SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with miniatures: truly, madly and deeply. The first set I remember comprised 12 cowboys in 6 poses, all six guns and 10-gallon hats in a kind of brown resin. From the pictures, I must have been about 6 (for I was so obsessed, I must have demanded a picture) At 7, I put together my first kit with my father, a rather snazzy looking Panther tank in 1:48. This was also the first time I’d picked up a brush. I wish I could tell you it was beautiful, but I can't. I painted it a nickel colour with deep green and black patches with a generous daubing of claret around the hull in a crude representation of gore. I was a macabre child. It would take pride of place among my 8th Army plastic soldiers: as an adult I lament that I put a late war German tank next to mid war British soldiers, but what absolutely filled me with irritation when playing with toy soldiers with other children was the lack of rules or structure. The outcome of an engagement was down to your force of personality, manipulation, domineering attitude or petty threats; to my mind at the time tantamount to barbarism. So, when I discovered Warhammer 40k, it was heaven-sent. It was 2001, I had just turned 9. It had been a very difficult summer full of problems a child doesn't fully comprehend but feels keenly. It was at this point, at the start of a new academic year, that two of my friends came in excitedly chatting about a new game they had started playing over the summer. A game full of elves, orks, soldiers, space marines and, most importantly, machine guns. I listened enraptured, desperately trying to wrap my head around the concepts of dice, tape measures, rulebooks and models. I'd rushed home that day and when my mother arrived, asked if I could go over on the weekend. Parents were liaised with and a date was set. When I arrived, it was a spectacle never before seen. There was no playing on the floor (as I had expected); the dining table had been cleared and a green felt mat covered in hills, ruins and trees took the place of a table cloth. Two forces mirrored each other: one in the resplendent blue of the Ultramarines; the other in red, green, white and blue, the colours of the Eldar. I was utterly blown away. The entire day was spent with my best friend and his dad soaking the battlefield in the blood of grizzly conflict. That night we poured over the artwork and pictures of that rather hefty 3rd edition rulebook. That was that, I had to get an army. My birthday had just been, so no chance of an army until Christmas, 3 long months away. I mewled, whined and grizzled my way into a starter paint set with 5 space marines, a brush and a paperback catalogue from Mason’s Models. My mother was appalled at the price, which only galvanised my resolve. I carefully and painstakingly painted those 5 chaps in one morning, with more effort and enthusiasm than I had ever applied to anything before. Christmas finally came and I got the 3rd edition starter set. I would have assembled them in record time had I received any glue with my present. Instead, I buried myself in the rulebook, reading it cover to cover. To the delight of my mother, as I was a good, but idle, reader. My other present was a house key. It felt like a perfect Christmas. I was a latchkey kid now, and there was no finer hobby to be found. I'd build and paint models, construct scenery and read rulebooks and lore to my heart's content. Weekends were reserved for fighting epic conflicts, pulling off daring raids and sundering lesser forces with chitinous claw or beneath crushing hoof However, what came next was to revolutionise my hobby. The release of the magazine series Battle Games in Middle Earth in 2002. This is without doubt the finest wargaming publication that has been, and will ever be, made. It was a fortnightly release complete with miniatures every issue; all this for the princely sum of £3.99 (contrast this with White Dwarf retailing at £3.50 at the time). Each magazine was incrementally teaching you the rules in piece meal, gradually advancing your painting skill with guides, scenarios, battle reports, tactics, lore and scenery building. After a dozen issues you had a great collection of fully painted miniatures, a solid knowledge of the rules, the tactical know-how and a table full of scenery to play on I had been a fan of Tolkien before Peter Jackson's trilogy, I listened to the BBC radio productions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings regularly on tape (kingly gifts indeed for the time). My copy of The Hobbit was very dog eared and well worn (that's the edition, below), my LotR books less so and The Silmarillion practically unread. I was primed and ready to submerge myself in a miniatures game set in this world. Living in a rural area, this gave my hobby structure, provided me with achievable goals and the skills and motivation to complete them. Sadly, none of my gaming friends at that time were as taken with it, preferring the galactic conflict only the 41st millennium could provide So I squirreled away alone in my fantasy world until I hit secondary school and found a few others who had been doing exactly the same. This created a community that I'll never see again in my life. A group of players that had flawless knowledge of the rules, fully painted armies, loads of scenery, similar levels of skill and, perhaps most importantly, the time and motivation to play. I feel utterly spoilt to have had this experience of the hobby for a few years. It was a period of time for which I will be eternally grateful. A high that I will always chase, an unachievable dream for an adult to pursue. Thus began a fraught love affair with my hobby, the flame may have at times guttered through the years but it has always remained lit
Are there ethical 'frontiers' that games should not cross? A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Secret Hitler and whether games could promote Fascism. Then came news that Russian toy company Igroland had published a boardgame about the 2018 Novichok poisonings: Our Guys in Salisbury has players retracing the route of GRU goons Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin on their way from Moscow to Salisbury to attack former-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia (and, let it be noted, poison DS Nick Bailey and bystander Charlie Rowley and kill Charlie's partner Dawn Sturgess). Our Guys in Salisbury is a real game, with a print run of 5000 copies in Russia, but it's also a stunt. The mechanics seem to be risible: roll dice, race to the end, obey instructions to go back or forward, Snakes & Ladders basically. Since a product like this has no market among proper gamers and is lost on children, its raison-d'etre is to make a political point. Game designer Mikhail Bober puts