Ancient Order of Hibernians slams new board game for trivializing the Great Hunger

The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) has issued a formal statement criticizing Compass Games for its upcoming title, "The Great Hunger." The organization argues that reducing a catastrophe that claimed over one million lives to a game format is a profound lapse in judgment.

The AOH issued a statement criticizing Compass Games for its planned release of The Great Hunger board game saying that the idea reduces a human catastrophe to a competitive exercise.

The Irish organization expressed both sadness and outrage at the announcement. While acknowledging that the game’s designer, Kevin McPartland, has suggested an intention to educate Americans through the medium of a game, the organization questioned whether an event that resulted in the deaths of at least one million people by starvation and the forced emigration of another million should be gamified at all.

“We do not doubt that there may be a kernel of good intention here,” said Neil F. Cosgrove, National Anti-Defamation Chair of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

“But good intentions do not excuse poor judgment. Some human catastrophes—particularly those involving mass death through hunger and forced displacement—should never be reduced to a game.”

Mr. McPartland has publicly stated, “I do not expect a single Irish person to buy this game,” and has instead presented it as an educational tool for Americans.

According to the AOH, the game’s own promotional materials reveal a troubling misunderstanding of the historical realities they claim to teach.

Promotional descriptions portray early 19th-century Ireland as a society of tenant farmers and field hands “thriving” on a “wonder crop,” the potato. The AOH strongly rejected this framing as historically indefensible.

“The people of Ireland were not ‘thriving,’” Cosgrove said.

“Centuries of dispossession, land confiscation, and discriminatory laws had forced the native population onto ever-smaller and more marginal plots of land. The potato was not a miracle of prosperity; it was the last fragile buffer against starvation.”

An illustration of Bridget O'Donnel and her children, Great Hunger survivors, in the Illustrated London News, December 22, 1849.

Ireland had already endured numerous subsistence crises and localized famines prior to 1845—clear warnings that the population was living on the edge of disaster. Only months before the arrival of potato blight, the British Parliament’s own Devon Commission reported that it was “impossible adequately to describe” the “privations” of Irish labourers, noting that in many districts their only food was the potato, their only beverage water, and that even a bed or blanket was considered a luxury.

“Parliament had been warned,” Cosgrove said. “Its own commission documented a society living with no margin for error. To suggest that Ireland’s Great Hunger suddenly emerged from a period of comfort or abundance is not education—it is distortion.”

Inside the coffin ships.

While games can sometimes serve as a stimulus to learning, the AOH stated that education must begin with accuracy and moral seriousness. The decision to frame survival during the Great Hunger as a form of “winning” profoundly misunderstands the lived reality of those who endured it.

“Those who arrived in America aboard coffin ships did not feel they had ‘won,’” Cosgrove said.

“Survival was not a victory. It was trauma carried across generations. The ability to exist is the most basic of human rights—it is not a prize to be awarded.”