Objective: The board game is a straight and narrow path from birth to marriage. To start the game, you will select a player identity (choose from Jessica, Lindsay, Hannah, or Bekah) and receive a fixed amount of Innocence Tokens. You can never gain more Innocence than you have at birth. As you progress along the game board, you will land on spaces—“experience cards”—that cause you to either lose Innocence Tokens or gain Spiritual Growth Tokens. Your goal is to be the first person to make it the marriage altar with the most Innocence and the most Spiritual Maturity. Achieving marriage means you win!
About the board: Game play occurs in three successive stages: childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. If you don’t make it to marriage by the end of early adulthood, you’re basically dead. You’ve failed to fulfill your divinely ordained role as wife, homemaker, and mother.
How to play: You proceed through the game by rolling a four-sided die, since using six-sided dice like every other board game would mean conforming to the sinful patterns of this world, and arcane props are integral to the practice of your faith. The side of the die that points heavenward shows how many spaces you should move.
The board is two spaces wide, which introduces the element of limited choice. You can move in any direction (forward, sideways, diagonal, or backward). Each space is an experience card that lies facedown until a player lands on it. The spaces-in-waiting are blank white, symbolizing unsullied maidenhood. Once an experience card has been flipped over, that space is considered “used,” and any other players who land on it lose an Innocence Token. Think of the overturned card like a piece of gum that someone else has already had in their mouth.
Every time you play the game, you can shuffle and rearrange the experience cards to create a new configuration of the same poor choices.
Stages of play: The childhood section of the board is a strategic time to start accruing Spiritual Growth Tokens. Example experience cards include accepting your parents’ faith as your own, memorizing Bible verses for Sunday school, and trying to tell the other kids about Jesus during recess (if they make fun of you, bonus Spiritual Growth point for persecution!).
The Adolescence stage of the game is full of different experience cards. These spaces can cause you to gain or lose Spiritual Growth Tokens or just to lose Innocence Tokens (remember: there’s no way to gain more Innocence Tokens. Once your Innocence is lost, you can’t ever get it back). Experience cards will say things like: “The boy you like likes you back! And asks you to homecoming! You say yes. But will this earthly infatuation distract you from God? Lose 1 Innocence Token.” Select experience cards can also cause you to lose a turn, such as: “You get your period and are immobilized by the curse of Eve.” It will feel like Adolescence goes on forever. At least this time, you know that in advance.
Early Adulthood is the stage of the game in which you advance to Christian college and hopefully start meeting godly men, one of whom might choose you to become his smokin’ hot helpmeet. In this section, you may land on spaces such as, “Volunteer to help out in the church nursery. Wow, doesn’t nurturing come naturally to you? Gain 1 Spiritual Growth token.” However, you can also lose Spiritual Growth Tokens by landing on cards that say things like, “Get a job at the same independent coffee shop as your youth group crush. Try to suppress your feelings for him, since he’s now engaged. Lose 1 Spiritual Growth Token for backsliding.”
Meeting the win condition: It’s possible to make it to the end of the Early Adulthood section but not have enough Innocence or Spiritual Maturity to win the prize of a godly husband. If you’re lacking Spiritual Growth Tokens, keep rolling the die and move backwards, hoping to land on experiences that will contribute to your spiritual maturity—such as, “Attend a women’s retreat and learn the importance of a quiet and gentle spirit.”
If you don’t have the most Innocence Tokens on the board, stall for time while hoping the other players will lose their Innocence. Godly men are a limited commodity, and there are far more Christian women hoping to get married than there are men to marry them. The less qualified for marriage someone else is, the more qualified you’ll appear.
Finally, if you make it to the marriage altar with the most Innocence Tokens and the most Spiritual Growth Tokens, you win! Celebrate by planning an adorable Pinterest wedding and losing your virginity on your wedding night.
Please note: if you’d like to play Purity: Race to the Altar with a male player identity, check out our companion game, Every Young Man’s Board Game. Instructions can be found in Appendix A.
Appendix A: Every Young Man’s Board Game
Choose a player identity: David, Tom, James, or Matthew.
This game board consists of only two squares.
Square one: Look at porn, but then repent. No tokens lost or gained.
Square two: Marry a godly Christian woman—there are plenty vying for your love.
Congratulations! You’ve achieved headship!
