It’s a rare board game that leaves me as conflicted as Ezra and Nehemiah, the latest creation from design duo Shem Phillips and Sam Macdonald.

Set during the resettlement of Jerusalem following the Babylonian Captivity, it sees players rebuilding the destroyed temple and walls of the city, strengthening the priestly classes, and translating and preaching the torah. As much a work of Biblical exegesis as it is a plaything, it calls to mind the golden darics mentioned by its sources: where one side of these coins features an expressive slice of history, the other is little more than an empty divot.

Jerusalem, ~539-457 BCE.

This being a modern eurogame, “empty” isn’t an apt description of the game itself. Like many of the titles in Garphill’s catalog, Ezra and Nehemiah is overfull with icons, systems, and components. To the credit of its designers, these are usually crisp enough that no Rosetta Stone is needed to decipher their intended meaning. While there are a few too many ways to modify actions or wriggle around various costs, it isn’t long before the game’s various portions develop into a fuller picture.

At its most basic, the game revolves around three actions. As in the Biblical account of Ezra-Nehemiah, players take on the role of Jewish leaders returning to Babylon under the decree of Cyrus the Great of Persia to undertake the three spheres of reconstruction that reflect the chronicler’s priorities for the holy city.

The most mundane of the trio is rebuilding the walls. Taking a note from Vital Lacerda’s Lisboa, players first excavate the rubble that surrounds the city center, recycling usable wood, stone, cinders, and even gold that somehow escaped the notice of plundering Babylonians and the ravages of intervening decades. These now-cleared portions may then be rebuilt, either as walls for an immediate but minor bonus, or as a gate for a more valuable but potentially delayed infusion of resources. This is the game’s most uncomplicated option, offering resources and points in exchange for action points.

Next is the temple. For simplicity’s sake, the temple is most easily divided into three sections. First, players may promote workers to become Levites, descendants of the tribe of Levi and dedicated assistants in religious rituals. These both enable and bolster one’s activities elsewhere in the temple. They also offer a nice perk. In a nod to levitical instruction that Levites should be provided for from the sacrifices offered in the temple, players don’t need to feed them at the end of the round. Given the scarcity of food, shunting one’s unused workers into cultic labor is an appealing solution.

Speaking of cultic labor, the temple has more to offer. By donating stone, wood, or gold, players adorn the temple — and in the process earn victory points and a variety of bonuses. Meanwhile, sacrifices can be offered, letting players fling wood or cinders into the holy fire to improve their standing on a piety track. Don’t worry, unobservant players stand to lose a loaf of bread or some points, not their lives.

The final action is the realm of scribal transcription, and it’s here that Phillips and Macdonald venture into the choppy waters of exegesis. In exchange for silver or gold, scribes churn out various upgrades for whomever authorized their work. There are a few nods to the little-acknowledged realities of such an endeavor. Somebody needs to actually fund this stuff, paying for all that papyrus and parchment and ink, not to mention the hours somebody spent hunched over a bunch of scrolls. Similarly, later advancements are built over the foundation of earlier work. In game terms, this means paying a coin to any scribe whose labor underpins your own in that pyramid scheme. It’s decidedly anachronistic — these texts are full of unpaid debts, with nothing like our modern dedication to citation — but it’s a refreshing acknowledgement that Biblical documents are as dependent on earlier labor as anything else. One can see how an early error in transcription could be replicated and then passed along for centuries.

Haggai and Zechariah, shouty prophets.

But for a game that fills its nooks and crannies with period terminology, these upgrades are drawn with the thinnest of lines. The inverted pyramid printed on the board references various passages from the Pentateuch. I say the “Pentateuch” rather than the Torah; while the game prints its snippets in Romanized Hebrew, the book titles are straight out of the Greek. During setup these are covered by upgrade tiles, themselves untitled, but the presence of Hebrew scripture on the board still speaks to some intention for the game’s reconstruction of history.

