For this month’s Board Gaming the System comic, Adam Bessie and Jason Novak draw a new set of cards for Parker Brothers Sorry!
“PIETY, HONESTY, TEMPERANCE, GRATITUDE, PRUDENCE, TRUTH, CHASTITY, SINCERITY”—these were the only ways to advance to a Puritan Heaven of The Mansion of Happiness, the template upon which game of Sorry! was later created by Parker Brothers of Salem, MA. The Mansion of Happiness—widely considered the first mass-produced board game, published in 1843 (also in Salem)—popularized the use of “track” gameplay with which we are all familiar, and which Sorry! is built around. In track games, a single, rigid path takes players toward the final destination: progress is determined not by virtue, but by the luck of the draw, and strategy with the cards you’re dealt (which in Sorry! means trying to knock your opponents off track). What cards are we being dealt in the new year?
Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.
“There are so many different kinds of games and you’ll see that certain people might be really good at one kind of game and really bad at another kind of game.”
Game play is becoming more digital every day and yet many people remain die-hard board game enthusiasts. Meet the people behind The Board Room, a member-driven board game group with their own clubhouse in Providence, Rhode Island.
Life is complex. Family, friendship, health, work, inequality, the state of the world all contribute to our understanding of and approach to our daily lives. This week’s Play Digest links up with games based on lived experiences.
It goes without saying that sometimes games can help escape these realms, even navigate them, or aid in solving real world issues. It’s worth noting that the board game we now know as Life was released in 1860 under the name The Checkered Game of Life, which, in fact, referred to its checkerboard-like playing surface, but which also might be the best unintended euphemism ever in board games.
When the popular Uncharted video game series was “recast” earlier this year with two women taking over the lead, the progression of gameplay wasn’t altered much. Over the course of the game, however, the relationship that develops between Chloe and Nadine has made some women reflect on not only of how sometimes complicated, competitive female friendships are portrayed on the game screen, but how it mirrors real life.
Women, and perhaps women of color especially, are subject to near-constant micro-aggressions aimed at their appearance. Wieden + Kennedy art director Momo Pixel created Hair Nah as a response to one such insult in particular. As a comment on those who cannot resist the lure of difference, Hair Nah has the player trying to get her avatar to the airport and onto a flight with as few “hair reaches” as possible. It is a great example of enlightenment through light humor.
DreamDaddy is a queer dating app sim in which you don’t just date a gay dad, you are the gay dad. The characters are given deep back stories, problem children, job woes, and identity crises. Gamewright Leighton Gray says it was important to her as a gay woman to develop an honest and humanistic approach for the LGBTQ gaming community. She added, “There’s so little queer content now that’s just light-hearted and fun and silly and showcases a really honest relationship. I think part of the goal for this was for it to be for everyone.”
More often than not life isn’t so interesting, as manifested in Desert Bus, once called the worst video game ever made. In it you drive from Tucson to Las Vegas and immerse yourself in all the monochromatic boredom of a roadtrip. But there was art in its mundanity and it has its fans (and raised a good deal of money for charity). Now there is a sequel, with a big “improvement”: if you win, you now get to drive the bus back to Tucson.
The life stage that vexes many of us the most perhaps (at least in the west) is death. Death isn’t addressed in the old Hasbro Game of Life (in which you’re more likely to cash in your 401k than meet the Angel Gabriel), but video games are full of it: graphic, grizzly, hyper-realistic, but usually atypical for the average player. Mortician’s Tale is different. Imagine, for a moment, that you run a funeral home. Mortician’s Tale is an outgrowth of the death positive movement, and aims to demystify the death and grieving process by putting the player in the mortician’s robe. It’s a game that would make Jessica Mitford proud.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
This month, comic duo Adam Bessie and Jason Novak offer us a new spin on the Milton Bradley Company classic The Game of Life.
