SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
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
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