The implication seems to be that we’re taking the author(s) of Ezra-Nehemiah at their word, that the scribal efforts they oversaw were occupied solely with preserving and transmitting the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as faithfully as possible. Modern theories, not to mention a lightly critical reading of these texts, indicate otherwise. Although most scholars agree that the Torah was compiled around the period the game presents, there are stark divergences over how its contents were negotiated into existence. This is hardly a straightforward source. These books are filled with superscriptions added by later authors to contextualize (and even recontextualize) various passages, interpolations that alter meanings, and intermeshed sources that upon being picked apart present conflicting accounts. Countless lifetimes have been spent translating, examining, and interpreting these books.

At times, Phillips and Macdonald seem to acknowledge this scholarship, even if that acknowledgement is veiled behind their game’s systems. One upgrade tile in particular stands out as an example. Like the rest of the game’s upgrades, it goes unnamed. Its in-game effect, however, speaks to the complicating factors behind Ezra-Nehemiah. As I mentioned earlier, at the end of each round all players must feed their workers lest they sacrifice two hard-earned victory points. But food is in short supply, possibly due to the famine that is afflicting the province. Anything that helps players meet their workers’ needs is worthwhile. Hence the upgrade tile in question, which lets players bypass feeding their scribes by transforming them into the equivalent of Levites. What a boon! For any player emphasizing the scribal action, it’s a no-brainer.

This is also an event that occurs in the Book of Nehemiah, where levitical law is reinterpreted to give the priests a portion of the allotments reserved for the Levites. The author doesn’t merely present torah; he reinterprets it in such a way that favors his social caste. Many scholars draw a direct line from this act of reinterpretation to the disillusionment with the priests that fills the second half of the Book of Zechariah and the Book of Malachi. Both in game terms and in the text, this is no minor adjustment. It’s a volley in an ongoing class war.

It’s hard to determine whether this tile is intended as a reference to this ecclesiastical overstep. Despite its similarity to an event from the text of Ezra-Nehemiah, it’s wholly possible that Phillips and Macdonald stumbled into the parallel by accident. Further complicating this portrait, there are upgrades aplenty to select from, and not all of them are so readily mapped onto passages from the text. Another tile removes the need to feed laborers. Is this a reference to one of Nehemiah’s principal doctrinal innovations, the merging of the Year of Fallow with the Year of Forgiveness? Is the game espousing Jubilee? Textually, Nehemiah is a canny governor who shrewdly navigates the antagonism between laborers and landowners by transforming their conflicting obligations into a shared burden. Without the benefit of explanatory notes or titled upgrades, it’s impossible to determine whether these parallels are deliberate or fanciful.

The action system gives a sense of repeating growth.

This absence of clarity extends to the remainder of the design. Certain touches are deftly communicated, even belabored, while others go missing.

One of the best examples is the game’s action system. Each turn, players deploy a single card to their player mat and then use their color-coded banners to strengthen their chosen action. Over the course of a full round, represented as a seven-day week, six of these cards will be deployed in this manner.

As gameplay, Phillips and Macdonald have struck upon something undeniably clever. Even simple actions are burdened by long-term considerations. While a mason excels at rebuilding the city walls, his banners will linger across future turns, potentially intruding into your efforts at rebuilding the temple or preaching torah. The same goes for others, such as teachers, singers, jewelers, and so forth, who are strong in one arena but flimsy in others. Better-rounded individuals, such as gatherers, musicians, and lookouts, are less restricted. They don’t go as far in strengthening the action you’re taking right now, but may contribute more to different actions on future rounds.

This has two profound effects on gameplay. The first is that players are encouraged to diversify their activities, at least to some degree. While it’s possible (and probably necessary) to specialize, becoming a builder or a priest (or a different kind of priest!), a successful approach requires players to undertake a little bit of everything. There’s an opportunistic edge to Ezra and Nehemiah, a race to claim the most appealing walls, the best snippets of scripture, and the choicest placements in the temple. Unlike some games about scriptural topics, it’s pleasingly earthy.

