SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
No, not the Led Zeppelin song. It's a quote from an interview on Radio 4's Sunday morning magazine show Broadcasting House (9am, 17 March, 2019), discussing board games once more, with familiar results. It's a tribute to how significant a cultural product board games have become that the BBC can't leave them alone. Yet the Beeb's pundits seem unequipped to discuss the topic.
Nowadays, an ordinary undergraduate or a particularly bright schoolboy (if such there be) could sum up the gist of Einstein's ideas, which goes to show that some concepts perplex very clever people, not because they are complicated, but because they are unfamiliar. Something like this seems to be true of board games at the moment. You can listen to the BBC piece here: don't listen from the start (you'll get Brexit commentary that is instantly out of date) or stick around after the end (you'll get the Irish Question which has never changed and never will).
If you don't know, Wingspan is the new game from Stonemeier Games (who brought us Vitculture) and it arrived in January this year after much anticipation, the advance reviews being so positive. Unfortunately, the first wave of stock was too small, so retailers couldn't fulfill advance orders and scalpers on eBay cleaned up, selling copies of a £70 game for three times that amount. Stonemeier Games apologised to fans after a Twitter-led crusade of disappointment. The game is already on its 3rd print run, with 30,000 English copies sold. Wingspan has a charming theme, which is that you are bird-lovers trying to attract the best collection of birds to your aviary. You can lure in different species by placing different types of food and you can choose between a diverse or a focused collection and whether or not to encourage them to nest and lay eggs. The mechanics are elegant but not especially original, being a sort of victory engine where birds played earlier interact with birds played later to trigger more powerful effects or more lucrative scores. There's a lot to say about Wingspan. It's physically beautiful (as Stonemeier games tend to be), with gorgeous avian art. Its sales illustrate the role key critics like Shut Up & Sit Down play in creating hype ahead of the release of a game and the economic heft a successful game now has. It has a conservationist theme, which taps into our current concerns. It was designed by a woman, Elizabeth Hargrave, and the artists are both women as well, and that too is culturally on-topic these days. Hargrave is a keen ornithologist and the game celebrates her enthusiasm for birds and science, being a careful representation of the feeding and mating habits of different species and their place in the wider eco-system. There's an excellent New York Times article on Hargrave, her game and her passion. With so much to commend this story to so many target audiences, the BBC decides to get this game reviewed by a chap called Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, because, on a previous show about museums, he declared himself a fan of board games. Irving Finkel lives up to his name. He's the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay. However, he's also a historian of board games and in 1990 he set up the International Board Game Studies Association. A proper academic heavyweight! And he looks like Dumbledore! Finkel is one of those pet academics that Radio 4 loves to use because of his breathy, kid-in-a-sweet-shop voice and tendency to drop fey witticisms. He's all over the Internet too, teaching geeks to read cuneiform script and challenging people to play the Royal Game of Ur - a board game from 2,500 BCE, the rules for which he deciphered.
Watch either of these and you too will love The Fink! This means the BBC has brought together the game du jour and an academic in board game studies - and not a clapped-out comedian or retired athlete in sight to interrupt with asinine comments about Monopoly. All Bodes Well. Now: what does The Fink have to say about Wingspan, do you think? This is a typical modern game where you have to work very hard to work out how to win Hmm. Bridge is a game where it's hard to work out how to win, but this seems to be a back-handed way of saying that Wingspan is a Euro-style game. Surely, over at the International Board Games Studies Association, they know all about Euro-games? Maybe Fink doesn't want to dazzle R4 listeners with his erudition yet. It's a kind of resource game … overlaid with a tremendous repertoire of fiddly things where the actual fun element seems to me to be trampled underfoot What's going on? Even critics who don't much like Euro-games have praised Wingspan for its elegant design. Tom Vasel calls it "a medium weight gateway-plus game you can play in an hour" - so why does a scholar of board game studies find it 'fiddly' and lacking "fun"? The Fink expands on his critique: In the old days … you would learn [a game] simply by watching it and you’d be able to do it an hour later whereas it would take me I-don't-know-how-many months of incarceration really to understand how to play this game We've been here before. Clever people pretending to be stupid when confronted by a board game. Remember Jeremy Vine debating Brexit but professing himself baffled by Cluedo? Now here's Irving Finkel, who translates Babylonia cuneiform FOR FUN saying that he cannot wrap his head around the rules for a medium weight Euro-game. I smell a rat. But it doesn't end there. Finkel is confident that all the people who rushed to order Wingspan, sight unseen, are going to be bitterly disappointed when they discover what a dull-fest it really is: I’d be very interested to know whether the people who bought it have enjoyed it very much This is where the penny drops for me. The Internet is awash with testimonials for Wingspan from delighted players and gushing reviewers. How can Finkel be unaware of this? Because he hasn't even bothered to find out. This is confirmed when O'Connell asks whether the conservationist theme might explain the appeal of this fun-free game. Finkel sniffs at the idea. Well, I think they exploit the idea that people are supposed to be interested in wildlife by putting information on the cards, like their wingspan, how old they are and when they mate: that's all very well and good but it's a kind of 'nod', I think The simplicity of this remark is breathtaking. Let's pass over the slur that environmental concern is just something that people do because 'they're supposed to be interested in wildlife' - Finkel is clearly baffled by anyone whose sensibilities are drawn to sunlight and birds rather than dusty crypts and clay tablets. No. What's simplistic is his view that this game is a purely commercial venture, cashing in on faddish conservationism by tacking a wildlife theme onto a fiddly number puzzle. Mere minutes of Internet searching would have disabused Finkel of this. This game isn't by Hasbro; it comes from a small independent company that puts out labour-of-love projects and designer Elizabeth Hargrave is a real-deal nature geek with an educational agenda behind her game. Click the image to read a fantastic interview with Elizabeth Hargrave - the sort of reading Finkel should have done but didn't I don't know about you, but if I were asked to go on the BBC (that's the BBC! the BBC! the BB-freaking-C!) and talk for five minutes about something of interest, well I don't know, I might just hit Google and read up on it, briefly, you know, maybe while in the taxi heading to Broadcasting House. Or for spend an afternoon the day before, looking things up, just to make sure I didn't say accidentally say something completely stupid. I might actually play the game. Because this is the truth of things, isn't it? Finkel has opened the box, looked at the pretty cards with birds on them, skimmed the rules and formed a judgment. Of course he didn't round up his buddies in Egyptian Antiquities and Byzantine Reliquaries and other cobwebbed regions of the British Museum to sit down and actually play the game. Can you even imagine that? This is why the only aspect of the game Finkel enthuses about is a gimmicky component. There's a dice tower that looks like a bird feeder. Cute. But Finkel goes into raptures over this. Why? Well, it touches on his area of interest, you see. There’s an imitation of a Roman fritillus, so the bird box where you put the bird food is actually derived from this Roman tower with steps inside where you threw the dice in and they rattled down, to stop cheating. So that’s a rather interesting nod to the past What Finkel is whittering about is that the Ancient Romans loved dice games and they invented the idea of a dice tower (called a fritillus or 'dice box' in Latin, apparently; it's also called a pyrgus or 'tower'). The Vettweiss-Froitzheim Dice Tower (right) has the inscription "The Picts are defeated. The enemy is destroyed. Play in safety!" Yes, you can buy replicas. Finkel, like the old narcissist that he is, imagines that Stonemeier Games have included a dice tower as a deliberate nod to the Classical origins of dice games. He's simply unaware that dice towers are pretty common gaming accessories and have no Roman connotations for most people. But Finkel is so lost in his scholarship, he sees links that aren't there while missing features that are right under his nose. But isn't Irving Finkel on the editorial board of the International Board Game Studies Association? How did he manage to avoid knowing anything about modern board games? With difficulty, surely. But Finkel is an antiquarian rather than a board gamer. He sleeps through seminars on collectible card games and hidden role games, if he attends them at all. He's strictly there for the ancient stuff. This is why, when commenting on a game like Wingspan, Finkel speaks with no more authority (and perhaps less insight and sympathy) than, I don't know, maybe your Nan? If you're not out of patience with Irving Finkel, listen on past the 25:00 point where he gets to talk about stuff he knows something about: the Royal Game of Ur and an Indian game that's the precursor for Ludo. In his own field, Finkel bristles with learning. But he could not care less about 21st century board games. Card drafting? Worker placement? Resource management? Pointless fiddliness! But give him a roll-the-dice-and-chase-each-other-round-the-board game from 5,000 years ago and he's in heaven. Finkel demonstrates the Royal Game of Ur. He betrays no awareness that tetrahedral dice are used in modern games and are termed D4s. Finkel is the single-topic obsessive you don't want to find yourself sat next to on a long air flight. He simply doesn't take anything seriously if it's from after the invention of trousers. Getting him to review Wingspan is like bringing in an expert on the 1908 Model T Ford to present Top Gear or the world's leading authority on the invention of the abacus to offer her views on the latest iPad. Finkel's sheer cluelessness about life in the 21st century finds striking expression towards the end of the interview. He's talking about the elementary Victorian race game Ludo and is confident his listeners know what he's taking about: It’s under every television in the country Younger readers of this blog (i.e. the under-50s) might need help unpacking this gnomic remark. You see, once upon a time TVs were big bulky affairs that often lived in bespoke cabinets in people's living rooms, rather than slim panels that now hang artfully from their walls. Usually there was a lot of storage space under the TV and, before that space was filled with DVDs or VHS videos (yes, that's how far back you have to go to make sense of Finkel's allusion), it was often filled with dusty children's board games and