it like this: This was an idea of our answer to western media: enough already. To us, it’s not funny any more. It’s sad. This needs to stop. Bober is referring the UK's insistence that Chepiga and Mishkin poisoned the Skripals on the orders of the Russian state. Although dogs in the street know this to be true, Russian media flunkeys at RT follow the Kremlin line that it's all a big joke, sending out chocolate Salisbury cathedrals as a Christmas message of goodwill. Bober sees his game as a similar contribution to international banter: If anyone died in Salisbury, then we didn’t want to offend anyone. The idea of the game is a kind of joke, and a bridge of friendship. Note the 'if' at the start of that comment? In Russia, where only 3% of people think the Russian state was behind the poisonings (source: Levada Centre, October 2018), the question of whether Dawn Sturgess is even dead seems to be something on which gentlemen might reasonably disagree. Our Guys in Salisbury can be dismissed as a sort of commercial trolling inspired by Putin's campaign of fake news and disinformation. But Bober has limits. No board games about his country's annexation of Crimea will be forthcoming. Definitely not about Ukraine, a fair number of people have died there, there are a lot of opinions and everyone has their own truth. There are victims there, it would be stupid to use it in a commercial project. So, no victims in Salisbury, then, eh Mikhail? But Bober's stray remark that 'everyone has their own truth' is a moral insight that's worth sticking with. Let's take a look at Escape from Colditz, published by Gibsons in 1973 but re-released in 2016 by Osprey. The game was designed by Major Pat Reid, MBE, MC. Reid himself escaped from Colditz in 1942. The new edition of Escape from Colditz (with Eagle, not Swastika) - and Major Pat Reid Escape from Colditz is a striking expression of the idea that everyone has their own truth, because, as well as up to 5 teams of escaping POWs, one player plays the German guards. This needs repeating. In a game published barely 30 years after the War, one players gets to be the Germans and, if the Security Officer manages to contain all the POWs for long enough, the Germans win. And handshakes all round! Pat Reid's game embodies the challenging notion that German Wehrmacht officers have their own truth: if they are intelligent and efficient and perhaps gamble shrewdly, they will win the game. I'm sure that this concept is rooted in Reid's own POW experience, which informed his understanding that his guards were doing their job, some of them with commendable diligence, and that, from their perspective, the hell-bent escapers were not heroic freedom-lovers, but the baddies! Ha ha. Of course, the guards at POW camps - even Colditz - were not SS. I don't know if Reid intended his game to serve as a moral fable about war, but it expresses values that aren't easy to digest. Mikhail Bober is shy about a game based on annexing Russian Crimea, because everyone has their own truth, even Ukrainian nationalists who see their country being dismembered by Vladimir Putin's cynical project. But a game expressing this insight as fair-mindedly as Escape from Colditz does would, I suspect, meet with not-so-gentle reproof from the Kremlin, so don't expect Igroland to publish it any time soon. Bober's Salisbury game doesn't allow conflicting truths to be expressed. You make a one-way journey through Europe to Salisbury. If you believe that Chepiga and Mishkin's mission was murder, not sightseeing, you cannot subvert it by playing to lose. The structure of the game compels you on down a linear path that ends under a picture of the Cathedral tower (123 metres tall!) and images of figures in hazmat suits. The deed is done and the poison is delivered. By playing the game, you cannot challenge the outcome and this is what makes it propaganda rather than a true game. Escape from Colditz makes a striking moral decision in its game design. Black Orchestra takes a different approach. In this game, the players are German patriots plotting to assassinate Hitler. These real-world conspirators include truly idealistic characters, like Dietrich Bonhoffer, military pragmatists, like General Beck (who simply thought the War was being badly-led), along with odious types like Admiral Canaris (innovator of the Star of David for identifying Jews), Von Tresckow (enslaver of Polish and Ukrainian children as forced labour), Von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise, but an anti-Semite) and Erich Kordt (Soviet agent). Very much a case of everyone has their own truth mixed with a dash of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The game has many similarities to Colditz, such as gathering cards representing papers, tools, disguises and weapons that can be combined to fulfil the requirements of a successful plot. But it also has a striking difference: no one gets to play Hitler or his Gestapo. Black Orchestra involves cooperative game play against a card-driven A.I.. Hitler is the game itself, trying to beat you. As the War progresses, Hitler's power intensifies and the Gestapo become more suspicious: the stakes rise. This is a brilliant idea, exploring everyone having their own truth while sparing a player the burden of winning as Hitler. And it would be a burden. The defeat of Hitler is the foundational moral event in modern, post-religious ethics. 'Killing Hitler' lies at the heart of our political values: we make his sort of regime impossible through checks and balances, democratic accountability, embedded rights and a shared culture of repudiation. When it seems that Hitler might not be dead and that he (or rather, someone else enacting his agenda) might return to power, we become alarmed. And rightly. Black Orchestra creates a 'ludic reality' in which you might succeed in killing Hitler or might fail (in which case, the tragedy of history plays itself out in its familiar pattern) but no one is asked to work towards Hitler's mission. The game does that dirty job for you. I'd have a bit more respect for Bober's dismal Salisbury game if it were merely trying to inoculate its players against morally unacceptable situations the way Black Orchestra does. There are no games about escaping from Auschwitz for this very reason. The historical fact of the death camps - and the related paradox that the people who staffed them were not in fact monsters - is one of those phenomenon that defy our moral understanding and you cannot make a game out of something you don't understand. Instead, Our Guys In Salisbury celebrates the poisoning of 5 people in Wiltshire last year, but treats it simply as a baffling event to which players are uninvolved spectators. It's like creating a Snakes & Ladders game about the Kennedy Assassination ('grassy