for around 10 months or so.
During that time, I was hit by a car and thrown off my bike, landed on my head and ended up in hospital. That experience was actually quite transformative in a lot of ways, partially because I realised, at 21 years old, that I could have died if it had been a bit faster. I could have just been dead, and that would be the end of me. That was a quite revelatory experience.
I ultimately left Viva as a result of that, because I figured, if I were to die tomorrow, what would I want to have done for myself? There is the grand purpose of putting an end to animal agriculture, but I didn’t feel like I was really achieving that. I also felt I’d never really taken time off, I’d always worked so hard at school, I worked so hard at university, I was working so hard at my job, and I’d never had time off. So, I took my leave from Viva.
I am a long-distance runner, so I was planning to go and run around the entire UK. I was planning to just run the whole coastline, take like a year, wild camp, or stay on people’s sofas or whatever. That never happened, because I met my now fiancé, Issy Acosta, and we got together.
We settled down, we fell in love fairly quickly, and we got engaged last month. Around the time I met her, I got a job at Animal Rising, as their podcast manager. I was there for about six months. I left because I wasn’t fully swayed by the way we were doing things. And then I ended up at Omni Pet Food (plant-based pet food) because this was the first time I’d worked at a business. I never really saw myself working at a business because my dad, my brother, and my granddad, all ran businesses of various kinds — electricians, printers, marketing, whatever — and I just didn’t think it was really for me to work in the for-profit sector. But actually working at Omni, I learned loads of things about e-commerce, tech, and websites, and how to run a business effectively.
That’s what really lit me on fire about the idea of using business as activism. I also really like being in charge, so I figured, ‘Let me set up my own business.’ That’s how I went from being an activist to somebody working in a business and an employee to being a business owner now. I am now the CEO of ‘This is Not a Game.’”
A Vegan Games Company
I have already seen Rory’s first game, Plants Against Veganity, being played at festivals and meetings, so it certainly has struck a chord. It’s a vegan version of a very popular card game called “Cards Against Humanity” (an adult party game in which players complete fill-in-the-blank statements, using words or phrases typically deemed offensive, risqué, or politically incorrect, printed on playing cards). He explains how his version came about:
“‘This Is Not a Game’ is the world’s first vegan tabletop games company. I set it up last August, so it’s now over a year old. And the reason I set it up is that my now fiancée, then girlfriend, Issy and I were playing some board games. I think we’re playing Monopoly at the time and just having a nice time of it. We kind of got to talking and figured we could make it like a vegan Monopoly. ‘That would be quite fun, wouldn’t it?’ Or you could have it a bit climate-focused, you could have funny vegan-related cards, you could have locations that were, rather than building hotels, factory farms or whatever; you’d have oil rigs rather than train stations; or you could have airports or all these kinds of polluting things.
The reason for the name we came up with for the company, ‘This Is Not A Game’, is that animal rights and climate change aren’t inherently funny or gameable things. It seems a bit crass almost, even for me, to make a game that makes fun of, let’s say, a pig being killed. And I don’t really make fun of pigs being killed in the game, but I can see that side of it. That’s why the company’s called ‘This Is Not A Game’, because it’s not actually funny stuff that the game is about. What it does is it makes fun of stereotypes about people. It’s more the people that I think are funny. That’s where the ‘laugh first, think second’ motto of the company comes in because I think comedy is a gateway to the heart.
That alternative Monopoly idea was kind of the kernel that started our company, but when I looked into it I realised that making a board game is really hard. You need so many different parts, you need the rules to work perfectly, and you need brilliant illustrations. So, we thought, ‘Let’s start with a card game instead.’
My favourite card game has always been ‘Cards Against Humanity’. The rules of this game are very simple. There are two kinds of cards, and the goal of the game is just to be as funny as you can with these two kinds of cards. There are white cards and black cards — or I call them kind of prompt cards and response cards. The prompt cards are in black, and they have a blank space in them. So, it’s something like, in my game, “I could never go vegan. I could never give up… blank.’. And you have to fill in that blank with one of your white cards, your response cards. They’re silly things like ‘Vitamin B12’ or whatever, just like vegan stereotypes. Or in the original Cards Against Humanity, it’s like ‘dead babies’ or something horrible. You put down this black prompt card in the middle of the table and everybody’s got their hand of white cards, their response cards. And they just play one of them face down at each turn. One person is kind of the card czar, it’s called in the original one — I call them the Vegan Overlords — and they have to pick which response they think is the funniest. The one that’s the funniest, or the most irreverent, or the most fitting or accurate, or whatever, that person who played that card wins the prompt card. The person with the most prompt cards at the end of the game wins the game.