copies of Trivial Pursuit with half the cards missing. And yes, under my grandmother's TV was a copy of Ludo. In other words the last time Finkel checked what board games modern people were playing, it was the 1950s. I don't blame Finkel. Yes, he's an old humbug who rolls up to the Beeb with his hands in his pockets and no notes, talks rubbish on things he knows nothing about and trousers a nice fat cheque, courtesy of the licence payer. But his enthusiasm for ancient gaming is infectious. Maybe, after some future holocaust blasts us back to the Bronze Age, he'll be able to take an interest in the world around him again and we'll all sit down together and play Ur. With that in mind, Finkel's final thoughts take on a delightfully apocalyptic tone: Board games will never die. The digital age will fail before board games die. If we're going to blame someone for making a mess of this, it's the BBC. It's the Beeb (perhaps Paddy O'Connell himself) who made the decision to treat the Wingspan story as essentially ridiculous ('grown adults playing a board game about birds!') and, rather than bringing in any of the informed, witty and charismatic commentators in the hobby scene, decided to get the phenomenon critiqued by someone whose perceptions were only ever going to be absurd. But Finkel is a Proper Historian, so he could balance this nonsense about birds with something that Actually Matters: like archaeology. I suspect that the ingenuous Finkel protested that he had neither the time nor the inclination to learn to play a ghastly modern board game, but was reassured by a BBC research assistant: 'Don't worry old chap. Just give it a look-over. Make a link to something historical. Then you can talk about your Babylonian game for 5 minutes.' I'm strengthened in this conviction by the appearance, towards the end of the interview, of one of O'Connell's R4 cronies, the presenter Jonny Diamond. Diamond has nothing to contribute to this discussion except to make chortling remarks about family feuds over Monopoly. Look, I can chuckle at Monopoly memes too. But is there any basis to them? Do people actually fight over Monopoly? Children will (I know!) fight over anything competitive and Monopoly is rather boring and protracted and once you start to lose there's nothing much you can do about it, but I wonder where the idea comes from that Monopoly is a uniquely fractious game? The competition in Monopoly is indirect; in Risk the other person is actually choosing to attack you, but in Monopoly you simply make an unlucky dice roll and land on someone else's space. What's there to fight about? The link between Monopoly - and board games in general - and socially dysfunctional behaviour is part of the wider negative stereotyping of the hobby as the preserve of misfits and inadequates. But it runs completely counter to my experience. Finkel, who knows a lot about board games but nothing about playing them, buys into this stereotype too. People are full of animosity and board games are a great way to reduce it to a manageable level without bloodshed This is the 'pressure cooker' model of human psychology, popularised by Freud. It suggests that we are boiling cauldrons of rage and negativity who need to vent our nastiness in safe doses through sport or art or politics, otherwise we explode in violence. It's a popular insight, but without a shred of research evidence to support it. Indeed, it was completely debunked in the 1960s. But insights from the 1960s are far too recent for Finkel to know anything about. People who play board games have a different experience. Games are largely harmonious. They bring people together rather than divide them. Good sportsmanship is the norm. Sure, there are sore losers, but they tend to get filtered out of the hobby. It's games with unwilling participants (the reluctant older brother, bored partner or roped-in friend) that produce the rage-quits and board-flips. The truth is much more interesting than Diamond's lazy quips and Finkel's obsolete pseudo-wisdom. People are not full of animosity, but curiosity. They enjoy coming together to solve problems and create things. They enjoy challenging themselves as much as each other. They like to experiment with what is possible and try out different strategies. Board games provide a structure for them to do constructive things together. Finkel is right that board games aren't going away. The BBC will keep returning to the hobby as its economic and cultural significance continues to rise. One day, the nation's broadcaster will decide to treat the story seriously.....
Club Chairman Martin Jackson was recently blessed with the safe and healthy arrival of baby daughter Sophie. That started me thinking about my own experiences as a Dad-of-Daughters. This week's blog is dedicated to my daughters and to the hapless Martin. I guess there must be fathers who want their sons to get into football. They take them to the park for a kick about, buy them mini football strips for Christmas, bring them along to matches, teach them how to swear at the referee, that sort of thing. Probably, if their boys grow up to be more into tennis or chess, those dads feel a sort of crushing disappointment, as if they've failed to pass on a legacy. But if football-dads are dads-of-daughters, what then? I guess they just pack it in. 'Ponies it is, then,' they say, and that's that. No dishonour in having football-averse daughters, right? Gamer-dads don't get a free pass like that. It might be more difficult to raise daughters to be gamers, what with social norms and lower rates of autism in females, but that's not an excuse not to try. Like a lot of people, I reached my 'gaming crisis' back in my 20s: no longer a student, holding down a career, young family. There was no place in my life for Hero Quest any more. Dune was long forgotten. I used to get a group of friends together once every couple of months for roleplaying games. Why did RPGs survive? I can credit one particular product for that: the appearance in 1991 of Vampire: the Masquerade. You see, back in those days Virgin Megastore (remember that place?) stocked games. I was browsing their games section in the Edinburgh store - I think I must have been doing my teacher training course at the time. This rules book commended itself with its arty cover and cryptic blurb: 'a storytelling game of personal horror.' This game single-handedly rejuvenated my interest in RPGs, moving the drama out of the hackneyed dungeon or medieval past and into a 'Gothic Punk' version of our world, with a hidden war between vampire immortals being fought nightly on the city streets. This game landed its creative punches before these tropes became mainstream: pre-Buffy, pre-Supernatural, pre-Twilight. White Wolf games followed up Vampire with a roster of games developing their World of Darkness: Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion and Changeling: the Dreaming. They adopted the title-colon-subtitle nomenclature before it had been picked up by every third rate horror or fantasy franchise These games, with their adult themes, grandiose philosophising and angsty settings, were great for keeping grown-ups in the gaming fold, but they were pretty hard to share with children. Instead, my daughters were treated to my had-me-down games from Christmases past. Battling Gladiators was particularly popular. This one took the spinning-tops idea and hung a board game around it. You moved round the board and spaces told you to fight the person to your left, right or opposite in some combination and you needed 10 victories before you could cross the finishing line and wine. Daughter Emily had particular skill with this: or perhaps her preferred top (Mean Marcus, green) just had the better winding cord. Travel back in time to the 1970s Games are good for families. They put adults and children on a level playing field: it means a lot for kids to beat dad. They enforce turn-taking and observing your opponents, which reins in boisterous personalities and forces the eldest to attend to the youngest. They teach losing... Ah, losing. Losing is very difficult for children and observing them struggle with the emotions losing unleashes tells us a lot about what goes into an adult personality. Cluedo, which could end very suddenly if someone stumbled on the identity of Dr Black's murderer, would often end in tears. My daughters recall similar furies over Monopoly but, since I've never owned a copy of the world's favourite board game, I think they must be recalling games with their mother or perhaps reconstructing memories (as psychologist Elizabeth Loftus says we do) from cultural schemas about the hostility that dismal game provokes. Elizabeth Loftus explains how we reconstruct memories We turned to video games instead. Tabletop gaming was in the doldrums (Pokemon never appealed for some reason) but Playstation games were everywhere and a local buy-and-sell exchange gave us a regular fix of cheap games. We toiled through the Tomb Raider franchise with me doing all the difficult manual dexterity bits and my girls looking up advice online for the difficult rooms, but the girls took over the handset for the Harry Potter games. Then, in 2001, Carcassonne came along. Actually, I didn't discover Carcassonne in 2001. That happened a few years later. But Carcassonne is an important game, the herald of the Gaming Renaissance, the game that introduced us to cute wooden meeples and Euro-style gameplay for the first time. Euro-style games actually broke out of their Germanic enclosure in 1995, with Settlers of Catan, but I totally missed that. In Euro-games, there's a focus on skill rather than luck, so dice tend not to feature. They are usually about controlling territory or collecting resources rather than a race or a knock-out. The competition is indirect, which means you're making pleasurable choices and having a nice time even if you're not winning. And they tend to be beautiful: sturdy cards, weighty boards, wooden counters and the distinctive 'meeple' design. All of which means, they're great to play with children. Older daughter Emily was experimenting with Teenage Rage at the time, but her sister Juliet played Carcassonne with me. There was something deeply satisfying about watching the attractive landscape of roads and churches and city walls spread across the table. Somebody had to win, or course, but that seemed less important than the dad-and-daughter bonding experience of placing tiles and meeples, often helping each other out with suggestions about the best placement. The crucial ingredient game along in (I think) 2011. I was amusing myself at a giant car boot sale (which is my partner Christine's hobby and passion) when I came across a glum looking couple selling a copy of Touch of Evil. The lurid art and fantasy/horror themes appealed and they were giving it away for pennies ('Too difficult to understand,' they complained). Here was something new: the CO-OPERATIVE game experience. Actually, ToE can be played competitively, but its real strength is in teaming up to find and defeat the Vampire, Werewolf, Headless Horseman or Scarecrow that's stalking the Sleepy Hollow-inspired lanes of Shadowbrook. Also present were delightful miniatures. I wish now that I'd come across these games earlier. Euro-games with their indirect competition and tactile pleasures, co-operative games that pull the family together as a team - we could have been playing Ticket to Ride back in 2004 or Pandemic in 2008. We'll never get those wasted years back! But I must have done something right, since both daughters are now enthusiastic gamers. So, Martin, my friend, you've no excuse now, not in a world that offers My Little Scythe. But enough about me. I've asked my daughters to speak for themselves.
