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2020/2021 Eurogames
My partner Katy considers it her personal mission to support out local boardgame cafe, the Ludoquist, through the pandemic by making a really astonishing number of purchases. This isn't an exhaustive list (somehow, she's bought even more than this), but I thought I'd talk about a few of this year's titles.
High Rise: An attractive enough game, but like many, doesn't really sing for two players--a downside that becomes particularly apparent during a pandemic. Ends up feeling slightly evolved-Monopoly (though that's hardly fair to it, as it's fine, and I would rather die than play Monopoly). The dummy token mechanic is kind of interesting, but a bit fiddly. Katy observes that it relies on a two player variant to make it work for fewer people, which she feels is generally the sign of a less sturdy design.
Not a keeper (everything we keep must have a very strong two-player mode or be so outstanding we don't mind only rarely getting to play it). Luckily, as you may know, Eurogames largely retain their value and can be sold or traded on via something like the Board Game Geek Maths Trade. Yes, that hive of 'oh I don't think Puerto Rico is colonialist, maybe the brown 'worker' tokens I'm assigning to my plantation wanted to come!' is good for something after all!
Century: A New World: Did you ever think, 'the vague chummy orientalism of Century: Spice Road just isn't a weird enough gaming experience! I wish this could actively gamify a process of colonialism--'
Well buddy, dream no more. All the plinky plonky cubes4cubes of a Century game, but now with a kind of ancillary board component, and a theme that makes you go, 'why are so many board game designers obsessed with shoehorning mechanics into a delicate, politicised theme that is not actually redolent with interest for a lot of people? Is it the tradition of wargaming, are you just a dick, what is going on here?' In fact, I'm just going to get all the exceptionally awkward ones from the past year in popular titles (that we bothered engaging with) out in one post. Note though that most of these are very recent, definitely all from within the last five years. This is a fairly current issue in the field, only beginning to be popularly addressed.
Rajas of the Ganges: I fucking swear we are not even a little trying for this coloniality world tour. The field is just this bad. It is useful to know that while Asia is a theme/setting for a huge swathe of games, Asian 'Eurogame' (ie modern board game) designers whose products are available in the Anglosphere are thin on the ground.
This is actually the Least Weird of these titles, in this regard. The setting forms a colourful backdrop (which is its own issue), but beyond that, you're not 'playing' any process of domination. You are simply trying to advance on two goal tracks and cross. It's a dice-placing game, so that random element with some strategy. I wouldn't say we need to own it, but it's pleasant enough. I'd probably like it better if you were building more of an engine (your little village tile sort of counts here, but).
Great Western Trail: Katy got this because she's interested in Alexander Pfister as a designer, whereas I largely pity him for the terrible name the circumstances of his birth have cursed him with. A deck builder with a 'one-way time track' you build as you cycle it three or four times. Katy felt the deck-building component could have been stronger, and that it was a less developed Maracaibo. I would agree, and would add that 'collecting cows to send to slaughterhouses' is a weird game theme, only made weirder by a whole portion of the game-path involving trade with fairly stereotypical generic Great Plains Native Americans, complete with requisite teepees.
Alexander Pfister was only going to grind it in in the years to come, though. He's a mechanically interesting, but should perhaps let someone else choose his topics.
Maracaibo: The rules of Maracaibo come with a very extensive discussion of the game's colonial setting. This justification for gamifying France, England and Spain's competing conquests of the Caribbean is fascinating in that either the designer or the publishers felt the need to bring it up at all, and actually I think that's quite a positive sign for the field. The logic, however, falls very flat: bad things happen herein because that's historically accurate. Well, all right, but lots of historically accurate things don't make it into the game mechanics, and the choice to stage this isn't some neutral mandate. I actually find it a bit insulting, in a 'logic of war' kind of way--naturalising logics of atrocity, et al. 'History is bad, kids.' Yes, and this in uniquely bad in ways that are very resonant in modern contexts, including for many people who may engage with this game as text?
I'm not sure how I feel about the game's decision to totally invisibalize labour in the production of its corn, tobacco and sugar. There are 'native guides' in the card deck and many Latinx figures (though most are presumably Spanish); no one is black. So did we dodge a bullet in the form of evading Puerto Rico's infamous slave cubes, or did we further obfuscate how the tobacco gets harvested?
Maracaibo achieves the holy grail of the newly-popular campaign game format: a game satisfyingly playable as campaign or as individual game. The campaign's writing is paper thin, but the mechanics are a reasonable evolution of a sound engine builder with Pfister's 'one way time track you build en route'. The set up and learning curve are both quite heavy.
Pfister's subsequent game, Cloud Age, is a SF corporate dystopia that not only doesn't stage any war crimes, it avoids the very common SFF game mechanic of racialised conflict, ie War Crimes in Space via the Na'vi Indians. A miracle. You know what this is? Potential growth. (I mean, we'll see, I haven't played it yet.)
