SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
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! |
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