My Dad's old games from his childhood came out again for mine As I hit my teens and my interests steered more towards parties and my mobile phone, I only ever gamed when begrudgingly dragged into one of my Dad’s Sunday gaming sessions. My scowl often mistaken for a poker face by his friends.
Gloomhaven We went on holiday to the Lake District – now an annual tradition - and spent every night playing Gloomhaven for hours. We were thrilled with the detail and concept of the game, and still plan monthly sessions in advance to push through scenarios. When I moved to Newcastle for my PhD, board games became an easy way to bring new friends together. Sure, some people came for the social side of it – more interested in drinking and chatting than focusing for too long on any game. But a few committed gamers emerged. They introduced me to new games like Small World and Munchkin, and even brought old classics like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game. I began to look for more conversational and co-operative games like Mysterium that might appeal to the more distractible of the group. We meet weekly at my flat or the pub next door, always eager to invite new members to join us. Games are now a regular part of Christmas wishlists and payday treats. My Dad is certainly happy with my renewed interest in gaming, and now Christmas in Edinburgh is often spent as it was when I was a child. The games are newer and more complicated, but still played over the dining room table as the rest of the family naps.
I started gaming myself once my Dad bought me and my sister a PS2. We were introduced to a lot of fantastic games. This included Drakan: The Ancient’s Gates, a sort of fantasy Tomb Raider-esque game, with a powerful female lead called Rynn and her annoying (but amusing) pet dragon, Arokh. Drakan: still the best! Out of the many games I have played, Drakan stood out in its originality, creativeness and how much we all enjoyed playing it, both me, my sister and Dad played it. An Xbox 360 was then bought but my interest in gaming sank down due to the games being less creative and yet more Assassin Creeds were released instead. One day, when I was a young teenager, my Dad was sitting at the dining room table and putting together Carcassonne, a tile placement game. I joined him, putting farm and city pieces together, We actually did not play the game the first time, just put the tiles together and this was fun in itself. Carcassonne: so pretty This was the start of the board game era of my life; less overpriced Xbox games were bought and instead I was playing board games with my Dad. It was like we had gone back to my childhood of watching him play PS1 games but now I was playing the game too! More games were bought at car boot sales including the fantastic Touch of Evil, which included a great soundtrack to play along with the game. I then went to University and visited my Dad less. I played less board games. However, it is always very special to me when I visit my Dad and play old and new games. There is always a new board game on the table when I visit. Now I have moved back to Cambridge and I have just started my first proper roleplaying campaign. I had done some D&D a few years ago with my Dad and his friends. I started playing Vampire: The Masquerade with a work connection I made whose friends were interested in starting a campaign. I was nervous to start as I knew it would be difficult to get into the game to start with. I created an Egyptian vampire named Mahar, who has now managed to kill lots of bad people but still hasn’t lost any humanity! Somehow Mahar has justified these kills (and got lucky dice rolls!). I think I am now in 'my RPG era'. My Cambridge RPG crew and their Vampire characters: Rory, Daryl, Mitch and Duncan I am unsure if I will ever fully commit back to video games, as roleplaying and board gaming fill your social needs as well as being more enjoyable! I have a lot of fond memories gaming growing up and, even writing this, I am wanting to turn on my dusty PS2 and fly Arokh around in Drakan. I miss having so much free time to waste days away playing these brilliant games, but I guess, when I do get to play, it makes it more and more fun every time.
I want to tell you about the girl who broke my heart. No Linda, not you. You see, by girl I mean 'board game' and by broke my heart I mean 'turned me into a geek.' It's Dune, Linda. It's always been Dune. The Avalon Hill board game of Frank Herbert's vast, stodgy, politically incorrect space romance-slash-theological swashbuckler came out in 1979. At the time, I didn't know anything about Arrakis or Spice or the Kwizatz Haderach but I knew a great cover when I saw one. Giant frickin' worms, man! Giant frickin' worms! I remember poring over this illustration (probably an advert in White Dwarf) when I was, I dunno, 12 or 13 perhaps and still new to geekdom. What the hell was this? A game where you fought giant worms? Wait, there are people hanging off that thing! And robot birds. What's going on? So when I was 16 or so I read the book, skipping over all the boring bits (don't lie - so did you!) and looking for the bits where the sandworms turn up. Sandworms! Yes, the Shai-Hulud, over 1000 feet long, (implausibly) allergic to water and attracted to rhythmic vibrations on the desert sands. From beneath you, they devour! Dune for impatient people: Dune is Arrakis, a desert planet where the mystical super-drug (not Superdrug) called Spice is harvested. Various factions of the corrupt space Empire vie for control of the planet. Murderous intrigue by House Harkonnen (basically, ugly Lannisters) causes Paul, the last heir of House Atreides (basically, House Stark), to be left wandering the desert with his witchy Mum until he is rescued by the Fremen (basically, Muslims) and revered as their prophesied leader. Lots of dynastic shenanigans and drug-induced mysticism takes place, Jessica's daughter Alia (or is it Arya?) becomes a magical assassin, Paul becomes a LSD-fueled god and blows up a mountain and rides into battle on top of sandworms (at last!) to crush the evil Lannisters, the Emperor, the capitalist Guild and their Bene Gesserit telepathic viziers. Paul ascends to the Iron Throne as the new Emperor but - oh no! - a religious jihad is underway as the liberated Fremen rampage across the universe in the name of their reluctant new deity. Plus, no one gets to marry anyone they actually fancy. Not bad, eh? As a piece of world-building, it's up there with Tolkien (i.e, it shamelessly pilfers European and Middle Eastern history and mythology and repackages it with magic, dragons/sandworms and pipeweed/spice). Then in 1984, they made a film: Opinions vary on the film's merits. It's got Sting in it. You probably get the idea I'm a bit meh about Dune as a book. It's not very well written. But it's got GREAT ideas:
George R.R. Martin was clearly taking notes. His (much better) story of a noble house brought low by treachery, its children scattered and adopted by sorcerous foreigners obsessed with ancient prophecies, mirrors lots of Dune's themes as well as its preoccupations with bloodline, dynastic intermarriage, Maesters instead of Mentats and the advantages of having a horde of screaming barbarians at your back when you make your bid for the throne. Plus, chicks with magical powers and giant frickin' fireworms! Anyway. The game. Avalon Hill was the premier games company of the 1970s whose name was a byword for quality. Their games came in these big (for the time) 'bookshelf' boxes that could be stacked alongside your encyclopaedias and leather-bound editions of Dickens and Shakespeare (or Asimov and Lovecraft, according to taste). Avalon Hill included this promotional postcard in their game boxes: Can you imagine games companies today reveling in the fact that their products were too difficult for stupid people?And notice the use of the masculine pronoun for your 'bright friend': PROBLEMATIC! By today's standards, the components don't look like much. The cards are two-tone and flimsy, the tokens are simple cardstock discs and the rules an unsightly list of numbered paragraphs (1.4 followed by 1.4.1 and 1.4.2, etc) ... but the board ... ah yes, the board: Pretty, yes? And groovy '70s typeface which suits Herbert's whacky space baroque You're looking at the northern hemisphere of Arrakis. The clock-like segments are for the Storm, which moves anticlockwise round the edge of the board, obliterating exposed people it roars across. Your units move from region to region, ignoring the Storm sectors most of the time. The black asterisks are where Spice turns up each turn. The red cities and grey mountains are are safe from the Storm. The Imperial Basin is also shielded from the Storm by the cliffs of the Shield Wall ... for now ... Each player gets to be one of the 6 factions trying to master the planet: the scheming Emperor (loadsamoney, crack troops, starts off-planet), his buddy House Harkonnen (duplicitous scumbags, control Carthag city), hapless House Atreides (psychic powers, start in Arrakeen city), the Guild (also loadsamoney, flexible turn order, control some smugglers in Tuek's Sietch), the Fremen (scattered units all across the western side of the planet) and the witchy Bene Gesserit (coexists with other factions). You get nice little card screens to hide your tokens behind. Player screens are quite common in strategy games now - another way Dune was ahead of its time Dune is asymmetric: each faction plays by different rules. For example, the Storm moves randomly round the board and the Spice turns up each turn in a location revealed by a card (or else a sandworm turns up to gobble up everyone there): the Fremen get to look at next turn's information, so they never get caught out and can always arrive just ahead of the Spice (good: they're dead broke so they need it) Everyone bids on face-down Treachery Cards: the Emperor collects the money spent (and therefore tries to drive up the bidding unless everyone else forms a cartel against him) and Atreides looks at each card first (giving him intel on other people's hands); Harkonnen gets a free card for every one he buys (meaning he owns stuff Atriedes does not know about). In turn, everyone pays Spice to move units onto the planet and this money goes to the Guild - except that the Fremen, who actually call Arrakis home, get to do this for free. Players also get a single