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 You can listen to the BBC piece here: don't listen from the start (you'll get Brexit commentary that is instantly out of date) or stick around after the end (you'll get the Irish Question which has never changed and never will).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.....
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
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.
We’ve been enjoying the Conan board game by games company Monolith and publishers Asmodee. The game contains a vast horde of miniatures, attractive boards and imaginatively asymmetric scenarios. In each mission, the players get to be Conan the Barbarian, Shevatus the Rogue, Hadrathus the Mage or Belit the Pirate Queen. Somebody else gets to be the evil Overlord commanding the antagonists (pirates and Picts, mostly, with the odd necromancer and demon thrown in).
Conan is a fantasy of White male power. A fantasy in which White male power dominates and holds moral authority. And as Conan, you are the biggest, strongest embodiment of that White male power, able to ruthlessly cut down all your non-White enemies, surrounded by the lamentations of their women and by White women falling at your feet Hornbeck argues that the attitudes the game embodies are the reason Donald Trump got elected and if you like this game then you are colluding in the sexual abuse of women. Hornbeck’s article is worth reading, but the TL:DR is that she is either (1) a well-intentioned person making salient points about some sadly regressive attitudes towards women and minorities in the gaming industry, or (2) an idiot. Take your pick and let yourself be defined by it. Some things can be stated as facts. The base game set contains 72 miniatures – of which 2 are women and both are half-undressed. One of these is pirate queen Belit and her character board and miniature look like this. Belit's character board (left) and miniature (right, sculpted by Stéphane Simon, painted by Martin Grandbarbe) How unlike the dress code of our own dear queen. But wait, you say, isn’t this just being faithful to Robert E. Howard’s pulp stories? Isn’t that just how women in the Conan stories are supposed to look? Designers Asmodee/Monolith take this view: they pride themselves on authenticity and employ ‘Conan historians’ as consultants. In the original stories, Belit flounces around naked as a sort of radical fashion choice and lusts after young Conan in a very sex-positive way. Isn’t she just taking ownership of her alabaster body? American artist Frank Frazetta cemented the 'look' of Conan and his clingy/helpless and nearly-naked women (left) . In my youth, all fantasy novels had covers like this. So, is the game's pervy art (right) a faithful hommage or a mindless pastiche? To untangle this, it’s helpful to look back at the life of Conan's creator, Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936). A bookish Texan, Howard’s childhood was shaped by his mother, who inculcated in him a love of poetry and an ambition to write, but who contracted tuberculosis from her constant caring for sick relatives. Howard acquired an obsession with youth and physical health and took up boxing and bodybuilding in his teens. His adventure stories reflect his own fascination with physical beauty and vitality and his fear of ageing. Howard wrote his Conan stories over a short 3-year period in the mid Thirties. His previous work had been Lovecraftian weird tales and historical adventures which reflected his fascination with his own Irish ancestry. Picts feature in many of these stories as Celtic heroes and anti-heroes – not as Native American Iroquois, as Hornbeck contends. Conan’s exploits in the ‘Hyborian Age’ before the last Ice Age also feature Howard’s beloved Picts, but this time as villains. After tiring of Conan, Howard moved on to writing Westerns in the years before his death. In fact, his last (and best) published Conan story, Beyond the Black River, features battles with the Picts in a setting clearly inspired by the American frontier, reflecting Howard’s new interests and explaining the confusion about Picts being based on Native Americans. Asmodee/Monolith certainly base their Picts on Native Americans rather than Celts - but also make them rather like Neanderthals rather than humans Howard supported feminism and tried to write strong female characters. He hated the pulp conventions that forced him to insert unnecessary erotica into his stories and tried to subvert them whenever possible – as he did in Beyond the Black River, which contains no love interest or sex scenes. Howard was delighted that he got such a story into print. So, yes, Belit goes around naked, but she’s a commander of men. In the game, contrary to Hornbeck's claim that "all she does is follow Conan around and boost his abilities," her character directs a team of warriors as well as engaging in battle directly. Expansions to the game feature other female characters, some semi-nude and provocative, but others (like the warrior woman Valeria) more sensibly dressed for action. The rather righteous miniature and art for Valeria (left) - and Sandahl Bergman's portrayal in John Milius' 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, which