The second outcome of the action system is that everybody naturally grows more efficacious over the course of the week. Then the Sabbath arrives, the game’s term for the end-of-round stuff where you gather additional resources, feed your people, score some points, and reset your board. This cycle repeats three times in total, each more fine-tuned than the one before. You’re effectively building your action-optimizing engine three times over. Where most games produce this crescendo only once, Ezra and Nehemiah swells over and over again, walking you through a process of becoming that grows more rewarding with each repetition.

But this emphasis on the passage of time and a national Sabbath makes the game’s omissions all the more apparent. It isn’t only that the history of the early Second Temple Period is simplified; it’s unthinkable that it wouldn’t be. Rather, it’s that the complexities have been reduced to such a degree that one begins to suspect that certain details have been willfully omitted for the sake of making the story glint a little more brightly.

Improving my camp.

I’ll give two examples, one more significant than the other.

First, the insignificant. Playing Ezra and Nehemiah, one might miss how much of a role the passage of time plays in this tale. The game features three named heroes and two prophets: Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, the major figures from the tradition of Ezra-Nehemiah, and Haggai and Zechariah from their own prophetic texts. These serve different in-game purposes. The first three are the foundational upgrades of the scribal action, offering minor upgrades and enabling access to better tiles, while the prophets provide shifting goalposts that players strive to hit with their religious observances.

In each case, these are presented as unified contemporaries who speak with one voice. Except many of them were neither contemporaries nor even particularly united. In Ezra-Nehemiah, Zerubbabel is an earlier governor and messiah figure thanks to his descent from the House of David; when prophecies about his ascent to the throne go unfulfilled, Haggai supplants his priority with that of the high priest Joshua. Ezra only comes onto the scene later, multiple generations after the initial resettlement of Jerusalem. In fact, so much time had passed since the governorship of Zerubbabel that its gap was wider than the span between the city being sacked by Babylon and its eventual resettlement. We’re skipping over material like a stone over water.

It isn’t only timescales that get compressed. The sources often differ on particulars of theology. Many of these differences are minor, distinctions of emphasis rather than outright disagreements. But not always. Where Ezra-Nehemiah portrays the defenses of Jerusalem as a crucial part of its three-fold restoration, Zechariah envisions a future in which the nations of the world clamor to a Zion shielded by Hashem’s holy fire. As a result, he openly commands that the walls of Jerusalem should never be rebuilt.

Again, these are minor issues, necessary omissions for the sake of clarity. Like nearly all historical board games, Ezra and Nehemiah plays loose with certain details for the sake of coherent gameplay. We’re playing a game, not reading a chronology of the Achaemenid Dynasty and its intersections with Jewish holy books.

But other lacunae rankle precisely because they loom so large in the tradition of Ezra-Nehemiah yet go missing from Phillips and Macdonald’s telling.

I won’t bore you with every detail, but major portions of these texts deal with groups that are marginalized by their protagonists, often under threat of violence. During the initial reconstruction of the temple, the “people of the land” — the author’s pejorative term for the local Israelites and Judahites that remained in the territory rather than being deported to Babylon — offer their assistance and are roughly turned away, sparking a centuries-long sectarian grudge between Jews and Samaritans. These conflicts occupy much of the narrative, ranging from neighboring provinces petitioning their Persian overlords to block the rebuilding of Jerusalem to outright attempts at assassination and battle. When Nehemiah decides to billet his laborers within the walls of Jerusalem, it speaks to problems both abroad and at home. Abroad, because those laborers were under threat of being raided by Yehud’s provincial neighbors. At home, because the people responsible for the task of restoring Jerusalem were normally too poor to occupy the secure portions of the city.

Sing songs! Clap hands!

While these pressures are certainly ripe for gamification, they’re the least of Ezra-Nehemiah’s troublesome subject matter. The culminating passages of the texts revolve around Ezra’s scandalized reaction to the intermarriage between returnees from Babylon and the people of the land. Despite their shared heritage, these newly installed leaders use the threat of Persian arms to command landowners to divorce their “impure” wives and children. It’s a sentence of deprivation and likely death. The governor’s court is purged. Families are torn apart.