on-planet move, usually one territory but the agile Fremen move 2 and whoever controls Carthag and Arrakeen moves 3 (thanks to ornithoptors - those winged birds on the cover). Controlling three cities wins you the game - but, if the game lasts 15 turns, the Fremen win (if they still have board presence) or else the Guild wins by default. But - and get this - the psychic Bene Gesserit get to write down a prediction at the start of the game (who will win and on what turn) and if that prediction comes true, they win and they win alone. I've seen people deliberately throw a dead-cert victory purely because of the anxiety that the BGs have predicted it and manipulated them into this situation. How cool is that? Despite the theme-rich board, factions, Storm and sandworms, combat is almost abstract. Use the dials to commit in secret a number of your troops and add the value of your leader. Weapon cards kill a leader but Defense cards keep a leader safe. Highest score wins. Winner loses only the troops they committed. Loser loses everything. Leaders only die if a Weapon card killed them. Shadout Mapes and 9 troops means a battle strength of 12. Unless Mapes dies. Play Poison Defense to protect her and hope your opponent isn't playing a Projectile Weapon instead. Just this basic system creates fraught conflicts. Better to commit few or no troops and rely on your Leader to win the battle. But what if your Leader dies? OK, better to commit more troops - but since the troops you commit all die regardless, you could win the fight but be left with no one on the board. Let's mix it up. Atreides get to use their 'Prescience' power to inspect one aspect of their opponent's battle plan (how many troops committed? which Leader? what Weapon? what Defense?) which gives them a huge advantage. Hypnotic Bene Gesserit use 'the Voice' to dictate one aspect of the battle plan (telling an opponent that they must or must not play a particular card). A cute rule mandates that if ever the unstoppable Lasegun is played in the same battle as a Shield Defense, a massive explosion kills everyone and everything in that region. What fun when you send in a lone trooper armed with both against a vast army! More fun if you don't really have the Lasegun and you're just bluffing! Most fun of all if your opponent has the Lasegun and the Bene Gesserit uses 'Voice' to force them to play it, destroying themselves! (Almost) the only maths you need to play Dune Mix it up one more time. At the start of the game everyone draws 4 Leaders and chooses one to be a Traitor in their pay. If your nominated Traitor is ever played against you in battle, you can activate him, in which case you win regardless of numbers and take no losses. Horrible Harkonnen gets to select all four of the Leaders he draws to be Traitors. Traitors can be decisive, which is why knowing which Leaders are 'safe' (because you drew them but didn't choose them) is fantastic Intel that gives you leverage over other players. These simple mechanics make every battle a very psychological affair of bluff and double-bluff. Other players offer you information - at a price - but are they telling the truth? Remember Atreides knows most of your cards, so there's no bluffing against him. Remember you may be playing a Traitor, in which case you've lost regardless. Maybe you should play a Truth Trance to ask about that? Or a Cheap Hero in place of playing a Leader? Back when I was a teenager, we played this game to death. Remember when Harkonnen used Family Atomics to blow up the Shield Wall, then Weather Control to move the Storm over the Basin, Arrakeen and Carthag to wipe out everybody hunkering down there now that they were no longer protected? Ah, but then, didn't the Fremen use their power to march through the Storm (gasp!) and a Hajj card to get an extra turn, so they could occupy both vacated cities and win? But then, didn't the Bene Gesserit reveal they'd predicted that victory all along, and win by themselves, despite being the Fremen's allies! Such times! Yeah, that's the other bit of maths you need to know for Dune I need to tell you about Alliances. You only get to make an Alliance when a Shai-Hulud sandworm turns up to gobble the Spice (and the Spice-collectors). You only get to break an Alliance when the Shai-Hulud turns up. In between, you're stuck with your Ally. It's inconvenient. But you get to use each other's powers. That's cool. Choose carefully. Remember, the Fremen get advance warning when one of these is coming up. I guess I love Dune because it's far more about conversation than it is about counters or counting. Turns take a long time, but largely because everyone wants to talk to everyone else about everything. The Fremen check the next turn's Storm and Spice Blow and then people want to talk to them about what's coming up. Everybody bids for Treachery Cards and that means talking to Atreides (who knows what each card actually is). If Shai-Hulud appears, the entire game turns into a galactic summit as people wrangle and wheedle to get into or out of Alliances. Dune bears far more similarity to modern games like Root or Rising Sun than it did to most of the fiddly '70s games with their critical resolution tables or later 21st century games with their hosts of miniatures and rules for tactical movement. Maybe that's not surprising. Game designers Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka also created Cosmic Encounter, another classic '70s game that breaks all the conventions: no board as-such and completely asymmetric factions whose powers consist of being able to break the game's simple but immensely nuanced rules. Rising Sun and Root are defining 21st century 'heavy' board games, but owe so much to Dune with their beautiful but abstracted boards and simple but psychologically vexing combat mechanics; Cosmic Encounter is simply evil Cosmic Encounter shares another trait with Dune: it's a game that offers victory to the biggest bastard at the table. If you're a nice guy or girl, if you get on with your fellow players, if you socialise with each other outside of gaming, maybe enjoy the odd co-op game now and then ... go home and play with your kids. These games are not for you. These games are for people you hate. And you will hate yourself while playing them. But it will feel so good. The promotional postcard Avalon Hill should have included in Dune (corrected for gender balance) And this is, perhaps, a problem with Dune for me, now, middle aged, compared to the testosteronal young thruster I used to be. I like my fellow gamers too much to enjoy screwing them over the way Dune demands that they be screwed. They like each other too much. We all sat down last year and I introduced them to Cosmic Encounter and they engineered a draw!!! A draw!!! Why don't you just play Forbidden Island if you love each other so much? I muttered, suddenly missing the company of those adolescent semi-sociopaths who used to howl with laughter at the sight of fellow players being betrayed, ganged-up on and humiliated. Progress comes at a cost. So what happened to it, then, this perfect game? Cosmic Encounter is still on the shelves (Fantasy Flight picked it up back in 2007) but no sign of Dune... Who killed Dune? Well, it was the damned film, wasn't it? Designer Peter Olotka explains it like this:
It seems Avalon Hill hoped the Dune movie would be the next Star Wars and invested big on a new print run, unnecessary expansions (the game cannot be added to in any meaningful way), art and movie tie-ins - and lost big on the gamble. How very like playing Dune itself! Then there followed problems with Frank Herbert's estate. Avalon Hill retained the rights to the game design, but not the Dune IP itself. Avalon Hill flourished into the '90s (they invented Pogs!!!) but ended up getting devoured by Hasbro and are now moribund. Fantasy Flight hoovered up the Dune rules and re-skinned them as Rex, a game set in their (to my mind) rather flavourless Twilight Imperium universe. Rex takes Dune and shortens it to 8 manageable turns and replaces the charming, thematic board with a hideous, nonsensical one. Some changes are welcome. If Dune has a flaw, it's that it's simply too evil for modern sensibilities: every single player has to be working flat out to screw all the others all the time or things become unstable. In a 5-6 player game, you can cope with the odd snowflake (let him play the Guild or the Emperor), but the game lasts until everyone is too exhausted to keep hating, which is often a 4 or 5 hour game. In a 3-4 player game, it only takes one person with a fondness for poetry to hesitate over being cruel and then, oh no!, someone like Harkonnen has betrayed your Leaders, stolen your cities and won the game before the second turn is over. Rex balances the game so that people who don't have personality disorders can get a solid 2 hours of enjoyment out of it: no sudden defeats, no protracted grinds. But something distinctive is lost. Nonetheless, I'll be imposing a 10-turn cap in my classic Dune games from now on. Dune ended up becoming this 'holy grail' out-of-print game that changes hands for £100 or more on eBay. Reverential fans keep it alive and have produced some amazing PnP re-designs: Then there are hardcore fans with craft skills who make their own to-die-for boards and components: Squeeeeeeeeee! I've still got my 'classic' set (with a few pimped components) and I try to get it to the table once a year, to honour the dysfunctional adolescent I used to be. Researching this blog, I discovered that Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka originally pitched their game to Avalon Hill as a Roman Empire wargame called Tribute but re-skinned it for Dune. I wished I'd known that when I blogged about themes recently. Right enough, there's a generic, rather abstract, rules engine lurking under the desert sands of Dune. It's just hidden by great theming like the Bene Gesserit 'Voice' and Atreides prescience and the fact that the Emperor's crack Sardaukar units lose their double-tough bonus when up against Fremen units who aren't impressed by their undeserved rep. Now that I think about it, it's a bit surprising there aren't more fan-made Dune re-skins out there. It would translate well into Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Game of Thrones (with 'Winter' instead of the Storm, moving south down the board instead of anticlockwise around it).