The Game of Life has always reflected the times, even at the start of its own life, a year before the Civil War. Known first as The Checkered GameLife, Milton Bradley’s seminal game was really just checkers with spots which reflected the values, hopes, and worries of the era: Intemperance, Idleness, Speculation, Ruin, Honor, Suicide, and Happy Old Age (50). Since 1860, every generation has updated Life as a mirror—not of what life actually is, but of what the dominant wisdom tells us it should be. And just what should today’s The Game of Life be?
Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.
Did you know that the first board game, a popular game called senet, came from ancient Egypt? Clearly, this type of play has staying power. Here at PlayTime we’ve already looked pretty closely at the world of board games—Naomi Russo delved into the conflicted history of Monopoly, Charlie Hall researched how the CIA uses board games to train spies, and Carlo Rotella shared his youthful experiences playing war games. This week we roll the dice and take a look at more board game news.
Eric Zimmerman, who talked to us about the virtues of cheating, and his partners in game design have developed the fun, broad-reaching, and modern Metagame. If the Metagame didn’t already enough of a draw, they’ve developed an expansion pack about games. A kind of meta metagame.
Cards Against Humanity purchases acreage on the US–Mexico border and hires experts on eminent domain to prevent the property from being claimed by the Trump administration for the border wall.
Board games aren’t all simplicity. There is a crop of “tech-centric” board games out there, including an update on the classic Civilization and Pandemic, an interview with the developer of which can be found here.
Where video game industry conventions like the giant E3 and the developer-centric GDC now operate at a level befitting Hollywood or Silicon Valley, the Board Game Convention in Essen, Germany, is open to the general public and introduces the newest in analogue gaming. Ars Cardboard (part of the terrific Ars Technica family) could barely contain its list of the best of the best from this year’s show (TransAtlantic and Altiplano have my vote.).
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Image credit: Game board and gaming pieces, ca. 1550–1295 B.C., from Egypt, Abydos, Cemetery D. Faience, modern wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
In this month’s comic, Jason Novak and Adam Bessie share a little magical thinking with a Magic: The Gathering–inspired card deck.
Before Pokemon gave us “Catch’em All,” there was Magic: The Gathering,a card game invented in the early ’90s that burned through teenage allowances faster than dragon fire. If you’ve never played Magic, you’ve certainly seen the fantasy roleplaying game at your local coffee shop, an entire table filled with animated characters—and that’s just the players, whooping and hollering after a ghost warlock decimates an upstart ice golem with a flaming spellblast. In 2017, what new magical creatures might we add to our deck?
Come back for next month’s installment in the Board Gaming the System comic series. Missed the last one? Check it out here.
Journalist Charlie Hall offers a look into the art of making board games for the CIA. Acclaimed designer Volko Ruhnke shares a whole new meaning to the term “serious games” with him.
The United States intelligence community has a long history with gaming. Role-playing and simulations have been part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s best practices for generations, and are often conducted with the help of judges and mediators behind closed doors to explore complex, real-world situations.
But recently, the CIA revealed that they also use tabletop games—in effect, complex modern board games—to train its own analysts, and analysts from other agencies.
By day, Volko Ruhnke is an instructor at the CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. By night, Ruhnke is an acclaimed designer of commercial board games best known for the COIN Series, published by GMT Games. He said the CIA has been interested in tabletop games for a very long time, well before he started working there in the 1980s. Applying his knowhow in the commercial space to building games for CIA officers in a classroom setting was a natural fit. The goal, he explained, is to facilitate repetition in the practical application of intelligence gathering skills, about separating actionable information from noise and acting on it quickly.
Unlike commercial board games, Ruhnke’s projects at the CIA don’t need to be fun.
Ruhnke shared an example of his work, a project called Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo, which he co-designed with another instructor in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kingpin uses the historical details of the capture of Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as well as some fictional elements to create a challenging, asymmetrical game.
Kingpin is an adversarial game where one side plays the role of law enforcement and the other plays the role of Guzmán’s own handlers and associates. It revolves around hidden information, with each side playing on their own hidden game board behind a screen. El Chapo’s team is constantly moving around inside Mexico trying to evade the law, but the cartel leader has certain tastes and expectations. He’s not just willing to sit inside a hole somewhere, and one viable strategy is for law enforcement to use his proclivities against him. In the classroom, the game is played twice, with students taking turns playing on both sides of the table.