So, it’s essentially to try and be as funny as you can, making the funniest combination possible. And that is exactly the same as the way my game, ‘Plants Against Veganity’, works. My game is just filled with vegan jokes, gags, and silly stereotypes about vegans and non-vegans. It’s just designed to make vegan people, or people with an interest in veganism, laugh.
It went through three different iterations. First, in September last year, about 13 months ago, I was on my bed in my room by myself with my laptop open and a spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet, I had one column for the white cards, the response cards, and one for the prompt cards — which I put as green rather than black because vegan is kind of green — and had a column for each. I just sat there and wrote out whatever I thought was funny that would make vegans laugh. I was starting from a fairly good position because I’d done lots of writing about veganism before, some of which was a bit comedic.
I’d done lots of talking to people in the streets, and I always found that doing outreach is a very serious subject matter — animal rights and climate change and all this — but by being funny and just like pepper in a bit of self-deprecation and whatnot, you could figure out what works, what makes people laugh and what makes them like you. I kind of went through my mental repository of little jokes that I’d told about veganism in the past and wrote those down as cards as best as I could.
I took what was in the spreadsheet and I designed some basic cards. We played a game, and I played it with my mum and my sister, both of whom are vegan as well. I showed some other people, and everybody was laughing and said it was really good. Some things could be tweaked in different places. I tweaked them all again, wrote some new cards, deleted some old cards that didn’t work, and changed the grammar — because grammar is really difficult in a game like this.
When I knew that we were onto a winner, like all the cards were pretty much as good as they could be, then that’s when I went and got out a small business loan from a bank and used that to pay a designer to make it look really good.
We have now made some expansion cards. They are being printed as we speak and being sent to me in a couple of weeks. Because I got so much feedback so quickly, and because it just kept on selling out and I kept having to do more print runs to catch up with the demand, I figured, ‘Why not capitalise on it now?’ I’m not one to wait around for things to be perfect or anything before I launch something. I quite like to keep the momentum going. If something’s working, then I just go all in. So, I decided I’ve got enough ideas that I didn’t put into the initial print run to make some expansion packs.
There are a couple of new games that I want to make on the horizon, one of which is the Monopoly variant that I mentioned earlier. That’s the one that I’m really passionate about bringing out next, hopefully. We’ve also got a trivia game that we’re working on, which is kind of set in a world after animals have taken over. There’s also one a bit further away, probably, which is more like a game for kids, which is quite challenging because a lot of the stuff around veganism is animals being killed or the planets on fire — you don’t really want to get kids all depressed with that kind of stuff. So that one instead, it’s like a sanctuary-based game. It’s more of a collaborative game, like world-building, and you build and run your own sanctuary. It’s not competitive.”
Vegan Gamers of the World Unite
When I talked to Rory at the Londen event a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned a group of vegan game creators like him beginning to get together, so I asked him to elaborate on that:
“Yeah, so I reached out because I read and loved your article about the vegan board game movement, and my thought was, there’s quite a few of us; it’s not just me out here making games around veganism.
The other contemporary to me is a guy called Jonathan Skinner. He runs Steer Madness. It’s like an app that you may have seen. Basically, the plot is that you’re a cow who’s been rescued or escaped from a farm, and you join forces with these activists. You run around completing missions. It’s quite a fun little game on your phone. There might be a PC version as well, I’m not sure, but he’s built that single-handedly. It’s been going on for almost 20 years, and he’s recently redeveloped it. He’s got a very defined vegan message and lots of Easter eggs, so-called, that you can find in the game to do with veganism.
Of the ones that I know about there, there is a father and son [Ray and Ethan Kowalchuk], in America somewhere who have built a Vegan Dungeons and Dragons game, which is similar to the one mentioned in your article from three years ago. So, there is vegan D&D out there, and there are a few news articles about it.
Then, there’s Patrik Baboumian, who’s making a video game called UNCAGED. That’s going to be very interesting with animal rescue and animal liberation in mind.
There’s also a couple in Germany, called Vegane Spiele, which is ‘vegan games’ in German. They make more kids-focused games, and I’ve chatted with them a bit as well.