There's a project to get to work on. Samantha, cancel all my appointments! 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! Nobody here is a fascist right? I thought not. Fascism is something other people get up to. But maybe we should check ourselves. We might be fascists after all. Perhaps we play fascist games. These thoughts are because of a news item about the popular (or, as subeditors would have it, 'controversial') board game Secret Hitler. The game (which Kickstarted in 2015) has been released to mainstream retail in Australia and New Zealand where it's attracted criticism. There have been 10 complaints to the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) in Australia after it was stocked in ordinary toy stores. Children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors have spoken out against this crass and tasteless product. People have been triggered. The ADC has called for stores to boycott the game. Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the ADC, has this to say: This is beyond normal. What's next, a board game set in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz? Ah, my old friend, the famous slippery slope argument. But let's investigate this game on its merits. Secret Hitler is produced by Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage LLC, the people who brought us Cards Against Humanity. These guys have form for skirting the edge of good taste and occasionally plunging over in a glorious splash-dive. Secret Hitler is a hidden role/social deduction card game in the same vein as The Resistance or the various Werewolf iterations. Each play takes the role of a politician in Weimar Republic Germany in the 1920/30s: most players are liberals but one or two will (unknown to the others) draw the role of fascists. The fascists know who each other are, but the liberals don't know who anyone really is. One fascist player is secretly Hitler. Each turn, the office of President moves round the group and everyone votes on legislation drawn from a deck, which is either liberal or fascist. The liberals win if 5 liberal laws get passed; the fascists win if 6 fascist laws get passed or if Hitler ever becomes president after 3 Fascist laws have been passed. But why would anyone vote for fascist laws? Well, passing fascist legislation lets you peep at other players' roles or even assassinate other players, so the liberals have an incentive to do what fascists want for their own game (for example, to identify fascists or even kill Hitler). As with most social deduction games, the drama comes from the fact that everyone is motivated to act against type. The liberals will urge fascist legislation to gain some unconstitutional benefits, whereas the fascists (including Hitler) will lie low, masquerading as liberals and reluctantly allow themselves to be persuaded of the need to vote for tough measures until they are strong enough to reveal themselves and seize power. It's a pretty neat exploration of the frailty of democracy in the face of determined insurgency. Let's be clear, the game does not flaunt Nazi iconography. There are no images of Hitler or swastikas anywhere on the box, in the rules or on the cards. The word 'Nazi' is not used. As you can see, the fascists are snakes and lizards, Hitler is some sort of dragon and the legislation is generic. Jews and the Holocaust are nowhere referenced. The game is abstract and the only concrete links to the German context are the name 'Hitler' and the convention of saying 'Nein' or 'Ja' when voting. The main designer, Max Temkin, sees the game as a tool for raising consciousness about the dangers of fascism. In a candid interview with the US news site Washington Jewish Week, Temkin (himself Jewish) explains how the idea for the game was prompted by his apprehension about the rise to power of President Trump. We came up with the idea for Secret Hitler as we were watching the Republican primaries last year. We were playing a lot of hidden identity games ... and thinking about how the mechanics of those games mirrored how authoritarians take power in a democracy through deceit and manipulation Temkin has followed through on his concerns. In 2017, he sent a copy of Secret Hitler to every US Senator - a copy each to all 100 of them. The point, Temkin explains, is that Hitler "required the cooperation of well meaning men who hoped to appease and control the Nazis" - and that Trump won the White House for similar reasons. He followed this up by releasing the 'Trump Pack' that allows you to play the game with Donald Trump and his Administration rather than the nameless fascists - and all profits go to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Temkin and the guys at Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage clearly have impeccable liberal credentials. They even ran a campaign to buy some land on the Mexican border to help stymie Trump's wall. So if Secret Hitler is an educational game with pure liberal intentions, what are the Anti Defamation Commission up to? The ADC is an anti-hate charity, focusing largely (some would say, entirely) on antisemitism and drawing attention to the rise of Far Right and Neo-Nazi sentiments. Worthy stuff. Their mission statement includes
The ADC and games designers like Max Temkin should be a united front against fascism, since Secret Hitler is exactly the sort of product that 'educates the public about the dangers of anti-Semitism and racism in all its forms' and if the ADC was really 'employing the instruments of research and fact finding' then they'd discover this themselves after 5 minutes of online browsing. Instead, we get this: There is nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about Hitler This of course true, in a narrow and reductive sense. There's nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about murders in big Edwardian mansions either, but Cluedo still escapes the censorious eye. Max Temkin offers this advice to morally vexed customers on the Secret Hitler website FAQ: Temkin's cheery dismissal is surely the correct response - because it was the response of the generation that actually fought Nazism, who regarded Hitler as a preposterous figure of fun. Wartime propaganda poster, Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) and Bugs Bunny in Herr Meets Hare (1945) Somehow, Hitler has turned into a numinous figure of evil, too terrible to be spoken of except in hushed tones and certainly not a fit subject for games or entertainment. How different my own childhood was. Nazi Action Men!!! The classic 'Escape From Colditz' board game HAD A SWASTIKA ON IT. Notice how the modern re-issue has removed that. Escape From Colditz is a good case in point, since nothing funny, entertaining, laughable or enjoyable about being stuck in a Nazi POW camp - but that game was designed by Pat Reid who had himself been such a prisoner (and successfully escaped) and the game was first published well within the lifetime of men who experienced such imprisonment. But perhaps the past was wrong and the new sensitivity is right. The ADC justifies its stance by appealing to the hurt feelings of shoppers confronted by Secret Hitler while browsing for Buckaroo One can only imagine the pain and moral offense a Holocaust survivor would feel walking into a shop and seeing this game displayed for sale This isn't a trivial concern: 27,000 Jews emigrated to Australia after the War and many still live there. Perhaps former-POWs walked into 1970s toy shops and wept when they discovered Escape from Colditz on the shelves, trivializing their ordeals, but that's no reason why we, in 2019, should put Holocaust survivors through a shock like that. Yet that's exactly what we appear to be doing. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor stumbled across Secret Hitler in a toy store in Bright, Victoria, and complained in these terms: I started shaking, I literally saw the Holocaust flash in front of me. I felt as if there were Nazis about to storm into the store. I could barely look at the shopkeeper. I felt anti-Semitism alive. I couldn't wait to get out of there It's easy to snigger at this. The Holocaust isn't the sort of thing that can 'flash in front of you' and the idea of Nazis storming a toy store in Bright (a tiny tourist village beside the Mount Buffalo National Park) is absolutely the product of an over-active imagination. But perhaps the sheer loveliness of Bright, Victoria made finding Secret Hitler for sale there even more shocking It's tempting to accuse someone like this ('only the daughter of a Holocaust survivor,' we are quick to point out, 'not a survivor herself!') of trying to appropriate the victim-status of her parents, who bore their sufferings with greater dignity. But hold on. Just because the expression is absurd, even histrionic, it doesn't mean the sentiments aren't serious. The exact words might not be the woman's own anyway, but put into her mouth by local journalists eager to 'sex up' a silly story ("Madame, would you say you saw the Holocaust flash in front of you? Can we write that? How about feeling Nazis were about to storm the store? Just sign here!"). A bit of empathy is needed. If you're the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, you're probably a woman in her 60s or 70s, shopping for a gift for grandchildren. Your idea of a board game is Monopoly, Mousetrap or Sorry! You stumble across Secret Hitler instead. You read on the box that "one player is Secret Hitler". What do you make of this? You were raised on stories of your parents' sufferings in the camps. Your community shares these stories reverentially. Your whole life has been informed by the fear that, since it happened once, it can happen again. Only the consensus about Hitler's unique monstrosity reassures you. Now that seems to be slipping. Being 'Hitler' has turned into something you do for a party game. Your family tragedy has become a joke and, what's worse, a bulwark against history repeating itself has been slyly removed under the pretext of entertaining children. You don't know what a 'social deduction game' is. You don't really appreciate that Secret Hitler is a game for adults. You entirely miss the point that it shares your alarm about creeping fascism and cleverly challenges it. All of which is to say that septuagenarian Jewish ladies browsing in rural toy shops don't have the resources of the ADC to investigate things like this. They just get alarmed and fly off the handle. But this makes the ADC's response even more deplorable. The ADC does have the resources to look into this sort of thing (i.e. a PC, an Internet connection, an employee with ten minutes to spare) and, as noted, a mission statement to promote "the instruments of research, fact finding, education." Put it another way. On gaming forums, this news article has been greeted with great derision. As I said, it's easy to sneer at this old lady's outrage and the hapless way it is expressed. Really, though, it's not for those of us who weren't intimately connected to the Holocaust to school the Jewish community. It's for the ADC to do that, to sift rumour and hysteria from stuff that's truly dangerous or offensive. The ADC commands a position of moral responsibility and if it came down from the mountain to say, "No, actually criticisms of this game are misplaced and we support its agenda," then everyone would go home wiser and less distressed. But that's not what happens. The ADC's failure to engage with this topic is a setback for serious, politically-engaged gaming, but it has serious ramifications. It's right to fear the resurgence of fascism, but there are right and wrong ways of acting on that fear. One is to view Hitler and the Nazis as an expression of inscrutable cosmic evil - as Satan, if you like, who punishes us for sin. If you adopt this view, then the precautions we take against resurgent Nazism must be things like:
The other view is that the Nazis were ordinary human beings, produced by ordinary social, cultural and political circumstances. If you take this view, then inoculating society against Nazism involves education, since we must understand these circumstances so that we can detect and defuse them in future, and a healthy scepticism towards the powerful appeal fascism makes to our anxieties about power and identity. Humour is vital but so too is placing yourself in the position of fascists themselves, the better to understand them. The Roman writer Terence (c195-c159 BCE) expresses it like this: Words to live by and a succinct refutation of fascist thinking If we apply the Terence-test, then Secret Hitler qualifies as an anti-fascist product, but the ADC, for all its right-on mission statements, on this occasion functions with a fascist mindset:
Which isn't to say there can't be morally odious games. I'm not backing a 911-themed version of Jenga any time soon. A case could be made the Monopoly embodies laissez-faire capitalism or that Cards Against Humanity encourages cruelty, coarseness and contempt in its players. I could get behind both those criticisms. But Secret Hitler is on the side of the angels, despite its provocative concept. Perhaps there are genuinely fascist games. Diplomacy seems to advocate military expansionism through treachery and deceit. Spartacus endorses slave-trading and gladiatorial combat. Britannia exalts our island story as a rise to greatness through war and ethnic cleansing. I've discussed the dubious politics of Conan in a previous blog. And yet I can't take these critiques too seriously. There seems to me to be something about game-playing that is inherently anti-fascistic (although we can take issue with particular pieces of art, titles or topics).
