Playing video games is the number one leisure activity for children and youth growing up today. The gaming arena can give them many positive experiences and have an impact on their future in various ways. At the same time, the gaming arena has been unsupervised for long and now includes a number of potential risks, including an increasing culture of toxic online behaviour, hate speech, and cyberbullying. Toxic: the board game is a learning resource that is part of a number of projects tackling this issue by the Norwegian Safer Internet centre.

The board game is part of the learning resource CTRLZ Skole, inspiring young people to become more responsible players and make them better understand how their behaviour can affect other people. "CTRLZ" on a computer means “to undo”. Through this learning resource, students will learn about undesirable behaviour, so they avoid saying something they can regret. 

The board game is based on a classical “Shoots and Ladder” game, where in groups of four students, you roll a classic six-sided dice, move your pawn to the appropriate field, and respond accordingly to the colour. Some fields have no action, others have “read a card”, and some have “move to another part of board” as automatic actions. 

The cards to be read are divided in three different categories:

1. “Reflection cards”: the player reads out loud a case or situation, and then discuss possible solutions according to the case, all based on real scenarios. 
2. “Toxic cards”: the player has to look at one of the other players and read out a statement collected from real communication in video games. For example: “You’re ugly and stupid”, “You should never have been born”. The reader can then decide if they want to give their card to the player they had to use the card on to gain an advantage later in the game, or to make up for the bad thing they just said. The feedback from testing was that the players felt this part was very uncomfortable, which is actually the main purpose of the game.Saying something toxic to someone’s face is much harder than via a screen. 
3. “Joker cards”: random actions are associated with these cards, such as “move back to the start”, “move five spaces forward”. These cards are meant to represent the random and sometimes unfair things that happen in life.

It is important to have an adult/teacher present when the board game is played. The teacher might need to help some groups along, give tips to how they can discuss the reflection cards etc. It is also important to have a joint session after the groups have played, to sum up learnings and new thoughts on how we communicate through our screens. 

Please note that some of the tasks might contain foul language. 

This resource won the March 2025 Insafe-INHOPE Training meeting resource competition. As a result, the Norwegian Safer Internet Centre used the prize money to make the resource available in many additional EU languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Spanish.