combines the roles of Belit and Valeria into one character Howard also created the more famous female warrior Red Sonya (sic). But before you crack wise about chainmail bikinis, Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino is a Ukrainian female mercenary in Istanbul in 1626 who fights with flintlock pistols. The sword-wielding barbarian heroine Red Sonja (with a J) was developed by Marvel Comics in 1973, porting the character into Conan’s Hyborian Age for their comic book adaptation of Howard’s stories. The chainmail bikini is Marvel's distinctive contribution to the character. Red Sonya/Sonja: 17th century mercenary (left), under-dressed Marvel heroine (centre) and Brigitte Nielsen in the 1985 film Which goes to show that Howard’s legacy is a complicated one: you've got Howard's original conception, compromised by commercial pressure; then there's later artists and writers (notably Marvel) focusing on elements in the stories Howard himself disliked. To their credit, Monolith/Asmodee try to honour Howard’s stories in their game, rather than the comics or movies. Red Sonja does not appear in the game. But the general vibe of adolescent sexuality definitely does. Certainly, some design choices are ... unfortunate. Making nude Belit the only playable heroine in the base game instead of armoured (and better-known) Valeria is a weird choice. The first scenario tasks Conan & Co. with rescuing a drugged princess from the Picts: she is literally an object that must be carried across the board. Conan faces off against a big snake while the princess takes a nap (left) - which I'm sure Cynthia Hornbeck LOVES in comparison to the strategy board game Age of Conan (right) in which there are three rewards for Conan to earn: treasure (fine, really), monsters (trophies, I guess) and actual women! All of this in a context where the gaming industry increasingly offer gender variants for playable characters and goes out of its way to represent women as capable and autonomous. Sometimes this works beautifully, such as Mistfall’s non-objectified heroines (one a lesbian by the way). Others are more controversial, such as EA Games' decision with Battlefield V to depict a woman combatant on the cover, leading to accusations of political correctness gone mad by people who failed GCSE History (women certainly did fight in WWII in small but not insignificant numbers). Mistfall's Elatha the Misthuntress (left) and Valkea the Myrmidon (centre) offer positive representations, as does the troll-baiting cover for Battlefield V (right) This leads us back to Cynthia Hornbeck, who makes two impassioned pleas: the first ill-conceived but the second important for a number of reasons: As a gamer, start refusing to purchase or even play a game that objectifies women, excludes women, excludes non-White people, makes non-White people the enemy, etc This is ill-conceived. People don't play or refuse to play games to make political or moral statements - or rather, those that do are jackasses. Many gamers want to explore conflicts set in the world as it is (or was), not the world as we'd like it to be. Fantasy and SF gamers want to explore dystopian rather than idealised settings. An ancient-world setting will include features like slavery, for example. But Hornbeck follows this with a better point: As a designer, start making very deliberate choices about what themes you work with and how you represent people of other gender, races, and sexualities than your own ... Conan has gained lots of acclaim for its mechanic innovations and the thorough realization of its theme and setting. But why can’t those innovative mechanics and immersive gameplay be matched with a setting that treats women as something other than sexual objects and minorities as something other than enemies? She is right about this. Monolith/Asmodee missed a trick with Conan. Any adaptation of a literary product is also an interpretation of that product and the designers failed to avail themselves of the chance to interpret Howard’s female characters more positively in this game. It's a mistake on an artistic as well as a political level. I’m sure Howard himself would have approved of revisionism. He hated the limiting conventions of the adventure genre of his time and would not have wished to see those conventions still being mindlessly perpetuated 80 years later, still less justified for being in the 'spirit' of his stories. The 'spirit' was a concession to what magazine editors demanded of pulp fiction in the '30s - and it was a spirit that Howard resented and delighted in subverting whenever he could. Now don't get me started on whether they should be banning Baby, It's Cold Outside... ...
Oh all right then. The 1949 original (left) isn't as depraved as you think, because it pairs Ricardo Montalban seducing Esther Williams with a foil where Betty Garret (rather more successfully) seduces Red Skelton. Meanwhile, the 2016 version by Idina Menzel and Michael Buble (right) cleverly uses child actors and defuses some of the more troubling lines (like "Say, what's in this drink?" and substituting soda pop for alcohol) - now that's how you interpret something rather than just recycling it. Merry Christmas.
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