At the end of the day, the Nazis were too anxious about their ideology to be happy with people playing games based on it. Maybe they realised that a game about deporting Jews allowed for the losing players not to deport Jews and for some players to play to lose. Games give players agency and foster choice and the contemplation of alternatives: not qualities fascists like to promote. In any event, the Nazis preferred to get kids out of the house, doing sporty-things in the countryside. Perhaps the ADC have similar qualms. After all, in Secret Hitler it's possible for the Fascists to play better than the Liberals and then Hitler wins. In a morally-ordered universe, that's not supposed to happen, but although games express values, they don't impose outcomes, which is what the ADC wants to see happen. But let's put all this in perspective. With antisemitic attacks on the rise, the ADC is understandably fretful. It's a mistake to jump at shadows, but (I think) a pardonable one. It's just a shame to see opportunities for education and discourse missed. Banning board games doesn't present a set-back for fascists. In any event, should Antipodean retailers follow the ADC's misguided appeal to refuse to stock Secret Hitler and "show moral responsibility when it comes to this issue and put aside the issue of profit," designer Max Temkin (truly guided by moral responsibility rather than profit) has made his game available as a free print-and-play download from the Secret Hitler website. Enjoy This just in: Am I too complacent in dismissing fascist games and the absurdity of 911-Jenga? A couple of Russian designers have put out a board game based on the Salisbury Novichok poisonings. Clearly, there's more to say about this issue in a future blog.
Are board games boring? When someone gets the Monopoly, Cluedo or Trivial Pursuit out, do you die a little bit inside? Oooh, a VINTAGE Monopoly set depicted on Vine's Facebook page. It's 'Britain's favourite boardgame' according to a pre-show survey... Channel 5 then conceded that board games might have some merit, y'know, for the kids? isn't anything that gets kids away from playing Fortnite or Minecraft and spending more time with family and friends actually a good thing all round? If you're not too Vine-averse you can watch the show yourself: Jeremy Vine and guests chat about board games at 45:00 (skip the stuff on Brexit and Dry January!) until 56:00 Didn't fancy it? OK, I'll tell you what went down... Jeremy Vine introduces the topic by describing those dreadful social predicaments where your host hauls out Monopoly or Cluedo and you "die a bit inside". I can't really believe this goes on at the sort of dinner parties Jezzer attends in his gentrified W6 postcode. I suspect Jez is just reading off the autocue (the same line is on the Facebook page), so I'm guessing some hapless Channel 5 script-monkey 's desperate social milieu is being referenced here. Straight over to Vine's elegant but strangely-monickered co-host, Storm Huntley, perched on a high chair, who is quick to point out that she loves Monopoly. And Snakes & Ladders. Snakes & Ladders, Storm? Really? You're 31 years old with a degree in Politics & Economics from Glasgow University but you've got a passion for Snakes & Ladders? It's not unusual to see clever, successful women putting on this "I'm just a widdle girl" routine, so maybe she's just treading carefully round Jeremy's ego with self-denigrating silliness like this - but there's more to come, so hold that thought. Jezzer is back behind his desk. He's got a stack of games and my heart lifts: there's Vlaada Chvátil's excellent Codenames - the prince of intelligent party games - and Ticket To Ride, which I don't rate personally but it's got chops, and Sushi Go which is delightful little card drafting game, like 7 Wonders but for people with only 20 minutes left to live. Someone's been doing their research! Is there a Secret Gaming Nerd in the studio? The Secret Gaming Nerd is revealed. He's a spotty ginger youth sitting in the audience. He's 22 and he 'works on the show' (intern? mailboy? Scooter from The Muppets?) and, despite his fashion disaster jumper, he's confident and articulate and he might just save this whole segment for shame and ignominy. Jez and his three guests are going to play a game and Scooter is going to talk them through the rules. Everyone looks thoroughly uncomfortable. The game is Say Anything, which is one of those party games you bring along instead of Cards Against Humanity if the host is your boss or a born-again Christian. Jeremy Vine is the games master and offers his guests a coy question: "What's the worst question to ask on a first date?" Guests James Haskell (man-mountain, rugby player), Dawn Neesom (peroxide bob, middle-aged journo) and Dr Bull (no idea) have to jot down a witty answer. They were tipped to the question earlier, because they all seem to have answers ready-made. James Hagrid asks about shaving his body hair after the couple marry, Dawn alludes to a worrying rash, Dr Bull comes right out with it and inquires about chlamydia. It isn't redefining comedy, but this is 10 o'clock in the morning on terrestrial TV, what do you want? Things start to come unstuck the moment that actual 'game' element surfaces. You see, Jezzer has to decide on a winning response and the players have to guess whom he's going to choose: they have little coloured tokens to do this. Scooter tries to explain but he's hampered by three things:
No one can understand what to do. Here's a group of people who've made it onto a flagship daytime TV chat show because of their wit, charm and general social aplomb, but Scooter might as well be instructing them on how to deliver a baby. Let's be clear, Hagrid might look like beef brisket on legs, but he's written cookbooks and fitness guides. He can handle complicated ideas, like slow braising in a barbecue sauce. Dawn Neesom was editor of the Daily Star (which presumably doesn't edit itself) and Dr B is a doctor and probably can deliver actual babies. (To be fair to the good doctor, he's the only one asking pertinent questions and trying to clarify Scooter's garbled instructions). I'm left wondering whether this faux-idiocy is a sort of pantomime of contempt, whereby the guests (and Storm Huntley) think that board games are so stupid the only legitimate response is to act as if you yourself are even more stupid, or is it a genuine confusion arising from people being placed outside their comfort zone? Or an odd aspect of British culture where we all try to project an image of ourselves as dull but salt-of-the-earth proles whenever anything inter-ter-leck-tual is put our way. Jeremy abandons the game and goes to talk to Scooter, who is so charming and sensible you rather wish he was presenting. Scooter shows off his stack of games, admits that this is where most of his paycheck goes (I hear you, brother!) and mentions a board game cafe he frequents and how these places are popping up everywhere. He presents Jezzer with Magic Maze, a sweet co-op game where fantasy heroes raid a magical shopping mall but the players can't talk while making their moves. Scooter's a nice guy. I'm going to stop calling him Scooter. His real name is Ash. Jezzer furrows his brow. He's a man on the horns of a dilemma. Should he pursue this line of questioning, ask about board game cafes, explore this post-modern notion of 'cooperative games' ... But that would involve dropping his 'I'm-just-a-simple-working-bloke' persona. What to do, what to do... Simple-working-bloke persona wins out! "No one wants to learn all these rules!" Vine declares, waving the rather flimsy rule book for Magic Maze at the camera. "I mean, look at this!" he gasps, showing off p4 with its clear diagrams and photographs of components. "Once the instructions are more than 4 pages, I'm 'gone'" he confides. The rules for Magic Maze take up 5 pages. Jeremy Vine has a degree in English Literature from the University of Durham. Think about that. Over to Storm. She has viewers phoning in. I hope, for one mad moment, that Basement Guy is watching this and is phoning to set the record straight, sing the praises of Dominion or Five Tribes or Shadows Over Camelot, tell everyone there's been a renaissance in gaming brought on by crowdfunding, 3D printers and cheap Chinese manufacturing and leave Jezzer and his chucklehead guests hanging their heads like bloody penitents. But it's daytime TV isn't it? So here's Christine from Staffordshire who loves playing Snap! with her 5-year-old daughter. Even Jeremy Vine seems to think this is a bit of a slap in the face. So Jez makes a striking confession. He took a game home last week and played it with his family. The game was Mysterium. Mysterium is the real deal. It's a reworking of a Ukrainian game called Tajemnicze Domostwo, in which the players are psychics trying to solve the mystery of an ancient murder and another is the Ghost who can only communicate by handing out cryptic vision cards. Have you payed Dixit? It's like that, but cooperative and set in a haunted house. I'm really excited to think Jeremy Vine sat his family down (wife Rachel, pre-teen daughters Martha and Anna) and played Mysterium. Why isn't that a Channel 5 TV show in its own right??? I really wanted to hear Vine say something about this. Maybe about the fun of getting the family working together to solve a puzzle. Or the challenge of providing clues based on how you know someone's imagination works. Or just the lovely art. Vine complains that it took them 45 minutes to work out the rules and it nearly led to his wife divorcing him (as if anything could separate those two love-birds, ho-ho!). But then he seems to sense he's being churlish and muses about the odd concept of a 'cooperative game': "I have to get my head around that slightly," he concludes, sounding lost and tragic, like a man out of time. But that's the nearest we get to analysis, because here's Storm again to introduce Sue from Lancashire. Sue is 70 and plays games with her son and grandson and loves it. She agrees that board games are boring, but only the old-fashioned sort, like Cluedo. Jeremy, still stupefied by the idea of cooperative games, clutches this like a drowning man. "No one understands Cluedo!" he exclaims with feeling. A degree from University of Durham, remember? In English Literature! I'm just saying... Another caller sings the praises of Monopoly, but only the Friends version, which her daughter adores. Jeremy moves to salvage things. Can Ash recommend something for any viewers motivated by this shambles to experiment with board games? The camera pans back to Ash who, quick as as flash, says "Carcassonne" and sticks two thumbs up in a desperate parody of Paul McCartney. The thing is, Ash isn't wrong about Carcassonne, which is a fantastic entry-level game: it can be played idly, to build a pretty map, but players with more shark-like instincts will identify placing farmers as the winning strategy and they'll ride roughshod over everyone else then grow a taste for more exciting fare. But the other thing is, what the hell is going on here? I get that this is daytime TV and there's a picture of