As was the case with Nehemiah’s rather expansive application of Levitical support codes, Ezra’s efforts at ethnic cleansing represent a twisting of earlier laws that mediated Israelite exogamy. Those laws established prohibitions against intermarriage with select groups or because of certain behaviors, but also laid out methods for welcoming non-Israelites into the Covenant. Ezra applies a harsher hand, adjudicating those prohibitions to apply to anybody that doesn’t fit into his regime’s objectives.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. There are ample traditions both within the Hebrew Bible and in the later historical record that show that not everybody was on board with these efforts. One of the best textual examples is the Book of Ruth. Written contemporaneously with Ezra-Nehemiah, it operates as exogamic propaganda, celebrating the Moabite heritage of its titular character in her role as the great-grandmother of King David. Where Ezra emphasized a cleanliness of bloodlines, other authors offered a range of contrasting opinions on issues of intermarriage and the Covenant.

To be clear, I’m not saying that these omissions ought to have been the focus of Ezra and Nehemiah. Rather, my disappointment stems from the game’s pedigree. This is the same publisher that gave us Bobby Hill’s excellent Hadrian’s Wall, a game that managed to highlight not only the builders, patricians, actors and gladiators who sprang up in the wake of Roman Imperial projects, but also the people on the fringes, the so-called barbarians, the slaves, the rank-and-file soldiers. It’s within Garphill’s reach to publish games that not only treat history as icon-laden wallpaper, but as topics worthy of entangling with messy realities.

Ironically, the game already operates under the assumption that reality is messier than some chroniclers would have us believe. That’s thanks to its default play mode. We are, after all, competing to rebuild Jerusalem. While the game presents a simplified, perhaps even whitewashed narrative, one that harmonizes its disparate authorial perspectives and discards the central theses of Ezra-Nehemiah so thoroughly that it erases entire groups of castoffs, we are not, at root, placed on the same side. If we were, why would we squabble over who scores which points?

This raises a question the game leaves unanswered. Who are we within this fiction? Leaders, surely. Scribes. Priests. Patriarchs. Governors. Prophets. In those roles, we are set against one another, but only insofar as we pursue the same objectives. What a missed opportunity. There’s a version of Ezra and Nehemiah that peels into this complex history, that portrays some players as structuring power in a newly-minted court while others defy their authority. Some might safeguard the Torah, while others produce the purges of Ezra-Nehemiah and others still write Ruth. These players would be allies, standing against threats to their survival, but would operate as rivals as well, visionaries with conflicting perceptions of Zion.

Instead, Ezra and Nehemiah strips its subject matter to the bone, erasing both the external threats and the internal divisions. What remains is principally mechanical rather than ideological or even religious. We are here to clear rubble, pile stones, burn wood, and transcribe text. We are opponents with no indication as to why we stand in opposition.

Scribal work translates into a variety of upgrades.

As I noted at the outset, Ezra and Nehemiah leaves me conflicted. As a board game, it’s full of deft touches. While somewhat overburdened by exceptions and iconography, it offers a compelling and playable glimpse at a place and time many of its players will know little about. Its sense of escalation between weeks is unparalleled.

But it’s also so uninterested in questions of historicity that it becomes something worse than incurious — it becomes bland. Despite some occasional hints that its authors are aware of modern biblical scholarship, it never produces anything resembling real insight. This would hardly even qualify as a course for youths — at least then somebody might try to explain the text’s cruelty. Or explain it away.

Still, I don’t want to sell Ezra and Nehemiah short. Much to my relief, it never stoops to supersessionism; nobody ambles onto the stage to declare that the messiah is Jesus rather than Zerubbabel or Cyrus. And it is entirely playable. More than once, it’s paved the way for my gaming group to suffer through a course synopsis of the Second Temple Period thanks to a certain loudmouthed professor of religion. Maybe that’s enough for some. For me, I wish it had shown more dedication.

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