knoll, go back 2 spaces') or 911 ('Flight 175 hits the South Tower, miss a turn') with no sense that these events are tragic or criminal. Now you might say, what's the difference between a Novichok-themed game and any game that takes as its subject matter some historical disaster or sacrifice? Igroland's development director 'Alexander' defends the Salisbury game like this: Thousands die every day ... Better to ask an arms maker how Kalashnikov is doing, how American or Israeli defence firms are doing, you'd do better to find that out. It's just funny Right enough, lots of games are themed around events where people died. Nearly half a million people died during the Battle of Normandy: does that make games like Memoir '44 in bad taste? Isn't playing a victorious German defence at Omaha Beach as morally toxic as helping Hitler survive a patriotic conspiracy? For that matter, what about other play-the-Germans games from the '70s and '80s like Third Reich or Axis & Allies? Ah, those big old hex map-boards and fiddly cardboard chits bring a nostalgic shudder. Memoir '44's Omaha Beach set-up (image 2) has a clean and tidy, up-to-date aesthetic I think the degree of personalisation and stylisation matters. Colditz has you playing impersonal pawns rather than named prisoners. Memoir '44 is highly stylised, rather than being a soldier-by-soldier recreation of battle casualties. The other games take a God's-eye view of the conflict, focusing on surges and pincers and chokepoints rather than the fates of this unit or that officer. But just as important is the sense of moral closure. WW2 is over: its combatants now meet and shake hands at Armistice celebrations, its nations are now allies. The conflict is resolved, the reparations made: we have moved on. But this is exactly what hasn't happened with the Novichok poisonings. Russia hasn't even admitted culpability, never mind apologised or made reparations to the Skripals or the family of Dawn Sturgess. In this context, the game muddies rather than clarifies - and is intended to do so. It's fake news by other means. Slightly more controversially, I feel that the mere passage of time doesn't close cases. Look at games based around the 1888-1891 Whitechapel Murders. I'm uncomfortable with any game which has someone playing the role of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps as a concession to such feelings, FFG's Letters from Whitechapel uses historically accurate detectives but replaces the Ripper's historical victims with generic tokens representing 'the Wretched' of Victorian London. Other games, like Bruno Cathala's Mister Jack, recreate the cat-and-mouse aspect of the chase, but not the actual murders. Letters from Whitechapel is immersive but macabre with anonymous victims drawn from 'The Wretched' of Victorian London; Mister Jack is more abstract and the victims don't feature at all Good, because the Whitechapel Murders are unresolved, even if no one alive today is directly affected by the representation of them in games. Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Mary Kelly and the others were real women, horribly murdered and mutilated, and the passage of a century shouldn't diminish their status as human victims in an unsolved crime, any more than the passing of a decade makes a Madeleine McCann game less obnoxious. Then FFG go and complicate things by releasing the Dear Boss expansion to Letters from Whitechapel, which now identifies the historical suspects and victims in cards. My heart sinks - but it is well handled. The gameplay is stylised so that the Victim Card acts as a sort of meta rules tweak rather than recreating the circumstances of a particular woman's ugly death. The historical details on the card are sympathetic. The level of immersion is not gratuitous. There are no images of corpses. It's far above Our Guys in Salisbury in terms of its moral engagement with its subject matter, but it still skirts pretty close to the frontier. Of course, there are books and films by the truckload based around D-Day (Saving Private Ryan) or the Whitechapel Murders (From Hell). True, but narrative art guides our responses: it leads us by the hand, showing us some things but not others, in order to make an imaginative point. If it's handled badly, it's on the author or film-maker. Games work differently: they give agency to the players so that we ourselves are doing these things, not just watching them or reading about them. What view to take then of video games, like KumaWar: Osama 2011 which enables you to play the US Navy SEALS who killed Osama Bin Laden? Re-enacting, for entertainment purposes, the state-sponsored assassination of a real person (even that person) leaves me ill-at-ease. Previous episodes of KumaWar courted controversy by simulating the Battle of Fallujah, in which 71 US troops died (and 1600 insurgents). There was understandable outrage from the families of the soldiers. What the families of the insurgents felt goes unreported. You might argue that Osama Bin Laden is just 'Hitler' for the 21st century: killing Bin Laden is a metaphor for what we're all about as a liberal, democratic, secular civilisation. Perhaps, but the sense of moral closure is missing. In fact, the conflict triggered by Bin Laden is still raging. Playthrough of KumaWar featuring Osama but no defenders. No women or children either. Was that moral delicacy on the designer's part? Another feature KumaWar is that, although Osama is an A.I. moving target, another player can control Taliban-guards defending the compound. So there's an acknowledgement too that everyone has their own truth - although the tactical situation is weighted heavily in favour of the SEALs, who get rewarded when victorious with a cut-scene of Bin Laden's burial at sea. This is 'spiking the ball' for the victorious Americans, which is something Escape from Colditz does not do for victorious escaping players at the expense of the German player. Bin Laden, the compound, the final showdown and the 'ball spiking' funeral after a US victory Kuma Games CEO Keith Halper defends the Bin Laden episode of the franchise like this: At Kuma, we are very sensitive and respectful of American and coalition soldiers and the sacrifices they are making every day. We hope that by telling their stories with such a powerful medium that we enable the American public to gain a better appreciation of the conflicts and the dangers they face. I can't make my mind up on what Kuma is doing here. Honouring the courage and skill of US soldiers doing a dangerous but necessary job? Or ghoulish exploitation of a messy extra-judicial killing for entertainment and propaganda? It's right on the frontier, isn't it? But it's still better than Mikhail Bober's inane defence of his Salisbury game as "a kind of joke, and a bridge of friendship".