Jeremy Vine in the encyclopaedia if you look up "banal nonsense" but this seems exceptionally confused. Clearly no one, not Lord Jezzer or the fragrant Storm or any of his guests, was prepared to acknowledge for a moment that a grown up might want to waste an evening with a board game. There were a vague concessions that it's nice for the children, family time, get them away from their damned iPads, etc etc. But adults? So here's Ash with his horrid jumper and a lot of proper board games, trying to evangelize, and Jez took Mysterium home to play with his family - even though he can't understand Cluedo. Twenty minutes previously, he'd been discussing Article 50, but he didn't reveal back then that he couldn't read anything with more than four pages in it, did he? So why the sudden pretense of being incredibly dim? Perhaps it's a sort of inverse snobbery. Jeremy is fundamentally an effete talk show metrosexual, but the one place he can burnish his macho credentials in the the presence of a dork like Ash - which is why he suddenly starts posing as a testosteronal illiterate who's just too damn manly to sit down at a table and learn how to play Cluedo. Maybe, but that doesn't explain his female co-host and guest, who seem to be reading from the same neanderthal script. Maybe it's our culture? Is some strange fracture in the British psyche on show here? Is it because, on a subconscious level, we despise childhood? Here's a thought: we bury our childhoods pretty deep here in the UK and we roll a big rock on top of the grave. That's how we grow up: by turning our backs on our younger selves. For most boys, only football is allowed to function as a conduit between childhood and adulthood. If you're lucky and your parents made you learn an instrument, then music can bridge that divide. But few people have hobbies that they can trace right back to childhood. For most people, the golden thread is broken. Lost in the maze of career and family and mortgages, they settle down in front of the TV or the work email server. Childhood is reduced to a meme that you share online about stuff "only '90s kids will remember". But childhood is the well of life, isn't it? You have to keep going back to it to drink and be renewed. Yes, but the well is fenced around by vast multinationals who sell us the life-giving water in plastic bottles, branded with superheroes, Star Wars and Harry Potter. As adults, we're reassured because this bottled water is expensive and dignified by state-of-the-art technology and celebrity endorsement, so that we don't feel too ashamed while we consume it, usually in a very passive way. Is this why intelligent grown-ups in this country can't engage with the institutions of childhood, with play and singing and dancing and telling stories, without getting drunk first or regressing entirely (like Storm and her Snakes & Ladders)? Faced with childhood activities, they profess themselves baffled, as if forced to speak an unknown language or pick up and play a strange musical instrument. But you know how to do this, I want to tell them: You used to find it easy and fun, but you've made yourself forget. A colleague from Austria recognises this peculiar pathology in the British. Childhood isn't shameful or despicable in Northern Europe. They love games there, and the folk literature we call 'fairy tales' and the immemorial music we call 'nursery rhymes'. "It's because, in Britain, you don't really have childhood," she tells me: "You end it too soon. At age 4 or 5, they start school, doing tests, learning Maths and Science and writing. In Austria, we don't start till later. Children carry on playing. We let them be children." I'm left wondering by this. Is there something wrong with us? The sight of Vine and his guests cheerfully representing themselves as idiots rather than tapping into their childhood delight in play is deeply dispiriting. I don't think I could watch daytime TV every day.
Members of Spalding Wargames Club reflect on 2019 and their resolutions for gaming: New Year, New Gaming You - Chris Peat
But this year, once you've got past the flurry of torn wrapping paper and exploded with glee at the latest expansion set for your favourite system, maybe you should look back at 2018 and take stock of your gaming life. It's time to make some New Year's gaming resolutions. Conquer the miniature mountain So, you've got those fabulous new figures and you can't wait to get them painted and added to your army. But will you? Or will they just be dumped on to that ever growing miniatures mountain we are all guilty of owning; that stack of plastic, lead and resin we promise to get round to painting one of these days. Maybe it's time to actually crack out the paints and, at last, get scaling that mountain. Perhaps take it steady, don't rush in and aim to paint the whole lot in a weekend. You just won't. Allocate a unit to paint and stick with it until it's finished. You might not reach the summit, but even if you make it just past 'miniatures mountain base camp' and finish just a single unit or character model, that may well give you immense fulfilment and pride; maybe even a renewed love for the hobby. You might also find yourself hankering for a game to use your freshly painted minis in. And therein lies another potential New Years' gaming resolution: get more games in. That's one we can all make. Get gaming Sometimes real life can get in the way of our gaming lives and more pressing commitments mean we cannot play as much as we would like. That's unavoidable. But let's be honest, sometimes we're just a little too lazy to get a game organised. We all love the thrill of tabletop action, but the lure of video gaming may be a quick fix for our hunger for excitement. Or even the sedateness of binge watching a box set can be too much of a temptation for some. It's all too easy to fall into that trap. But what is it that makes wargames, and tabletop games in general, so much more rewarding? Books could be written about this, but in short, one factor is the human element. The fact you are playing with a living, breathing gamer. Being able to shake their hand, watch their puzzled brow as they decide their next move or slap their back as they make a joke. It's so much more social and that can only be good for you. So, maybe make a resolution to get out there and get gaming. If you're not a member of Spalding Wargames Club, get yourself down. Even if you don't have a game organised, come on down and have a chat with some of the members. You will soon be embroiled in a game the following week, or even that night. And you know you will love it. But maybe you're a Club stalwart and are more weeks than not down there playing. In that case, maybe your New Years' resolution should be to become one of those friendly souls who gets games sorted for people. As the clock strikes midnight on 1 January, make a vow to get the community spirit going and help out fellow gamers. Aid others in arranging games, demo your favourite system and maybe even put on big multi-player battles. Get others involved and give something back to the local gaming community. You might also want to be a better gamer. Perhaps make 2019 the year you finally get your head around those complex rules you previously just winged. Learn your army inside out. What is it good at? What are its weak points? Perhaps you could look at it from a practical stand point too. Vow to be an organised gamer in 2019. Maybe store those tokens you keep losing or misplacing in little bags. Make sure you have something to put your objective cards in too. Invest in some decent storage devices for miniatures and accessories. These precious models and gaming products are not cheap, so keep them safe. New Year, new game Maybe the New Year is a good time to try out a new game. Like the look of that new rulebook that's ready for pre-orders? Fancy dabbling in wargaming feudal Japan, Dark Ages England or a whole host of other historical settings? Maybe you just have the desire to make the jump to fantasy gaming from sci-fi, or vice versa. You never know, it might turn into your new favourite. Whatever system it is you choose, you have to be dedicated to it. Read the rulebook, try a few practice games on your own, collect and paint an army. You might have to collect a couple of armies if no one else plays it in order to entice someone to join you in a game. Don't get the rulebook and let it gather dust on the bookshelf. We know there are some of you reading this that are guilty of doing just that (you know who you are). The New Year might even mean a new army. Again, make a vow of dedication if this is your chosen path for the next 12 months. But let's not forget, are you sure you want to be adding to that miniatures mountain? Whatever your New Year's gaming resolution is, let's hope it goes well and lasts out the ensuing year. Happy gaming in 2019. Get yourself painted - Martin Jackson
The slog began. Thanks to the utterly brilliant week away we had all pushed our painting schedules to breaking point. For the rest of the year only new models and a small collection of fantasy miniatures remained on the 'to-do list'. The painting fatigue was strong after such an ambitious undertaking, but, as the festive season drew near, I was confident I could achieve 100% painting completion before the lure of new miniatures became unbearable. Of course Christmas came and, to my surprise, my Dark Angel army grew exponentially. Fully painted was a little further away but still achievable. Then came March. More specifically March 5th. Birthday gifts arrived and among them was a large number of Bolt Action Soviet Troops. In the world of any wargamer, new always correlates to interesting in terms of miniatures, so of course I started adding to the collection. As the Spalding Wargames Club really hit its stride I was drawn into more and more exciting new gaming systems. Board games, war games, skirmish games, fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, legendary movie settings..... Christmas 2018 is fast approaching. I was so close. Barely a couple of hours from completion. Maybe this year will be the year I stick to the resolution. Curating my Collection - Jonathan Rowe A games collection is like any hobby collection, like collecting records or books or cactuses. Your collection grows to a satisfying size, then bulges, then sprawls. My games collection climbs a wall in my living room, lurks under tables and in cupboards and stacks up the corner of my spare bedroom. And still the parcels arrive from Amazon, from eBay, from The Works, from various Kickstarter projects... Something must be done. Before my partner Christine snaps and makes a vast bonfire out of the lot. There's no question of selling on games or (shudder) giving them away. We're not reduced to that yet. We haven't lost a war or anything. No, new shelves are required, upstairs, in my little study. Strong shelves and deep ones, right up to the ceiling. Plans have been drawn: a carpenter appointed: Christine is calmed. But where do we go from here? Do I keep adding to this vast library? Surely enough is enough... Well, it's never enough, now is it? Realistically, I'm