Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.

And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024.

Grays and Reds closing in.

In his pitch letter to Henry Saalfield of the Saalfield Game Company, Vonnegut talked up his design, as one does when trying to interest a publisher into taking more than a cursory glance at something you’ve spent the past year testing on the neighborhood kids. “It has enough dignity and interest, I think, to become the third popular checkerboard game,” he wrote. “The game would, I’m quite sure, satisfy the faculty of West Point as a tactical demonstrator.”

I’m not sure about that part, but GHQ does have a certain depth of place to it. The shorthand is that GHQ is to WWII what chess is to the Medieval battlefield. Where chess speaks to feudal realities — expendable serfs, riders who exploit openings rather than dash themselves against spears, the weirdly militarized influence of the church — GHQ proposes its own axioms.

Your goal is to destroy the enemy’s headquarters, thus decapitating their command structure and presumably ending the conflict, although in practice sessions tend to conclude in surrender a good dozen turns before that happens. The principal delineation is between infantry and artillery. There are different forms of each archetype — mechanized infantry move faster, heavy artillery lob their shells farther — but everything on the field can be sorted into one of those two categories.

These unit types operate according to distinct rules. Infantry are flexible, moving and capturing opposing pieces first by engaging with them, their little arrows — which Vonnegut’s early notes evocatively call their “business end,” calling to mind the barrel of a rifle — pointing toward one another to indicate their engaged status, and then, with the assistance of a second infantry unit, flanking and destroying the piece. One can practically hear the “Find-Fix-Flank-Finish” of 20th-century infantry drills being boxed into one’s ears. Artillery, on the other hand, is lumbering but destructive. These pieces rotate their barrels along fixed axes, creating zones of destruction that, if not swiftly vacated, will demolish every opposing piece along the line of their plunging fire. Unsurprisingly, artillery is achingly vulnerable along every avenue they aren’t currently aiming at, providing little inroads for canny infantry divisions to exploit.

A proper defensive line, insofar as I can tell.

It’s funny, the way we look at chess and forget that these knights and bishops and pawns and doddering royalty were once the thematic side of the hobby. It takes something like GHQ to snap that historical distance into focus.

Here’s an example. The most potent of Vonnegut’s pieces is the airborne infantry, capable of dropping onto any open space on the board, but only if they begin their move on your back row. As soon as they’re deployed onto the board, the airborne make themselves an ongoing threat simply by sitting there. Unless you’re looking to allow some crucial artillery pieces to be captured, you soon screen your flanks and rear, carefully positioning infantry around your cannons so that enemy airborne can’t take them out on a whim. It only takes the smallest opening for a bold commander to shatter the composition of an entire front with the right drop. But then, as soon as they’re on the ground, airborne make a target of themselves. They’re as flimsy as regular infantry, and often worth a sacrificed unit or two to capture. So the game turns briefly into a clash of kill and rescue missions, one side racing their mechanized units forward in an effort to clip their rival’s wings, the other slipping their boys back across the lines where they can be outfitted and dropped once more.

As vignettes go, that’s a shocking degree of evocation for a game that predates Risk or Diplomacy. It’s also only the first of a few small touches that feel commonplace now but were downright innovative in 1956. As Engelstein’s commentary points out, GHQ may well contain the world’s first instance of zone-of-control rules. Once engaged, infantry are stuck in place; they can withdraw to a non-engaged space, but cannot, for instance, sidle through fire to engage and destroy another unit. The board, too, feels dynamic in a way that slots into the tradition of abstract wargames. About midway into a session, when a tangle of units has been arrayed and overlapping fields of fire emanate from various artillery pieces, it isn’t hard to imagine some mid-century grognard investing in a plotting rod to nudge his pieces across the grid.

It’s also so very Vonnegut. Years before Billy Pilgrim manifested as his coping mechanism for the horrors he witnessed in the Ardennes and during the firebombing of Dresden, here he was designing a game that drew on his experience as a spotter for the 106th Infantry Division. It’s a game rooted in a particular military doctrine, one where most casualties were not inflicted by tanks or planes, but by distant cannons. While the game’s airborne units are flashy and threatening, it’s the roving fields of fire that shape this battlefield.

The included materials are a delight.

That, too, strikes me as the proper way to consider GHQ. Vonnegut’s antiwar stance crystallized as U.S. involvement deepened in Vietnam, and it’s natural to wonder if the older Vonnegut set aside GHQ not only out of disappointment with Saalfield’s lack of interest but also because its maneuvers and bombardments cut too close to the bone. The author had been shelled by the Germans in the Ardennes, strafed by the R.A.F. on Christmas Eve in the boxcar that carried him to Stalag IV-B, and then, while performing hard labor for his captors, as he wrote it, “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. My grandfather was a bomber squadron commander in that same war’s Pacific Theater, and while he hated the pointlessness and absurdity of war, he never shed that portion of himself that appreciated the skills he had developed, the knowledge of aviation and bombers and which segments of a bridge were most vulnerable to demolition. But he also screamed in his sleep and suffered flashbacks in which his plane was going down again and exited the exam room for a deep breath whenever a Japanese patient came into his office. He was both men.

In that regard, GHQ is worthwhile for the same reason that any beloved author’s lesser-read books are worthwhile, because they offer a few more hours in the company of this person who has brought wisdom and thoughtfulness and beauty into our lives. Engelstein reproduces Vonnegut’s notes, typed and handwritten alike, providing a window into his version of what we would call the development process. We see the designer grappling with how to explain infantry engagements, the way his later efforts double in length and provide gameplay examples, the gradual clarifications to his terminology. It’s technical in a way that his novels are not, but that doesn’t make it any less his.

If anything, there are familiar touches: the billowing smoke clouds of an artillery impact, redolent of his illustrative style; little asides scratched out and replaced with more concise expressions; precise pencil slashes where the author has decided to try his phrasing again. Perhaps most of all, it’s the density of it all, the lived-in-ness, the semi-autobiographical touches. Thanks to the game’s authorship, when an infantry piece is shelled and removed from the game, this is no mere abstraction, or not only abstraction. It is the 106th Infantry Division being blown to pieces and having over 6,000 men captured in the span of a few days. It is those same men traveling via unmarked rail cars that drew strafing fire. It is those men working themselves ragged in a malt syrup factory and getting caught in an Allied atrocity. It is the same absurdity and pointlessness that would cause Billy Pilgrim to become unstuck in time and find himself among creatures who witnessed the death of the universe but could do nothing to stop it.

Artillery under threat, infantry under bombardment.

Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming.

But that isn’t what happened. In our time and place, GHQ is a serviceable game. It suffers from the same endgame as many modern abstracts, packed with fiddly little moves that amount to very little. We would write that it could have used a good developer. But that doesn’t really matter. Instead, we get the second-best outcome. Because GHQ isn’t only a board game. It’s a piece of history that has come unstuck and traveled from its time to ours. It’s a surprising ludic evocation — of the awe reserved for the airborne, of the terror of crawling fire, of the sheer casualties inflicted in such a war — authored by somebody who went through it. It’s another hour or two with an old friend long passed. So it goes.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.