Hello, I'm Martí, creator of PLAI, the board game inspired by tech culture.

I'm a data engineer and I've worked in all kinds of companies around Barcelona: from huge consultancies to trying to start my own startup. From a pharmaceutical company, 'startups' of 40 and 300 employees, and working as a teacher. I’ve been through a bit of everything, and this game is the result of the experiences I and the colleagues who accompanied me on this path have lived.

This game, PLAI, aims to be a continuous irony: each person decides to start and create their own artificial intelligence startup. And what do they do? Get funding and buy/eliminate the competition until they become a monopoly. But don’t worry: if your startup runs out of assets, you can join the Open Source project!

The only constant is change: each round you will have to readapt your strategy to decide between improving your situation or sabotaging the other startups. A bit like what (unfortunately) happens in real life.

Developing this game has been enriching. At a time of burn-out, it helped me realize that the many problems we have as an industry are common, and only from a community perspective can we prevent being dragged into hating what we love. I hope that playing it helps you as much as it helped me to see that you are not alone.

As software and data are having such a large impact on the world, we engineers must remember that we carry a responsibility to work toward the kind of world that we want to live in: a world that treats people with humanity and respect. I hope that we can work together toward that goal.

Martin Kleppmann - Designing Data Intensive Applications