Teaching about Oppression: Asshole/Daifugō

Two things I like: games and youth-focused anti-oppression education. So when I was playing the card game Asshole (you may know it as President) the other day, it struck me that the game could be used as a valuable teaching tool.

If you've never played before, then you might want to get a sense of the rules here (Asshole, according to Wikipedia, is an Americanized version of Daifugō, a Japanese card game, and that page explains it more thoroughly than that for Asshole/President.). The most important thing to know is that the game is played over a series of rounds with a single deck of cards. During the first round, the distribution of card values between players is totally random. Thus, controlling for skill levels, each player has even odds of coming in first place. After this first round, however, standings in the previous round determine a player's rank in the next. The first player is "president" for the next round, while the lowest-ranked player is the "asshole". In a five-person game, the president is allowed to trade two of hir worst cards for two of the asshole's best, the "vice-president" trades hir worst for the "vice-asshole's" best, and the "neutral" player trades nothing.

In the basic set-up, there is no cumulative advantage, because the game only tracks how well you did in the last round. It doesn't matter whether you've been president for one round or five, you still only get that two-card trade. That said, the president has an advantage that makes it much easier to remain president, while the asshole has a large disadvantage (from a random hand, having two of hir best cards replaced by two of the president's worst) that requires some skill and a great deal of luck to overcome.

As it is, I think the game could be a valuable tool for illustrating how historical oppression works in a very simple, visceral way. Anyone who has played the game has probably encountered a situation where a bad first hand has locked them into a position from which it's very difficult to escape -- one is more or less at the mercy of luck. I wonder, though, whether by modifying the game to incorporate a sort of positive feedback structure whereby advantages and disadvantages accumulate, it might work even better as a demonstration of how historical processes work. I'm envisioning this as a simple tool for explaining these kinds of things to children, because there's a very visceral and immediate sense of unfairness when regardless of one's knowledge of the rules and strategy of the game, one is unable to succeed due to an initially unfavourable hand.

Of course, this is all quite rough, but the game seems so well-suited to explaining these systems (one alternate name for the game is actually Capitalism) that I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before. Has anyone read about or else actually used this game or something similar in this kind of capacity?