Root is a board game I very much enjoy. It's physically beautiful, the gameplay is really engrossing and it doesn't tend to last too long. In a recent online discussion, a critic complained that the problem with Root is that the theme is "just pasted on." This is a common criticism leveled at certain games. The charge seems to be that the ostensible premise is inessential: they game can be played just as enjoyably (or more enjoyably) ignoring the setting and characterisation, as an abstract strategy game, like Chess. Let me just stick with Root a bit longer. Root is a pretty vicious area control game, with each faction working towards victory using different mechanics. It would work as a purely abstract game, although it would be hard to remember the differences between the factions or keep a clear idea in your head of your own faction's mechanics if they were just "the oranges" and "the blues" rather than 'the Marquise de Cat' and 'the Eyrie'. Root's distinctive art and ADORBS wooden meeples. Wanna play??? But Root gains a strangely compelling quality from being a struggle between adorably cute woodland animals for control of the forest. There's a dissonance between Kyle Ferrin's art and the (pretty brutal) gaming experience itself. Ferrin claims to draw on Disney's Robin Hood (1973), Brian Jacques' Redwall series and David Petersen's Mouse Guard for inspiration; I'm reminded of Sylvanian Families and the children's books of Richard Scarry from the 1950s and '60s. From top left: Robin Hood, Redwall, Mouseguard, Sylvanians, Scarry's Busytown and Root The art has a lovely pastel palette and the cartoon characters have a breathless innocence to them. But the game is frankly ruthless, with a zero-sum dominance mechanic and an ugly impetus for everyone to gang up on whomever's in the lead. The context of the game is civil strife, with arch-capitalist Cats filling the forest with sawmills, prompting Marxist revolution among the rodent proles and a crackdown from the avian aristocracy. When the expansion introduces the mercantile otters and the grinning Lizard Cult (who want opponents to martyr their worshipers, thereby radicalising them into terrorists), the tension between the cutesy art and the dark subject matter creates a delightful disquiet. The Lizard Cult are a peaceful sect who just want to tend their sacred gardens. They recruit from the hopeless and dispossessed, radicalise them and spread like a virus. Maybe some point is being made? Designer Cole Wehrle could have located this game in a different setting. It would work well in revolutionary Paris, with revolutionary Jacobins battling the troops of the Ancien Régime through the streets and courts of the city. Or in St Petersburg in 1917, with Bolsheviks versus Tsarists. Or Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Or Thatcher's Britain. But the dissonance is the point. By setting the conflict in an idyllic forest, Root rises above simulation and becomes a robust metaphor. It's about all civil wars, everywhere. Root resonates with what is happening in Syria, what happened in Bosnia, with Franco's Spain and the American wilderness of Last of the Mohicans. The beauty of the backdrop sets the ugliness of the conflict into vivid relief. Magua should put down his tomahawk and check out the scenery Root, I think, passes the theme test with flying colours. Indeed, to complain that Root has arbitrarily draped itself in a woodland-animal setting, rather than, say, Krystallnacht or the Gunpowder Plot, is to miss the point of animal allegory. It's like saying George Orwell's Animal Farm would be better if it had used people instead of pigs. Having flashbacks to GCSE English Lit? But I own other games that deploy theme less successfully. Atlanteon is one of Reiner Knizia's less distinguished efforts. Originally, it was Revolution, and featured Jacobins and Royalists fighting for control of the districts of Paris. Now it's got a fantasy theme about mer-people in the undersea Sunken Kingdoms. A game of undersea conquest for two players. Or just a Maths puzzle. The re-skinning of this game is entirely cosmetic. Knizia has created a simple little area control challenge that's more like a mathematical puzzle than a board game (a criticism leveled at a lot of Knizia's work, to be fair). It doesn't need any theme at all: it works fine as 'whites versus blues'. There's something faintly insulting about the Atlantean aesthetic, as if I'm too dumb to try a number-puzzle game but might be lured in if it has monsters on the box. In fact, BGG user Matt Drake says it best in his review 'Undersea Conquest' = 'Boring Math Game with Sea Monsters’: you could strip the theme off the game completely without affecting it in any way at all. The box ought to say that Atlanteon is a game of boring math with some pictures of sea monsters I don't agree with Drake that the game is simply boring (although you definitely need a certain Sudoku-inspired mindset to get a kick out of it) but he's right that the theme is irrelevant to the game. Atlanteon reveals nothing about the nature of civil strife and nor does it explore the imagined reality of an undersea civilisation. It's revealing that another BGG-user (ludopath - great name!) delightedly re-themed the game around the film Mars Attacks! (1996) with a homemade set of components. I don't know if this makes me want to play the game again but it DEFINITELY makes me want to re-watch the film Another undersea conflict game makes a great comparison. Abyss is by Bruno Cathala, who brought us Shadows Over Camelot, Cyclades and Five Tribes, so he knows a thing or two about theme the same way Knizia knows Maths. Abyss has great broody art of hideous fish-people in a dank and macabre undersea realm. The box art, with its haunting variants, has inspired a slew of Abyss-themed selfies: The aesthetic continues with the use of (fake!) pearls as currency (though they roll around a bit) and, in the expansions, some superior miniatures. But when you look past the art and the components, Abyss is just another area control / resource management game, where you recruit Allies who help buy Lords who help claim Locations that help earn victory points. It doesn't have to involve fish people in an undersea world: it could be Renaissance princes or Cold War scientists or Han Dynasty mandarins instead. Yet I don't feel that Abyss is in the same category as Atlanteon. Abyss could have been created with a different context to it, but it still makes a good job of this context. The undersea kingdom is vividly realised, with its crab armies and jellyfish mages, its seahorse farmers and cursed nebulis pearls and invading Leviathans. When you play Abyss you can imagine the world it's set in and it's a pretty cool world. You wish there was a graphic novel or an anime series. Maybe the Aquaman horror spin-off, The Trench, will do it justice... Abyss doesn't reveal anything in particular about the nature of courtly intrigue (unlike Root, which captures some of the dynamics of revolt and oppression) but it does evoke a world that feels different from other economy/worker Euros with similar mechanics. By contrast, Lords of Waterdeep carries the official Dungeons & Dragons imprimatur. You assemble parties of mages, warriors, rogues and clerics to go on quests while buying up property in Waterdeep that helps assemble better teams; at the end of the game, your completed quests convert into victory points. Yet your mages, rogues, etc are coloured cubes. Don't misunderstand: Waterdeep is a very enjoyable Euro-style resource management game with gorgeous components but it feels nothing like D&D. It doesn't explore the Forgotten Realms setting in any meaningful way. You're just collecting coloured cubes in differing permutations. More accurately, Cube-Collectors of Anywheresville Let's take a look at games designer Vlaada Chvátil and his magnum opus, the magisterial Mage Knight. This game is based on a (now defunct) wargaming property with video game and novelisation spin-offs, so it has a setting to compete with Waterdeep and Abyss. This is another Euro-style game: Vlaada Chvátil chose not to treat the game as an exercise in Ameritrash roll-the-dice-and-kill-the-monster adventuring. Instead, he built for Mage Knight a delirious mathematical engine, where you level up your immortal knight by deck-building across several axes: acquiring spells, magic treasures, new feats and henchmen and - crucially - the manna tokens to power them. Mage Knight is hands-down the most intellectually engrossing epic-puzzle game out there. Whether it's a fun board game to sit down with friends I cannot say (no one will sit down and play it with me ::sob::) but by universal agreement it's the best solo board gaming experience to be had. But here's the thing: amidst all the calculations and hand management, where's the theme? Some people on BGG noticed the, uh, distance between Mage Knight's swashbuckling box art and its rather more cerebral mechanics and called foul:
'Adventuring for Accountants' - no slur on accountants, someone has to keep all the beans counted in this complex world of ours, but that isn't why I game - Don Smith I want sex, and the game tells me to go mow the lawn - Brent Lloyd Mage Knight was recently 're-skinned' as Star Trek: Frontiers. This game (ever so slightly) simplifies Mage Knight's daunting rules while retaining the impenetrable rule book (nice touch!) and replaces knights with Federation or Klingon starships and their captains, manna with data, mercenary units with Away Teams, monasteries with M-Class planets and the Atlantean Cties waiting at the back of the board with ominous Borg Cubes. It's Next Generation Star Trek too. The Trek re-theming works a bit better than the original. The luck-free, deliberative mechanics suit being a starship captain rather better than being an immortal barbarian, orc or elf plundering dungeons and razing villages. There's now a happy alignment between what the game asks you to do and what you imagine yourself to be doing while playing. Journalist Dave Goodhart, reflecting on the Brexit divisions in the UK in his book The Road to Somewhere (2017), suggests that people are split into 'Somewheres' and 'Anywheres'. The Anywheres are educated and mobile with an identity based on career success: they can drop roots in any city (and they like cities) or any country. The Somewheres are rooted in a geographical sense of identity: Geordies or Scousers, Yorkshire farmer or Cornish housewife. The 2016 Brexit referendum was, on this analysis, the Revenge of the Somewheres. Games can be Somewheres or Anywheres too. Abyss is a Somewhere, despite its fairly generic rules, but Atlanteon is an Anywhere. Mage Knight looks like a Somewhere, with its map-board and 3-D city models, but once you play it you realise it's really an Anywhere with a regional accent! Abstract games don't even try to be Somewheres, although there perhaps was a time in its development when Chess really did represent two armies opposing each other. A good example of a Somewhere-game is Firefly, which evokes the events of the beloved TV show and explores what might happen with characters or settings barely touched-upon in the show. What if Mal went evil and worked for Niska? What if River Tam became a heavily armed mercenary and flew around with Jubal Early collecting bounties? What if Jane was a hero? Firefly could, I suppose, have been any pick-up-and-deliver heist game. Instead of spaceships in the 'Verse you could be driving Minis around Italy. Moreover, Firefly has a synchrony between rules and theme that Mage Knight lacks: its push-your-luck cardplay when you carry out heists and the way other players send horrid Reavers moving erratically towards you all the time. And this coming-together of mechanics and imagination is what makes the game rich in theme, rather than the fact that you (really do) keep a dinosaur on your dashboard. Disclosure: I don't play Firefly very often because, for me, there's a quality in games that trumps theme most of the time and that's BREVITY. Firefly is charming and beautiful but it takes an AGE to play, especially once the expansion boards are on the table. Mage Knight may be a big puzzle but, intellectually, it rewards the 3+ hours you're going to sink into it. Another Somewhere-game would be Western Legends. There are options for cattle rustlin' and outlaw shootin' and raisin' hell at a cat house with the dollars you earned prospectin' at the mine. It's a sandbox game where you get to try out being a law-abidin' Marshall or a no-good Wanted Varmint or drift between the two. But the Poker Card mechanic offers the synchrony that brings the whole thing together. You don't need to drop character just because there's a fight. It's pretty short too. It's only right to finish off by considering wargaming rather than boardgaming. What could be more thematic? Your 11th Hussars are just that: Cardigan's lovely cavalrymen, right down to their pink cherrypicker trousers. These are Somewheres: they belong. You could no more paint their trousers green than you could equip them with lightsabers. Wargaming rules tend towards the vanilla: their point is to be invisible, so that players can concentrate on lovingly recreated battlefields and troop movements and tactics. Sometimes a rule mechanic tries to add something more by way of synchrony, like the push-your-luck fate tokens in Test of Honour or the order dice in Bolt Action. But the main asset of most rules sets is that they can resolve a conflict between any type of troops in any century or theatre of war. Yet gamers aren't content to leave it at that, are they? Let's have my Hussars fight your Cheyennes! they say. Or Polish winged hussars versus Parthian cataphracts. Or Celtic charioteers versus Egyptian Mamluks. As soon as you do this, the theme has evaporated. Once they're taken outside of Crimea or Ladysmith or the Western Front, in what sense are your miniatures really Hussar Cherrypickers at all? They've become generic light cavalry Anywheres. Fluidity can matter as much as theme. Perhaps it's because gamers are naturally, even irreverently, inventive. Perhaps it's in the nature of games themselves that possibilities be stretched, flipped and warped out of shape. As a child, my Marvel action figures were battling their DC opposites long before their comic companies signed any crossover deal. In fact, General Ursus from Planet of the Apes joined the fray as well, I recall. Hello again, old friends... Maybe it's post-modernism working its whacky spell, but we're increasingly seeing cross-overs as promos or DLC in various games. Fanatic from Sentinels of the Multiverse turns up as a playable character in the PC version of One Deck Dungeon. Fireteam Zero's Shadroe 'Rat' Decatur turns up in Order of the Vampire Hunters. There's a Game of Thrones themed Catan, while Cluedo, Monopoly and Risk have had their DNA spliced with everything. Back in the '90s, Capcom brought us Streetfighter versus the X-Men and then there's Kingdom Hearts: in what other game could Bambi or Dumbo aid you in battle? This sort of post-modern mash-up seems to be a growing force in our culture, but it's toxic for theming in general. Theme becomes a dress-up or cosmetic, like a new wallpaper for your phone - arguably, the way social class becomes about supporting a certain football team or getting a particular haircut. Look how Pandemic is no longer about super-bugs or all the iterations of Munchkin or the way Legendary Encounters morphs through Marvel, Alien, Predator, Firefly, Buffy, X-Files and Big Trouble in Little China. Maybe it started with Top Trumps, but the logic of capitalism means a successful product needs to be able to re-skin itself like this. The future belongs to Anywheres. I felt this death-of-theme at work when GW wrapped up their haunting, baroque Old World setting for Warhammer Fantasy and replaced it with Age of Sigmar, which imported all of Wargammer 40K's juvenile aesthetic but none of its macarbre humour or inventiveness. Out went the clever historical/fantasy pastiche setting with its 17th century black powder conflicts reimagined with orcs and elves and eerie Chaos instead of Hapsburgs and Bourbons; in come testosteronal Stormcast Eternals (space marines, basically), gurning demons and a pantomime backdrop of wrecked fantasy worlds for monsters to brawl over.
