Silverheart is the roleplaying game from the silver mining town of Kongsberg, Norway. Through roles, choices and reflection, students meet the people of the town in the late 1700s in a way textbooks or modern technology cannot reach.
Developed with support from the Municipality of Kongsberg, gifted to the town's secondary schools, and in classroom use today.
Landmarks, trades and events are drawn from Kongsberg's own past, verified together with the Mining Museum.
Structured follow-up work connects the experience to curriculum goals, so the session does not stand on its own.
The rules take minutes to learn, and it works in classrooms where neither teacher nor students have played a roleplaying game before.
Developed with a museum educator and tried out in secondary school classrooms before it went into regular use.
In 1770, Kongsberg was the second largest city in Norway after Bergen. By 1805 the Silver Works, the foundation of the town's existence, had largely shut down. The game is set in that crisis, and students take the roles of poor townspeople burdened with debt, navigating the town's challenges.
The rules are simple, fit on a single sheet, and are about exploring. The goal is that students learn about Kongsberg in the late 1700s, and have fun along the way. Those two things in that order, and it is why it reaches students who otherwise check out of a history lesson.
The book comes with a high resolution, historically accurate map of old Kongsberg, character sheets both digital and printable, digital game tokens and a player's guide for handing out.
Lower secondary, ages 13 to 16
From a 90 minute session to a full school day across four periods.
4 to 6 players per group. Skrim ran 70 students in a single day.
On 29 April 2024 Skrim gave Silverheart a whole day. Three classes, four periods, and the students ran the game themselves.
Ten students got a training day of their own beforehand and then led their groups through the adventure. The day opened with a fifteen minute joint introduction, then the students built characters and drew or made something for them. After play they wrote an interview with their own character, laid out as a local newspaper from 1796. The students who did not want to play cooked lapskaus stew and flatbread from 1796 recipes and served the whole year group.
Afterwards a parent wrote to me: "Today we had a really good time at school. We played a Kongsberg game about the old days." That is the sentence I measure the programme against.
Silverheart is used across two subjects, and the students are assessed in both. The programme maps directly onto these goals from the Norwegian curriculum:
Teachers get started through a workshop. The first ran a full day in February 2024 with ten teachers from the lower secondary schools in Kongsberg, and everyone went home with a class set. The municipality, the Norwegian Mining Museum and the local paper were present.
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The school portal arrives in 2027. Classroom use runs on a school license: it gives your school access to the complete lesson plans, the teacher's guide and the class set program. Three schools hold an active license today, and the waiting list gets first access.