N.J. man creates card game about deadly Molasses Flood of 1919. Its name is making historians uneasy.

Boston Globe

27-06-2025

Game creator and vintage playing cards expert Paulie Wenger said that while the criticisms are valid, he hopes that the game, his first board or card game, teaches kids about tragic historical events in a more engaging way. Otherwise, young people will probably learn boring, simplified versions of the event from textbooks, he said.
'There's history that's out there that's hard to bring up to kids, and sometimes that history gets left behind because it's too difficult to speak about,' said Wenger, a history PhD student at the University of Delaware who grew up in Southampton, N.J.
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Tragedy notwithstanding, Bostonians have long made passing jokes about the flood, because imagining a 'slow as molasses' tide of the sugary substance often elicits puzzlement, historians said. Some tour guides also use the term 'Molassacre' to get laughs from participants, Wenger said.
Still,
the new game is making some historians uneasy, such as Stephen Puleo, who wrote the foremost book on the flood, '
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'When you make this kind of joke about it, when you look at this in a whimsical way, it detracts from the solemnity of the event,' Puleo said.
On Jan. 15, 1919, a giant tank in the North End collapsed, sending a wave of an estimated 2.3 million gallons of molasses through the streets of Boston. Part of the tank smashed into the walls of the freight house of the Bay State Street Railway Co. with enough force to tear the structure apart, seen here on Jan. 20, 1919.
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North End Historical Society president Tom Damigella said he was baffled that anyone would make a 'funny game' about the flood.
'Families whose grandparents lived through it, I don't think they thought it was that funny,' said Damigella, 78.
It's like people would forget about Boston's Great Molasses Flood if @ayo wasn't around.
Game modeled on Mille Bornes
In Molassacre,
Molassacre was modeled on the once wildly popular game Mille Bornes, where competitors play distance, hazard, remedy, and safety cards to road race from Paris to the Italian border.
'Your opponents are tossing syrup slicks, panicked horses, and molasses traps in your path,' according to an online description for the game.
Wenger also read Puleo's book and received a few research tips from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The mechanics of Molassacre: Escape the Flood were directly modeled on the classic racing card game Mille Bornes, said creator Paulie Wenger. (Paulie Wenger)
Paulie Wenger
A sticky debate
The name 'Molassacre' and the game's objective — to not perish — insults the tragedy, Damigella said.
'It wasn't a massacre in the first place, that's using a word that doesn't fit the situation, using that word is already misleading,' Damigella said.
Puleo criticized the game's description, which says it is 'fast, funny, and full of sweet, syrupy sabotage.'
'That hits a little bit of a discordant note,' Puleo said.
Out of respect, none of the 21 people who were killed are represented as characters in the game, Wenger said. Instead, cards feature people who rushed to aid others, including Margaret Emery, who drove the first ambulance on the scene, and USS Nantucket sailors.
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'Real people died in this event, so I don't want to make light of their suffering,' Wenger said. 'I wanted to highlight some of the heroes from that day.'
Damigella said the game appears to do a good job of highlighting those who played a significant role on the day of the flood.
'That's worthwhile because I don't know some of those stories about it,' he said.
Paulie Wenger holds up a card pack for the game "Molassacre: Escape the Flood," near the official memorial for the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 in the North End's Langone Park. (Paulie Wenger)
Paulie Wenger
Remembering Boston history
At 1 p.m.
on Jan. 15, 1919, more than 2 million gallons of warm molasses flooded the area after a 50-foot-tall, 90-foot-wide metal container on Commercial Street exploded.
For the previous four years, the tank routinely leaked and residents worried something may be wrong, Damigella said. Amid complaints, the company that owned the tank had it painted brown to obscure molasses dripping down its sides. The tank's builders never had a permit to build it because there were not laws requiring permits for structures other than buildings at the time, he said.
The molasses had been used to make ethanol, which was further processed into a powder that was a main ingredient in military explosives used in World War I, Puleo said.
The liquid in the tank that January was cold, and a new shipment of hot molasses had recently been poured inside. The pressure from combining the different temperatures led to the explosion, Puleo said.
The tidal wave that ensued was 15 feet high and flowed at 35 miles per hour, historians said. Many of those
wounded suffered gruesome injuries, such as broken pelvises and backs, because the molasses carried heavy, dangerous debris like bricks and metal under its surface, Puleo said.
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The US Industrial Alcohol Co., which owned the tank, tried to blame the explosion on an anarchist terror plot against the government,
The company also had industrial molasses tanks in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Virginia Beach, Va., Puleo said. The shoddy North End tank was placed there in 1915 out of political expediency, Damigella said, because many of the neighborhood's poor Italian immigrants weren't citizens and didn't have the political clout to fight the tank's construction.
A multiyear class action lawsuit against US Industrial Alcohol eventually secured reparations for victims and led to sweeping changes in US building regulations that still protect people today.
'It really is a shocking name, but then again it was a shocking event,' Wenger said. 'Not only in the horror faced by the victims, but in the way that the company tried to displace blame on Italian immigrants instead of recognizing their own inadequacies.'
Claire Thornton can be reached at