A close-up of cartel’s game board from Kingpin. It shows how the cartel has robbed law enforcement of some intelligence collection capability, represented by the white pawn. It will constrain law enforcement’s ability to track El Chapo.
Traditional wargame-sized counters are used on the law enforcement side to keep track of where and when El Chapo and his assets were spotted, or to indicate an area they believe is clear. The production value here is actually quite high. Notice that the CIA spent time rounding the corners.
The key to the game, and to every other game played at the Kent School, is the facilitator. It’s their responsibility to keep things moving by interpreting the rules and feeding them to students on the fly. But in Kingpin, the facilitator also plays the role of referee. They have an important role in moving the action forward by revealing new information to both sides.
Unlike commercial board games, Ruhnke’s projects at the CIA don’t need to be fun. They also don’t need to support multiple playthroughs. In fact, they don’t even need to be played to completion.
“For a training game, it’s not nearly as important that you finish the game,” Ruhnke said. “It’s not even important that the game be balanced or have replay value. It might have those things. But our students are probably never going to play it again. It’s more about the insights and the process.”
The complete set-up for Kingpin. The law enforcement team’s game board is on the left, while the cartel’s game board is on the right. Both of those would be hidden behind a screen, while the middle board includes information shared by both teams.
Games are a very small fraction of what Kent School students will do in their coursework, but Ruhnke said the kind of hands-on work that tabletop gaming provides is invaluable.
Humans deal with complexity by forming mental models. . . . as instructors, we have to communicate those models to our students. Games do that very well.
“They are a tremendous tool for helping us prepare our understanding of complex affairs,” Ruhnke said. He likened it to studying the ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan. “An insurgency is the interactions of many different actors, interests, tribes, forces, political movements, parties, village elders. It’s a complex compilation of factors, and that’s what we’re asking our analysts to understand. But human beings deal with complexity by forming mental models. So now, as instructors, we have to communicate those models to our students. Games do that very well.”
I was first introduced to the Ruhnke’s design work with a game called Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?, first published in 2010. In it, one player takes on the role of the United States while the other plays as Islamic jihadists. Each player takes actions by playing from a hand of cards that includes real-world, historical events. In one of my most memorable playthroughs the US prevailed only by keeping Benazir Bhutto alive long enough to drive the opposing player entirely out of Pakistan.
I asked Ruhnke about the potential conflicts that might arise between his commercial work and his classified work at the CIA.
“It is something that I have to watch,” he said. “I use my judgement in choosing to participate in work that’s outside of CIA work, and I’m not alone in that,” Ruhnke said. “I have . . . authorities here to double check. And in situation where I could have been exposed to sensitive information, I need to make sure that I’m okay here. That’s a routine procedure at the CIA. In my case, it happens to be that I’m making games, but if I were writing a book or writing an editorial in a newspaper it would be the same thing.”
The most gratifying part of the job for Ruhnke is in bringing intelligence officers together in a low-pressure environment in the same room with their peers. The Kent School isn’t just for members of the CIA, but provides instruction for analysts from the sixteen members of the United States Intelligence Community and all branches of the armed forces.
“It’s professionals coming together to practice their craft,” Ruhnke said, “separated from the immediate, pressing needs of our country. Of course, they’re interacting with each other every day, but in here it’s coming off the line, getting together as a brotherhood or a sisterhood of terrorism analysts. . . . I think it has to help.” ♦
(Image credit: Detail from Kingpin, a board game used by the CIA based on the capture of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán, popularly known as El Chapo. All images courtesy Central Intelligence Agency.)
In this month’s comic, Jason Novak and Adam Bessie turn the classic board game Chutes and Ladders into a play obstacle course. The children surmount the walls and fences, and the barriers are transformed.