High Rise: An attractive enough game, but like many, doesn't really sing for two players--a downside that becomes particularly apparent during a pandemic. Ends up feeling slightly evolved-Monopoly (though that's hardly fair to it, as it's fine, and I would rather die than play Monopoly). The dummy token mechanic is kind of interesting, but a bit fiddly. Katy observes that it relies on a two player variant to make it work for fewer people, which she feels is generally the sign of a less sturdy design.
Not a keeper (everything we keep must have a very strong two-player mode or be so outstanding we don't mind only rarely getting to play it). Luckily, as you may know, Eurogames largely retain their value and can be sold or traded on via something like the Board Game Geek Maths Trade. Yes, that hive of 'oh I don't think Puerto Rico is colonialist, maybe the brown 'worker' tokens I'm assigning to my plantation wanted to come!' is good for something after all!
Century: A New World: Did you ever think, 'the vague chummy orientalism of Century: Spice Road just isn't a weird enough gaming experience! I wish this could actively gamify a process of colonialism--'
Well buddy, dream no more. All the plinky plonky cubes4cubes of a Century game, but now with a kind of ancillary board component, and a theme that makes you go, 'why are so many board game designers obsessed with shoehorning mechanics into a delicate, politicised theme that is not actually redolent with interest for a lot of people? Is it the tradition of wargaming, are you just a dick, what is going on here?' In fact, I'm just going to get all the exceptionally awkward ones from the past year in popular titles (that we bothered engaging with) out in one post. Note though that most of these are very recent, definitely all from within the last five years. This is a fairly current issue in the field, only beginning to be popularly addressed.
Rajas of the Ganges: I fucking swear we are not even a little trying for this coloniality world tour. The field is just this bad. It is useful to know that while Asia is a theme/setting for a huge swathe of games, Asian 'Eurogame' (ie modern board game) designers whose products are available in the Anglosphere are thin on the ground.
This is actually the Least Weird of these titles, in this regard. The setting forms a colourful backdrop (which is its own issue), but beyond that, you're not 'playing' any process of domination. You are simply trying to advance on two goal tracks and cross. It's a dice-placing game, so that random element with some strategy. I wouldn't say we need to own it, but it's pleasant enough. I'd probably like it better if you were building more of an engine (your little village tile sort of counts here, but).
Great Western Trail: Katy got this because she's interested in Alexander Pfister as a designer, whereas I largely pity him for the terrible name the circumstances of his birth have cursed him with. A deck builder with a 'one-way time track' you build as you cycle it three or four times. Katy felt the deck-building component could have been stronger, and that it was a less developed Maracaibo. I would agree, and would add that 'collecting cows to send to slaughterhouses' is a weird game theme, only made weirder by a whole portion of the game-path involving trade with fairly stereotypical generic Great Plains Native Americans, complete with requisite teepees.
Alexander Pfister was only going to grind it in in the years to come, though. He's a mechanically interesting, but should perhaps let someone else choose his topics.
Maracaibo: The rules of Maracaibo come with a very extensive discussion of the game's colonial setting. This justification for gamifying France, England and Spain's competing conquests of the Caribbean is fascinating in that either the designer or the publishers felt the need to bring it up at all, and actually I think that's quite a positive sign for the field. The logic, however, falls very flat: bad things happen herein because that's historically accurate. Well, all right, but lots of historically accurate things don't make it into the game mechanics, and the choice to stage this isn't some neutral mandate. I actually find it a bit insulting, in a 'logic of war' kind of way--naturalising logics of atrocity, et al. 'History is bad, kids.' Yes, and this in uniquely bad in ways that are very resonant in modern contexts, including for many people who may engage with this game as text?
I'm not sure how I feel about the game's decision to totally invisibalize labour in the production of its corn, tobacco and sugar. There are 'native guides' in the card deck and many Latinx figures (though most are presumably Spanish); no one is black. So did we dodge a bullet in the form of evading Puerto Rico's infamous slave cubes, or did we further obfuscate how the tobacco gets harvested?
Maracaibo achieves the holy grail of the newly-popular campaign game format: a game satisfyingly playable as campaign or as individual game. The campaign's writing is paper thin, but the mechanics are a reasonable evolution of a sound engine builder with Pfister's 'one way time track you build en route'. The set up and learning curve are both quite heavy.
Pfister's subsequent game, Cloud Age, is a SF corporate dystopia that not only doesn't stage any war crimes, it avoids the very common SFF game mechanic of racialised conflict, ie War Crimes in Space via the Na'vi Indians. A miracle. You know what this is? Potential growth. (I mean, we'll see, I haven't played it yet.)