But it's not the apocalypse. Look, Legendary Encounters does a really good job of reskinning with different themes. These themes are explored with bespoke mechanics, not just slapped on for a price tag. In the meantime, and perhaps in reaction against this, the demand for (and therefore the provision of) deeply immersive, single-theme games grows. No one is cranking out generic battle games like Risk any more; instead you get Rising Sun with its lovingly detailed miniatures, kami-worship phases, options for your troops and monsters to commit seppuku and tussle for honour. So perhaps that's the way things have to go: flexible rule templates that can throw down roots Anywhere (good when the imagined situation is compelling, bad when you're collecting cubes or mass-plating Stormcast minis) .... or highly specific rules tailored around telling one particular story, exploring one particular situation, staying Somewhere. I wonder, though, where that leaves the games in the middle. Just as society seems to be polarising into Anywheres and Somewheres, are games polarising too? What future is there for lightly-themed games like 7 Wonders and Dominion, which kinda-sorta have a setting (Iron Age empires, medieval kingdoms) but which, in play, are all about the icons and the numbers? It's interesting to watch White Wizard Games rake in the cash by re-skinning Dominion first as SF (Star Realms) and then as fantasy (Hero Realms). Perhaps the future belongs to Somewheres after all. It seems Brexit has a lot to answer for. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to pull Superman, Spider-Man and General Ursus out of the attic and make them fight... If you want more of this sort of chat (minus the post-modernism), Tom Vasel (minus the hat) nails it in discussing Dominion at 48:00
November 15th, 2018 was the day Keyforge: Call of the Archons was released upon an unsuspecting world. Tom Vassel on Dice Tower liked this new fantasy card game. IGN called it a "bold new idea". Polygon wondered if it could find its place in an already-crowded market. Well, it found its place. Most retailers sold out on Day 1 of release and publishers Fantasy Flight Games sold out of all of their stock by November 19th. There are echoes of July 1993, when Wizards of the Coast launched a modest little card game at the Origins Game Fair in Texas: a year's stock of Magic: the Gathering cards sold out immediately and a reprint was ordered. Magic sold its 10 millionth card later that year, in September. Comparing Keyforge with Magic is instructive, because both were designed by Richard Garfield. Garfield was a doctorate student in Mathematics, designing games as a hobby, when Wizards invited him to pitch them a game that could be played in minutes and was portable enough so that fans could get a game going while “waiting in line at conventions.” What brings Garfield back to the designer's table after all these years? He's trying to 'fix' Magic: the Gathering. Reflecting on the way M:tG morphed from a quirky hobby game into a world-conquering corporate behemoth, Garfield laments that some of my favorite ways [of playing] disappeared over time ... I have often wondered if I could get back some of that really exciting play, which was characterized by tools that weren’t universal. Each player had treasures no other player had, but also had less powerful cards that needed to be used in clever ways to get the most value. Some context might be needed for unreconstructed wargamers. Magic is a collectible card game that invites players to construct a deck out of the cards you own to beat your opponent's constructed deck. Buying extra packs of cards increases your chance of acquiring more potent rare cards and building a more powerful deck. Since there is such a thing as eBay, you can now shop specifically for the rare cards you want, introducing an element of pay-to-win into a collect-then-play game. Magic tournaments have become big deals: an all-conquering deck can be worth a $250,000 prize. Important rare cards change hands for big sums. You'll need that prize money to buy a Limited Edition Black Lotus. Watch this fan opening up a vintage deck of M:tG cards and stumbling across the legendary Black Lotus. The draw happens at 8:00. The lucky guy sold the card at auction for $27,302. It has since sold for 3 times that amount. Alas, the card is banned in most tournaments. But Garfield isn't alone in wanting to take Magic back to a simpler, more innocent time. Robert Dougherty is a professional Magic player and multiple tournament winner who set up White Wizard Games - the people who brought us Star Realms. Dougherty has his own version of 'fixing Magic', a game called Epic that was released in 2015. Here are two games with similar aims to recapture the fun of '90s Magic: the Gathering, but one is designed by Magic's original creator and the other by one of its most successful players. The designer's versus the player's perspective: Keyforge versus Epic. Which is best? Only one way to find out. Let's contrast gameplay. Magic bequeaths to its successors its two-stage structure:
Epic and Keyforge both de-value the economic aspect of play. Epic lets you play any number of cost-0 cards and just a single cost-1 card every turn. This means your big monsters and devastating spells will be hitting the table right from turn 1. There's no gradual level-up, as in Magic, where the big beasts only see play towards the end of the game. Instead it's turn one: Sea Titan: boom! Great art, huh? More about that shortly. You might notice that Sea Titan isn't the best play on turn 1 since its on-play 'tribute' is to return an opponent's champion to their hand, so maybe save it until turn 2? Epic cards come in 4 suits: Good (yellow), Evil (red), Wild (green) and Sage (blue). Lots of cards gain an extra 'Loyalty' power if you an reveal two other cards of the same suit in your hand, so this retains some element of long-term hand management, as you may choose to keep cards in-hand to act as fuel for more powerful abilities. Raging T-Rex and Strafing Dragon both have Loyalty bonuses but the Fireball's top power is cost-0. Play one of the cost-1's and reveal the other two to activate its Loyalty bonus, then maybe throw in the