The Game

 

Listen, I want to tell you about something that’ll make your skin crawl. Not in the way a good ghost story does—no, this is worse. This is the kind of horror that comes from real people doing real things, the kind that makes you wonder what darkness lives in the human heart when we decide someone else isn’t quite human enough to matter.

Picture this: Winter, 1894. Dutch family rooms, warm and cozy, the kind of places where you’d expect to find happiness and maybe some hot cocoa. But on those tables—on those goddamn tables—sat something that would make your blood run cold if you really stopped to think about it.

On one table: Atchin Spel. The Aceh Game. Released in 1874, tied to a war that was just getting started, though nobody knew it yet. The objective? Conquer the Sultan’s palace. Simple. Clean. Fun for the whole family.

On another table, twenty years later: twenty-five yellow pieces surrounding a single black piece like wolves circling wounded prey. Het Toekoe Oemar Spel—the Teuku Umar Game. Released in 1896 for 90 cents (a steal, really, for the chance to hunt a man from the comfort of your own home), and it invited Dutch families to spend their evenings “capturing” a real human being who was, at that very moment, fighting for his life and his people’s freedom in the jungles of Aceh.

Both games were propaganda machines, you understand. Entertainment, sure—but also something far more insidious. They were teaching tools. Indoctrination dressed up in bright chromolithography and clever mechanics. And here’s the thing that really gets me, the thing that makes my writer’s brain itch: decades later, that second game was adapted in Aceh itself and became something else entirely. The hunted reclaimed the hunter’s tool and turned it into a monument to resistance.

(Irony, folks. History’s full of it.)

The War That Wouldn’t End

The Aceh War started in 1873, and the Dutch thought it would be quick. It wasn’t. Wars never are, not really, but this one—Jesus, this one was special. What was supposed to be a brief operation turned into a long, festering wound that wouldn’t heal. Acehnese guerrilla fighters bled the state treasury dry, killed thousands, and exposed every weakness in the colonial machine.

By the 1890s, the war had become a national obsession. Think about that. An entire nation, obsessed with subduing one corner of an island thousands of miles away. Unlike other regions where the Dutch could swagger in, sign some treaties, make nice with the local rulers and call it a day, Aceh kept fighting. Guerrilla warfare led by fighters who believed—really believed—that God was on their side.

And that drove the Dutch absolutely crazy.

See, when you can’t win a war, you do the next best thing: you rewrite reality. You need a narrative that makes the chaos look orderly, that makes the unwinnable appear winnable. You need to turn the terror into something you can control, even if it’s just on a game board.

The Game as Teacher

Colonial games were born from this desperation, this need to make sense of senselessness. In the living room, that game board became a stage where the Dutch were always civilized, always in control, and Aceh was always the Other—the thing that needed to be subdued, tamed, conquered. Historian Caroline Drieënhuizen (and she’s right, she’s absolutely right) calls this “informal education.” A subtle way of poisoning young minds with a colonial worldview before they’re old enough to question it.

Here’s the kicker: this phenomenon didn’t die in the 19th century. It just evolved. Modern board games like Nieuw Amsterdam still carry these colonial themes, but they’ve gotten sneakier about it. Violence becomes “trading mechanics.” Genocide transforms into “victory points.” Slavery gets reduced to wooden cubes and resource management. It’s colonial nostalgia sold in a softer, friendlier package—easier to swallow when you don’t see the blood.

The shift from celebrating military conquest to hiding behind economic simulation reflects how we’ve changed the way we talk about colonialism. We still do it; we’ve just learned to dress it up nicer.

And the games—both old and new—keep shaping how we see history. Some violence gets celebrated. Other violence gets erased. But it’s all still there, if you know where to look.

The Man Who Couldn’t Be Caught

Toekoe Oemar Spel was born in 1896 from pure, concentrated resentment toward a man who refused to be caught. Published by Jos. Vas Dias & Co.—a printing firm that knew how to smell a trend and turn it into profit—the game took the nation’s most wanted enemy and turned him into a product. These folks had previously made their money on children’s books and circus-themed games (dwarfs were apparently big sellers), and now they were packaging patriotism for the masses.

The creator was Joop Vas Diaz, a businessman who understood the Dutch market the way a butcher understands cuts of meat. The game was simple: two players, fifteen minutes, and the thrill of capturing a man the entire colonial army couldn’t pin down.

They launched it just before Sinterklaas—the Dutch pre-Christmas tradition—because nothing says holiday cheer like hunting a human being, right? An advertisement in De Locomotief on November 4, 1898, called it “clever.” The goal was to trap Oemar in one of two triangles on the playing field, or box him into one of the square areas.

The board itself measured 34.5 × 50 cm and was gorgeous, in a horrifying sort of way. Bright chromolithography featuring a map of Aceh from the Indian Ocean to the Strait of Malacca. District names. Kota Radja. Even the mountains where the guerrillas hid. It was an imperial geography lesson disguised as fun.