There’s a guy called David Gould, who is developing a vegan card game. I’m chatting to him a bit about that as well. And there are one or two more people who haven’t got a company yet. So there are quite a few people a bit like me, who have just got this idea, they want to make something fun, but vegan, educational, and entertaining as well.
I quite like the word edutainment, like educational entertainment. There are quite a few people like me around the world who want to push this idea of vegan gaming forward. I guess, as you say, veganism and board gaming have both been very niche but are both becoming more mainstream, and as they become more mainstream, the Venn diagram overlapping between the two is definitely increasing. There are more and more of us out there who are making vegan games.”
Are Vegan Gamers More Than Just Vegans Who Play Games?
When I wrote my article “The Rise of The Vegan Boardgamers” I interviewed several vegan gamers: Antonio Favata (the Board Games Organiser), Ian McDonald (the Gamemaster), and Andrea Romeo (the Board Game Designer). I asked the three of them the question of whether they thought that board gamers and vegans are more likely to intersect because there is something in both that makes them particularly compatible with each other. I asked Rory the same question, and he replied with the following:
“I don’t think being vegan causes you to like games, and I don’t think liking games causes you to be vegan, but I think there might be something that causes both of those things disproportionately, perhaps. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but, for me personally, I’ve never really cared very much what other people think. It’s just not in my nature very much. It doesn’t really bother me if somebody thinks that being vegan is really weird, or out there, or wacky, or whatever, or if they think that liking board games makes me a nerd. When I grew up, my favourite thing was maths. I would spend eight hours just doing maths, doing competitions. I really loved maths for my entire life, and everybody thought that was massively nerdy. I just didn’t care at all.
I think you do find there are a lot of people out there who are bothered by other people’s opinions, and they won’t do anything strange. I know quite a lot of people like this. I don’t think board games are that strange anymore. I think most people like board games, but it definitely does associate itself with a subculture of nerdy, geeky people playing Dungeons and Dragons in the basement and having long hair and dreadlocks or something.
I think veganism is a bit similar as well. You’ve got to have a certain kind of constitution in a very, very carnist world, and this was more true before than it is now. It was more true 40 or 50 years ago. You’ve got to be really firm in your own beliefs and your own identity in order to just not care that everybody thinks that being vegan is so strange. So, I think that’s probably the thing that is the causative factor with being okay with being vegan and being okay with being a board game geek. Therefore, they overlap more. I think that’s probably the way that I’d put it.”
In my article, I concluded that there is indeed something that makes vegans and board gamers particularly compatible with each other, and Rory’s answer has reinforced my opinion. Through my analysis, I found many potential connections between boardgamers and vegans. Firstly, the social aspect of meeting up with like-minded people face-to-face is still something many vegans desperately look for. Secondly, the fact that some vegans and members of the geek culture may be inclined to go against the grain and conventions of society, while their groups are now becoming more mainstream at the same time. Thirdly, the element of consistency and logic that is present in the psyche of many vegans and board gamers. Fourthly, both vegans and board gamers are social pioneers who like to explore new things. Fifthly, through the act of playing games, we discover our playing essence, our primitive selves, and this is what vegans are also doing when they try to remove the “artificial” carnist indoctrination society has soiled them with. Sixthly, we have the vegan-friendly nature of board games themselves which do not contain animal products, and the narratives can be easily veganised. I can now add Rory’s “we don’t care what others think” answer to the list of potential factors that could make this phenomenon real.
I concluded the following in my article: “Considering all this, I believe there is such a phenomenon as the rise of the vegan boardgamer community, and I would dare to predict that, pandemics permitting, it will keep rising until sceptics that may not quite see it now may begin accepting it as ‘a real thing.’”
I think Rory is a brilliant, energetic, and resolute vegan activist entrepreneur who may as well add to his identity the label “vegan gamer”. In many respects, he may be the archetype of it. I very much hope that he continues his attempts to reach out to the other vegan gamers and keep building momentum as these individuals may end up playing quite a crucial role in the building of the vegan world we all dream about.
The rise of the vegan boardgamers has started.
Two new limited-edition Plants Against Veganity expansion packs have been launched as this article went live – find them here: https://thisisnotagame.co/pages/expansion-packs.
Sign the Pledge to Be Vegan for Life: https://drove.com/.2A4o