Fireball's cost-0 power for good measure or hold onto it to trigger future Wild Loyalty effects? Keyforge also simplifies Magic's economy system, but in a very different way. In Keyforge there are 7 suits (or 'Houses'): trollish Brobnar, demonic Dis, cyborg Logos, kitschy Martians, Sanctum paladins, roguelike Shadows and bestial Untamed. Each turn, a player nominates a single House and then plays, discards and/or activates all of their cards of that House - but only the cards of that House. As with Epic, this kicks a game of Keyforge off with the power level dialed to maximum. However, it encourages you to hold on to cards until you an make an optimal play, rather than drizzling out a few cards at a time. Both games take from Magic the convention of cards arriving on the table in an unusable exhausted state ('summoning sickness') so creatures rarely get to do anything in the turn you play them, giving your opponent a turn to blow them up. One card of each House with their distinctive identifying icons in the top left and colour schemes on their titles Keyforge departs from the Magic/Epic template in another important respect. You're not dealing damage to your opponent and keeping track of your own Life. Instead you're gathering resource tokens called 'aember' (silly spelling): at the start of a turn you convert 6 aember into a key and the first person to forge 3 keys wins (forge three keys... Keyforge... geddit?!?!). You pick up aember automatically by playing certain cards, but, instead of fighting, every creature can be used to 'reap' aember too, so you battle each other's creatures largely to stop them working as aember-factories. In a way, Keyforge reverses the strategic structure of Magic: the victory-engine comes out first, then the economy kicks in. Keyforge and Epic both offer a faster, less complex route into exciting gameplay than their parent-game, but at the expense of long-term strategic play. They are characterised by dramatic board-wipes and other reversals of fortune that send whole lines of cards into the discard pile, re-setting the game and abolishing carefully-laid plans. In Keyforge, aember is constantly being stolen or passed around while, in Epic, weak minions are brought out to act as suicidal blockers against big attacks. Magic-veterans might find this swingy play style irritating and deplore the lack of wise resource-management but for newcomers these games offer a wild ride right from the outset. There's another aspect to Magic: the Gathering that is adapted in very different ways by these new games. I said earlier that Magic has a 2-stage structure, but really it has 3 stages:
For Magic fans, deck construction is the whole point, like Army Lists in Warhammer 40K. You curate your card collection and tinker with you deck-lists as new cards are added, taking cards out or adding them in as you learn from victories and defeats. The tabletop game is the tip of the iceberg; the real work goes under under water and out of sight. There's a sense in which, like a Samurai duel, the fight is won and lost before swords have been drawn. Epic does away with this, because you buy a fixed deck of 120 cards that make up the entire game. From this, beginners can deal themselves a random deck or experienced players can 'dark draft' a deck: you each take 5 cards, select 1 and pass it to your opponent who chooses 2 and discards the rest; keep doing this till you each have a deck of 30. Dark drafting means you have some (imperfect) information about what your opponent chose for his deck and (limited) freedom to choose cards for your own deck (say, focusing on certain factions, monster types or spell effects). This means that, whereas in Magic you could find yourself up against any possible card from over 15,000 printed cards, in Epic you can get to know the 120 base cards pretty well and even the later expansions only double that amount. Epic confronts you with old favourites and familiar synergies: the ghastly Drinker of Blood who hurts you and heals its owner every time a card is destroyed, good old Kong who deals out 13 damage every time he hits the table, the Thrasher Demon that kills anything it damages and the maddening Thought Plucker that makes you discard cards every time its unblockable attack gets through. Nonetheless, these aren't your cards. They just form your deck for the duration of a particular game. Next game they might be in your opponent's deck. The cards are a common property of everyone playing the game. That special proprietary relationship between a player and their deck is missing. Which brings us back to Keyforge and the new game's single most innovative feature. Every deck is unique and personal to you. Keyforge offers 370 different cards, split between its 7 Houses, and you get 37 of them in a deck (made up of cards from 3 Houses). No two decks are the same. The designers claim (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that there 104 septillion deck combinations. That'll be a US septillion, not the rather more staggering British septillion, but it's still a billion trillions! Each deck, when you open it, has its own name, concocted by a demented computer algorithm. Maybe you get something a bit dull, like (real names here) Zipsy, the Underwater Genius, or a bit whacky, like Discosaber, the Elder of the Outlands. Then they start getting peculiar, like The Pilot That Jabbers At Heteronormativity or The Villain That Digs Up Porridge. Some of them are really cool: The Emptiness That Plans For Eternity reminds me of certain board games Then there are the problematic ones. Ah, the Emperor Who Pays For Boys! But then Titanflayer The Father of Racism hit a few nerves too. The Child Who Terribly Fears The Church seems topical. Wang The Seriously Bruised conjures up images. Before you go sinking a fortune into Keyforge decks, looking for ones with 'hilarious' racist or sexist names, FFG gave already noticed that the algorithms have generated "unfortunate pairing of words" (yayy!) and taken "corrective measures to adjust the naming algorithm for future decks" (boo!) and, what's more, "defective Archon Decks that we have flagged for removal will not be playable in any official KeyForge Organized Play events" (double-boo!).