going to keep on buying games, but maybe 2019 should be characterised by a new spirit of discernment. Even in late 2018, I was starting to hold fire on big Kickstarter investments. I've got a lot of monsters-on-a-map games: beautiful skirmish or campaign games like Gloomhaven, Fireteam Zero, Order of Vampire Hunters, Myth, Conan... So I froze my finger above the mouse-click that would have added Everrain, Tainted Grail and Monumental. I did right, didn't I? Didn't I...? Then there are the games that don't get the time and love they deserve. Gloomhaven was Crackhaven for a long time, then it stalled. It's a beautiful, brilliant campaign project and if I don't move it onwards in 2019 (I won't say "complete it" - I'm not a dreamer) then I won't be able to look myself in the mirror in 2020. Fireteam Zero is an exhilarating campaign game and simple to boot. That has to see the table in 2019, complete a few story arcs, take down a few bosses... There are also some deep strategy games that need mastering. Nine Worlds has sat on a shelf for months now. It looks lovely. The gameplay is deep. What's the problem? Well, it's a bit fiddly to get your head round. It really needs two people to sit down, master it, then sell it to other people. The catch is, it's not that great as a two-player game; it's really about getting 4-6 people to compete in an insane, world-hopping kaleidoscope of Norse myth and madness. But 4-6 people won't be able to get their head round it. So I'll keep dusting that one but I can't quite see how a New Year's Resolution is going to bring it to life. So New Year Resolutions don't solve every problem. You can't just 'resolve' a game like Nine Worlds onto the table. And even if I resolve to refrain from Kickstarter projects, how can I avoid the months of regret and self-blame afterwards? I mean, look at Western Legends... If only I'd resolved to get that in 2018 ::sob:: Bring colour to Blackstone - Tom Hopkins
My additional resolution is to unload a lot of my pre-existing armies/half completed projects. Some of you may be delighted to know that I’ve already sold 4 of my Imperial Knights on eBay, in an effort to diminish my collection before the move out to China! I’m probably going to need the extra money anyway. Getting the fix I need - Ian Davison
I need to get my Gobo's painted for the Bloodbowl League in January, as looking good while getting smashed is what's it all about. I want to spread the love of Keyforge - really enjoyable card game with next to no buy-in and great playability. Thankfully lacking the 'addiction' of your regular CCG as each deck is unique and self-contained. Isaac's at an age now where he wants to be playing more games so I want 2019 to be a year where he gets the chance to play as much X-Wing, Bloodbowl and board games as possible (even when that means I have to drag myself from the comfort of the couch to do so). And finally I'm going to get to the Wednesday Club as much as possible to have a go at whatever and not be so hung up on just one system in 2019. Farewell to Greenskins - by Alec Bell
After that, to devote more time to the gaming systems i was introduced to in 2018, specifically Bolt Action and Test of Honor, and to get the respective armies for both painted. I'd like to get to grips with more skirmish-type games. I have loved playing Mordheim in the past and it has been too long... and i would also like to have a crack at Necromunda as i have never played and it looks right up my alley. I want to get the board game Scythe out and have a first run-through see what's what (though am a little daunted by it). And last, but by no means least, I'm looking to invest in a co-op table top game. I'm currently torn between Mage Knight and Gloomhaven but have yet to make a decision! The case against New Year resolutions - Karl McMichael
I would advocate that being less stringently goal-focused on a grand scale is beneficial for you and your personal hobby. This doesn't mean goals are a bad thing in the short term, but keep them manageable to motivate you.
Although this doesn't mean I don't wish to improve in my hobby, but instead of being goal oriented I’m going to endeavour to make the time I do get to spend on my hobby is quality time. I implore you all to do the same. Happy New year. Back in 1978 (when I was 11), the comic 2000AD featured a gigantic board game of Judge Dredd's epic 'Cursed Earth' storyline. The game was carved into sections and serialized over 6 issues. As a player, you led your armoured convoy across a radioactive wasteland, taking vaccines to plague-stricken Mega City 2. It was sprawling, utterly baffling to non-Dredd-fans, took forever to play and had countess fiddly counters and cards. In other words, it was my first experience of 'proper' boardgames. I played it from beginning to end, I think, twice - and one of those times solo. Not much in a gamer's life changes. The board, sectioned like this, seems to make MORE sense than it did when it was all stuck together. Beautifully bonkers. Before this, board games had always featured high on my Christmas lists. The early ones were gimmicky '70s fare. I remember owning them but can't remember actually playing them. Buckaroo always broke. Mouse Trap was more fun to set up than to play. However, Battling Gladiators (with its spinning tops) got a new lease of life when my daughters were little and could unite three generations of the family in whirling combat. It's 'Battling Tops', right? Ah, but there's a board to circuit and you challenge your neighbours or the facing player, so there's a sort of (loose) narrative context for the battles. See how important THEME is? But where did this affection for board games come from? I guess it was TV adverts...
Yes, perhaps it was the adverts! MB's Stay Alive is a game I'd still sit down and play today. Battleship certainly is "a game you can play anywhere" - with a pencil and paper! I think my first true love was Haunted House, where Ghoulish Gertie's ball dropped down the chimney and bashed your hapless explorers, though I can't recall that I actually played it properly, with the cards. I suspect I just enacted 'let's pretend' ghost stories on the 3-D board. It was re-done, I think, in the '80s as Ghost Castle, with better rules and materials. But this was where gaming started for me. Better things were on their way. No, I don't mean Monopoly and Cluedo and all that stuff. I mean Waddington's wonderful Game of Dracula, a game which I would still gladly play today - and solo! - because I spent hours playing it solo as a child. Yeah, Game of Dracula had it all. Special dice with bespoke symbols? - check! Asymmetric play where one player competes against all the rest? - check! Separate movement tracks for the villain - check and check! The castle itself is a delightful maze, with Dracula sweeping through the rooms on his own trail of blood. There are hidey-holes to use, because if Drac ends up in your room he gathers you into the folds of his cloak and takes you back to his crypt where you now become... the Green Vampire.
Go on, look at the board. See that big white room in the middle? That's the quickest way to the exit ... but look how often Drac criss-crosses through it - and there are no hidey-holes or candlesticks. Better to creep round through the small rooms to get the the exits at the top. Jeez, I want to play this game again right now! Theme and narrative also scored big with Abandon Ship (a game pointlessly rebranded as Sinking of the Titanic in the USA). Look - the ship actually sinks and comes up as the rescue ship.
So here's a new thing: this game has a sort of victory engine, because you need to collect passengers, food and water (with proper resource tokens), so there are trade-offs to make between getting these on the ship (but losing everything if you're on board when the waters cover you) or taking your chances on the islands. This game was another I loved to play solo. As the '70s drew to a close, the components in games were improving: nice moulded plastic pieces, bright sturdy boards, quality cards and tokens. Lots of older family board games got makeovers. But I was getting critical of unimaginative rules. Buccaneer (in fact, a game from the 1930s) had adorable components (amazing gems, gold bars and rum barrels to fit in cute plastic pirate ships) and introduced me to pick-up-and-deliver mechanics, but was dull to play. Spy Ring (originally from the '60s) had fantastic fedora-hatted spies and bald thuggish bodyguards snooping around a beautiful city, but the clever mirrors and microchips gimmick couldn't disguise the tedious collect-the-set gameplay. Look at those awesome resources for Buccaneer (left and centre) - worth salvaging for newer games, don't you think? And how charming are Spy Ring's board and pieces? Shame about how it plays. However, one game of this vintage stands out for the sheer elegance of its rules design and this is Formula One. This racing circuit game has a tight theme and clever dashboards that let you dial your speed up or down (you move one space for each 20mph of speed) and track the wear and tear to your brakes when you slow for corners or tyres when you corner too fast. There are dice, but you only roll them to determine your penalties when cornering. The rest of the game is pure choice: slow down for safe cornering or risk spinning off? pull in for pit stops to fix those brakes and tyres or push your luck and take another lap to increase your lead? In 2004, the Telegraph called Formula One "the prince of all board games" and it has been praised by other reviewers over the years: Waddington's Formula 1 is, arguably, the benchmark against which all other motor racing board games must be measured. The reason is simple: skill is the predominant factor, while luck plays a just big enough part that the outcome is not entirely certain - Dave Budd I see that Formula One is finally out of print, but similar racing games (like Formula Dé) have replaced it and the grognards on BGG keep the original game alive by posting up designs for new circuits. Of course, all these board games were about to be swept into the attic by the arrival of powerful new forces in my life: D&D would replace the competitive board game and, when board games returned to the table in the 1980s, it would be Hero Quest and Talisman. The age of the modern boardgame had dawned.
Not all adverts are inspiring. What exactly is a "browdsowd"? Let Bardic Broadcast's cracking review explain it to you. Seriously, this is hilarious. One of the delightful features of life in the 21st century is that boardgames are very much back and feature once again on my Christmas lists. The new 'microgames' and deck games like Keyforge make great gifts (take note if you are reading this, O my Daughters!) and connect Christmas morning right back to the Christmasses child-me used to enjoy when the wrapping came off Game of Dracula or Abandon Ship. But I learned other things from those old '70s board games too. Important life lessons for the adult gamer:
Next blog will be in 2019!!! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all gamers.
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