As Parks and Recreation comes to a close this season, you can think of any number of iconic gags that will make up the show’s legacy and find a home in the real world. ‘Lil Sebastian. DJ Roomba. Treat ‘Yo Self! days. Any of Ron Swanson’s words of wisdom. Burt Macklin FBI wrangling dinosaurs on Jurassic Park.
But if you said any of those are the show’s biggest legacy, you’d be wrong. Possibly the coolest of all is the nerdiest of all, Ben Wyatt’s homemade board game The Cones of Dunshire.
The bit from an episode’s cold open (watch it below) was inspired by the game Settlers of Catan, Mayfair Games helped the show produce the equipment for the purposes of the joke. It was so well thought out and obsessively detailed in its attempt to make fun of a guy who is obsessively detailed that it even earned its own oral history.
But they didn’t stop there, proceeding to physically play the game at a convention hosted in, of all places, Indianapolis. Adam Scott even gave an introduction as Ben Wyatt to those noble players.
Now that very game carpet used in Indianapolis is being sold via Kickstarter, where backers who spend over $500 can receive a special deluxe version of the game. Polygon spoke with Mayfair and clarified that the “deluxe version” of the game is not quite a real game but is “as close to the on-screen version of the game that you see in season six of Parks and Recreationas we can manage (and for us to be comfortable about the playability of it).”
Polygon has additional details about the gifts you receive as a backer, including the ability to get a game box alone for just $150, as well as the official Ledgerman’s hat!
Who will come to own this truly epic board game to end all games? Maybe they should ask the Green Bay Packers.