The only catch is - and it's a huge catch - that if these cards aren't in your deck, then that's that. There are no booster packs. You can't buy extra cards in auction like the Black Lotus and add them later. Your deck is what it is. It's up to you to make the best of it ... or buy another deck and hope for better. You understand now why this game is going to get a grip on people, right? Want to know more about Keyforge decks to hunt for? This video (up to 7:30) describes the Four Horsemen cards that synergise beautifully and always occur together. If there's a downside to Keyforge's irresistibly bespoke appeal, it's that the game lacks Epic's sense of setting. The Houses in Keyforge have been plucked from their different realities by the godlike Archons and set to battle each other over aember in some strange dimensional hybrid world known as the Crucible. That's why elvish thieves fight robots, ogres, paladins and pulpy Martians. It's a mad genre mash-up. Epic is set in a consistent world. OK, a slightly odd fantasy realm with a city named Covenant and dinosaurs and time-traveling wizards as well as armies of undead, demons, dragons and angels, but it's a coherent setting and a game of Epic narrates a struggle going on within that world that is, well, 'epic' in scope. Events are referenced in the expansions, such as the rebellion in Uprising and the plots of the demon-lord Raxxa in Tyrants and the heroism of Captain Markus as a running theme. Epic is honouring Magic: the Gathering which, from 1996's Mirage expansion, started weaving serialised narratives into new cards, culminating in the Weatherlight set with its detailed metaplot. It's hard to imagine how Keyforge can attempt something like this. Related to this - and perhaps entirely subjectively - is the difference in art. Both games have colourful illustrations, but I think Epic wins out here. Keyforge has its moments, with the gurning trolls of Brobnar and the witchy forest folk of Untamed being standouts, but there's a tendency for static scenes and a lack of variation. The paladins of Sanctum stand stiffly in their gumetal plate armour and once you've seen one retro-kitsch 1950s Martian, you've seen them all. In Epic - and again, perhaps this is subjective - there's a more dynamic, even panoramic, quality to the art. Angels swoop from above, dragons soar, the undead claw their way towards the viewer, the heroes look as though they're in the midst of doing something, caught in mid-quest rather than posing for the artist. I can't help feeling this artistic vitality derives from the coherence of the setting and the game's attempt to tell a story. There are lots of reasons to get on board with Keyforge. The buy-in per player is pretty cheap (about £7-9 for a deck) and the game scores big by offering you a digital version of your deck on the Crucible website, where you can practise in real-time games against other players. Epic has an app-based digital version that's in alpha-testing right now. I've got a copy. It's pretty good. But Keyforge has stolen Epic's digital trousers. Nonetheless, I'd urge curious gamers to check out Epic. It retails at about £12, but that gives you 120 cards, so that 4 people could sit down to play it (yes, it can handle more than two players) at only £3 each. That's amazing value for money. If you mostly play games with just one other person, you have to sink a lot of cash into Keyforge to see a variety of decks, Houses and cards, but Epic gives you its whole world in one modest box. Epic gives you a world in a box, but Keyforge tantalises and teases because each deck is so incomplete Get off the fence, you say, Which do you prefer? I guess, if forced to decide, I like Epic's gameplay slightly better. There's more skill in drafting a deck and beating your opponent. In Keyforge you never really know if you won or lost because of the choices you made or because one of the decks is simply better than the other one. But what prompted this review was not to declare one game 'better' than the other, but to reflect on design choices revealed in these games. Both games honour the same ground-breaking product in Magic: the Gathering. One is respectful, a careful re-tooling of the parent game into something faster and lighter but offering similar tactics of drafting and duelling in a growing mythic narrative. Epic is a game by someone used to playing Magic at the top level and wanting to offer that experience to everyone: you get to draft a deck of high-end spells and top-drawer monsters then play a spectacular battle, without having to shop around for a Black Lotus. Epic makes every player feel like a Magic Grand Master, building a killer deck from an elite selection of cards. This is how you feel playing Epic The other game is a much more radical reinterpretation, throwing out many of the core conventions and staking its success on untested new technology. Keyforge only became possible with recent developments in printing, allowing computerised presses to assemble and seal unique decks sight unseen. Keyforge doesn't make you feel like a Magic champion: it makes you feel like a Magic newbie, but from back in '93 and '94 with the first flush of excitement, the discovery of new cards, the quest for the perfect deck, but without the baggage and the endless curating and the shopping for booster packs A vintage Magic booster pack. Keyforge aims to give you the heady buzz that these little brown packets used to generate. But what blows my mind is that the latter game is by the original designer who seems delighted to move on; the former is by his biggest fan, devotedly reconstructing his past achievements. Epic aims to deliver a turbo-charged version of Magic for a new audience; but Keyforge is much more ambitious, looking for a new way of realising the idea behind Magic for old audiences and new. Garfield didn't have to do this. He was set for life by the success of Magic. But he's not content to leave things as they are. It's not often we see restless aspiration in a business with so much money sloshing around. In a world where the Rolling Stones keep cranking out tours and U2 keep churning out albums with music that endlessly pastiches the sound that made them famous, we've come to expect creativity to drain away or end up parodying itself. We tell ourselves that Epic is the best you can hope for. We don't expect to see fresh bursts of innovation like Keyforge And creatively, Keyforge wins hands-down. Epic takes the whole experience of shopping for and curating a Magic collection and puts it in a tiny box, "here's one I made earlier," like those cakes and toys they used to make on Blue Peter. Job done! Anthea Turner, queen of Blue Peter craftwork But Keyforge finds a brand new way of doing Magic-style gaming, with players gleefully opening new decks and challenging strangers to see how their decks match up against new combinations. So, if Epic is another slick tour by the Stones or U2, then Keyforge is like Bowie, reinventing rock'n'roll and going through changes. Every time you think your current deck has got it made, someone unboxes a better one and the taste is not so sweet. What a nice point to finish on! |
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