But the box—oh, the box. That’s where they really showed their hand. Teuku Umar’s face printed large, drawn in a racist caricature that would make your stomach turn. Angular. Worn. Dark. Nothing like the actual man, who by all historical accounts was well-groomed and dignified.

Het Toekoe Oemarspel was propaganda wrapped in family entertainment, teaching Dutch children that the war could be understood, played, and even won in their living rooms—even though the real war was going about as well as a screen door on a submarine.

The Real Man Behind the Black Piece

Here’s what they didn’t tell the children playing the game:

Teuku Umar was an uleebalang—a noble from West Aceh—and he was brilliant. A master tactician who understood that Dutch military superiority came from modern weapons and logistics, while Aceh’s advantage lay in knowing the terrain and having the people’s support.

In the early 1890s, the Dutch started courting the uleebalang class to isolate religious leaders. Smart strategy, actually. Divide and conquer. And Umar saw an opportunity in this policy shift.

In 1893, he did something that shocked everyone: he surrendered. Swore loyalty. Got himself a fancy new title: Teuku Djohan Pahlawan. The Dutch were thrilled—practically threw a parade. They gave him money, 880 modern rifles, and 25,000 rounds of ammunition.

Then, in March 1896, Cut Nyak Dhien’s husband (that’s Teuku Umar, by the way) took everything—every weapon, every bullet, every guilder—and walked back to the Aceh side.

The Dutch called it Het Verraad van Teuku Umar. The Treachery of Teuku Umar. They were so humiliated they couldn’t see straight.

From 1896 until his death in 1899, hunting Teuku Umar became a serialized drama in the Dutch press. And Toekoe Oemarspel was released right in the middle of this fever dream.

Get this: the Nieuwe Tilburgsche Courant reported on June 23, 1898, that Teuku Umar himself had been spotted in Meulaboh, staying in a village head’s house, and he was playing the game named after him. The man they were hunting was playing the game designed to hunt him. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Rules of the Hunt

The rules of Het Toekoe Oemarspel tell you everything you need to know about colonial thinking. It belonged to the family of “hunting games”—an ancient tradition, like the Javanese Macanan. But the Dutch version? The Dutch version was rigged from the start.

Twenty-five yellow pieces represented the Dutch forces—the size and organization of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. One black piece represented Teuku Umar. One. The color coding alone should tell you everything: yellow for the “civilized” forces, black for the criminal, the other, the thing to be hunted.

The Dutch player’s goal was to encircle Umar until he couldn’t move—a tabletop version of the Benteng Stelsel fort system they’d used against Prince Diponegoro. The Umar player had to jump over Dutch pieces to eliminate them, reducing their numbers.

But here’s where it gets really twisted: Dutch archives record a special rule that Teuku Umar couldn’t jump over an “empty post.” Think about that. They were so frustrated by his ability to disappear into the forests that they literally wrote rules to force him to fight the way they wanted him to fight.

The Game Transforms

When the game eventually made its way to Aceh—and it did, because culture is funny that way—it transformed into Catur Teuku Umar or Catoe Perang, and everything changed.

The number of Dutch pieces was reduced from 25 to 20, creating actual balance. The game began with a coin toss or hand-sign contest to determine roles—introducing equality that was completely absent in the colonial version. And the most distinctive rule? The “odd attack,” where Teuku Umar’s piece could capture Dutch pieces if they lined up one, three, or five in a straight line. Suddenly, that lone piece had tactical power. It echoed the efficiency of ambush warfare.

The psychological functions of the two versions were complete opposites. For the Dutch, the game soothed humiliation, turning Teuku Umar into an object they could control on a tabletop. For Aceh, it became a reservoir of memory and a teaching tool, showing that victory doesn’t depend on numbers but on strategy.

What Remains

In 2018, artist Zaini Alif revived the game as an art installation at the National Gallery in Jakarta. The exhibition highlighted the game’s status as what they call “toxic heritage”—something we don’t play for enjoyment anymore but preserve as evidence of how twisted the colonial mindset really was. Evidence that human beings once thought it was appropriate to turn hunting another human being into children’s entertainment.

But here’s the thing: Het Toekoe Oemar Spel, despite its racism and propaganda, at least acknowledged that the enemy existed. By putting Teuku Umar’s face on the box, they were admitting—however reluctantly—that the empire was struggling against a formidable opponent.

Teuku Umar died in 1899. But the game lived longer than he did. It lived longer than Dutch colonial rule itself.

In Acehnese villages, Catur Teuku Umar still exists with its own rules, where that single black piece refuses to be boxed in. The colonized took the colonizer’s propaganda tool and turned it into something else—something that remembered, something that taught, something that survived.

In the end, the game exposes both the fears of the colonizer and the resilience of the colonized. All on a simple sheet of cardboard.

And that, friends, is the real horror story. Not monsters under the bed. Not ghosts in the attic. Just human beings, sitting around a table, teaching their children that some people are prey and hunting them is just a game.

Sweet dreams.