There’s a State of the EU speech board game and we played it

As the entire Continent waits with bated breath for Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the European Union address Wednesday, there’s good news for those of you who just can’t get enough of the SOTEU (as all the cool kids call it) — a board game! Made by the European Commission itself!

Making a board game isn’t easy but this one has the added advantage of coming from the EU’s top laugh factory, the Commission. Because, as the old saying goes, “if you’re laughing, you’re learning.”

Playing the “von der Leyen Commission 101” game involves the downloading of two PDFs, one of the game board and the other featuring the questions and answers. All you need to provide is a dice and a group of friends with in-depth knowledge of EU policymaking (summer 2019-present). Then you roll the dice and answer questions on a variety of hot topics.

These include: “Analysis of defence investment gaps and proposals of further measures to strengthen Europe’s defence industrial and technological base;” “Adoption of an action plan on preventing money laundering and terrorist financing” — because nothing says fun like “terrorist financing;” — and “The Commission proposes the creation of the HERA incubator.”

We won’t give away the answers as that would spoil your fun, but here at POLITICO we played the game and can neither confirm nor deny that we did quite badly. Some of the questions have multiple choice answers, which helps. But others do not. And while some answers are easy — “Who was on the EU side leading the negotiations on the withdrawal of the U.K. from the EU?” is a gimme — others are somewhat harder.

The answer to the question “What is vocational education and training?” is 72 words long and it’s not clear from the rules if you need all 72 of them in order to roll the dice again.

The winner is the first person to reach the finish line — and the prize is that you become an executive vice president in the next Commission (maybe)!