As fathers of young children, Jason and Adam have spent many fun hours playing board games, several of which were created by Parker Brothers, which made its start as a game companyright in Salem, Massachusetts. These board games aren’t just about diverting play, but about rules you must follow to win. The rules of game often reflect the idealized rules and mores of the culture—by playing the game, you are learning how to behave in the culture. And thus, board games are like a time capsule, a way of seeing the dominant values of a place and time. Our five-part series, Board Gaming the System, honors the legacy of the board game (and the many hours we’ve spent playing them) and reimagines classic boards to reveal the unwritten rules of our culture today.
Come back for next month’s installment in the series.
Albert Mobilio’s fictional stories are based on old-time games played in parlors, basements, and fields with balls, brooms, blindfolds, and cards. As winners and losers emerge from dodge ball, word games, and balloon contests so does the theme of our inner life as ceaseless competition. There is calculation, envy, humiliation, and joy, and there is always the next round when everything might change.
All players but Jack sit in a circle close together, with feet drawn up and knees raised so as to form a tunnel underneath the circle of bent knees. They pass a slipper from one to the other through the tunnel, trying to keep it hidden. Something about this ready-made tunnel strikes Sandy as unnerving—how easily a pocket of hiddenness can be made in plain sight. She laughs because everyone does yet stiffens in response to the newly made coolness below her bare legs, registering its kinship to caves, basements, and things unspoken.
The slipper isn’t glass or golden. Not one used for ballet or tightrope walking. An ordinary slipper. Torn seams, sole soiled from trips across the sidewalk to toss trash or the times it’s traveled all the way to the Bagel Delight on the corner. This slipper smells slightly of baby powder. Jack stands outside the circle and tries to follow the slipper’s covert passage and tag the player who has it. He doesn’t give a damn about the slipper or how he’ll be able to trade places with whoever he tags. What’s happening in his head is what he cares about: there seems to be a hockey puck sliding around the ice rink beneath the dome of his skull. Every movement—he bends down or charges forward—sends the disc caroming into the wall, the reverberation pulsing around his eyes. He can still taste the sweetish rum they were passing around, but not in his mouth—the taste rises up from his stomach. Where is that damn thing? The lights have been turned very low and he can’t even make out where people’s legs meet the floor let alone anything else. Better to follow the movements of shoulders than try to follow the slipper itself.
The bunched up thing comes Sandy’s way, the thin flannel cuff immediately familiar because the slipper is hers. She would have preferred not to use it—she might as well pass her socks around, too—but it’s her apartment and who else would have a slipper. Did Jess flinch the tiniest bit when it was in her hands? Sandy could swear she saw that. Could swear she saw a flicker of distaste. Jack darts this way and that, incorrectly tagging where he’s sure he discerned the telltale dip in Jess’ shoulder, then Frank’s friend, and that friend’s friend. He really needs to sit and let his headache have its way but just as he’s about to give up, he notices Sandy’s downcast eyes. She’s unaware, caught up in some faraway thought. He tags her, or really, because he has to lunge, he slaps her on the shoulder.
“You’ve got it,” he says. Without looking up, she offers the slipper. There’s the scent of baby powder. The inside worn smooth. He starts to put his hand inside as if it were a glove but he doesn’t. He shouldn’t. He knows that.
The fascinating thing about cheating is that the cheat is not the player that knocks all the chess pieces off the table. That’s a spoilsport.
That’s someone that says, “You know what? I don’t even care about this thing. I’m not here to uphold the idea that we’re playing together in some way.” The player that cheats loves the game so much that they will do anything to win.
So, in a sense, they’re almost too devoted to the game, and that’s why when you’re a designer you see people cheating at your game, it’s kind of thrilling.
And you’re saying to yourself, These people like my game so much that they’re going to hack into my server, or they’re going to sneak cards into the tournament, or they’re going to find whatever kind of psychological intimidation they can, even if they’re breaking rules of etiquette in order to do so.
So, for me, it’s really exciting to think about all of these things.
And, again, this is why it’s interesting to be a designer.
When we create a game and we’re handing that toolbox of activity to a player or a community of players, you never know what they’re going to construct.
