The "end-game" board of the Higgs Boson Goose Chase game.

Building and operating the CMS Detector is a complicated endeavour! Now, more than 20 years after the detector was conceived, the CMS Bologna group proposes to follow the steps of this challenging project by playing "The Higgs Boson Goose Chase" game, illustrating CMS activities and goals. The concept of the game is inspired by the traditional "Snakes and Ladders". The underlying idea is that the progress of building and operating a detector at the LHC is similar to the progress of the pawns on the game board: it is fast at times, bringing rewards and satisfaction, while sometimes unexpected problems cause delays or even minor steps back requiring CMS scientists to use all of their skill and creativity to devise new solutions. The game is designed to include seven boards: one for each CMS subsystem (Tracker; ECAL; HCAL; Muon system; Magnet and Infrastructure; and TriDAS and Computing), telling the story of each system from design to construction and commissioning, and one final "end-game" board looking at the whole detector from integration to the Higgs discovery. Only the end-game board has been prepared so far, as a prototype. The sequence of steps features pictures of the detector, of the Control Room, of computer screenshots and more, depending on the actions associated with the individual squares within the context of the game development. Some boxes show traditional and symbolic drawings, inspired by real game boards, that have been re-interpreted in the captions keeping the CMS and CERN contexts in mind. The game can be played by up to six players, each representing a CMS subsystem. The game itself takes place in two stages. In the first stage each player moves their pawn based on the roll of the dice on their individual subsystem boards. When they reach the end of their board, their subsystem is considered to be integrated into CMS and the player’s pawn is moved to the end-game board, the goal being of course the Higgs discovery!

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