I remember the first time I felt doubt. It was the night my little sister was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. Mom figured it out at the grocery store — we’d been through this once before — and was sharp with us, but she let me buy a treat and for a while on the ride home everything seemed okay.

Then she said it. “I think Em has diabetes.”

There’s that pang even now. That lurch. Em was three. At home, we already had the equipment from my other sister’s diagnosis. The glucose monitor. The ketone strips. Mom was crying. Em was crying. I couldn’t tell which was worse, my mother’s grief or my baby sister’s wails. I went upstairs to my room and shut the door and prayed so hard it felt like my stomach would roll into a ball and fall out. Please, I said. Please, Heavenly Father, give it to me instead.

Nothing. No miracle. I didn’t really expect one, even as a ten-year-old. But no comfort, either. I cried, then went into the bathroom and nearly vomited, then crawled into bed and cried some more. When I looked out from the cocoon I’d built around myself, there was the treat from the store. Sugar. Something my sister would have to avoid from now on. I threw it in the trash and fled back to my blankets and that’s where the memory stops.

The Great Commission, designed by Simon Amadeus Pillardo and Paul Snuggs, is sometimes about doubt. Not often, but sometimes, and not always in a way the game seems to understand. Set during the early years of the Christian Church — strictly speaking before there were Christians or churches as we conceptualize them today — it is preoccupied with the evangelizing mission that Jesus commanded after his resurrection. Or rather, a particular interpretation and portrayal of that mission.

My little church of Corinth.

Soli Ludi

But maybe you don’t want to hear about The Great Commission’s particular interpretation of the great commission. Maybe you want to hear about how the cards move, what function they serve, which position on the table they ought to occupy. The game’s mechanical objectives. How to win and how to lose. The basics alone.

Very well. I can oblige.

It begins with a church. If played with multiple players, then multiple churches. Leaders, too, and members of the congregation, drawn at random from a generous pool that becomes the foundation for a deck called “the world.” This jumble is one of the game’s greatest strengths, as aleatory and prophetic as thrown lots, dictating both your congregation’s potential and its weaknesses. A church in Caesarea will be a testy proposition for Jewish converts, while one in Ephesus will be haunted by extra trouble cards. Well-known figures like Paul and Mary Magdalene rub shoulders with those you might have to remind yourself about. For a dweeb like me, who spent his doctoral work focusing on the women of the period, it’s nice to see faces like Lydia and Priscilla represented.

And, of course, there’s your congregation. You begin with six members. For each player, twelve more have been shuffled into the world deck, eagerly awaiting your door-knockers to proclaim the word. This is the backbone of your labors. In game terms, your tableau. Every card is distinct. One session might see your fledgling group staffed by a linguist, a noble, a carpenter, a slave, a Herodian, a Sadducee. Not the most natural of friends. Indeed, there’s a distinction between Jewish and Gentile members, along with the potential for some mild rugburn between the two.

That congregation won’t stay the same for long, God willing. Because while there are distractions aplenty, your ultimate mission is to send your members out to convert the cards of the world deck. Mechanically, this is simple enough. By exhausting some of your members, you accrue a certain quantity of faith, then draw between one and five cards from the deck and check their resistance to conversion. If your faith matches or exceeds that number, swell! Those cards will be added to your congregation on the next turn. And if not, they’re shuffled back into the world. Maybe you’ll get them next time.

I mentioned distractions. There are plenty. Your church’s faith is always waning, necessitating constant prayer to keep your reservoir topped off. Meanwhile, a constant trickle of troubles appear from their own deck to afflict you. Troubles are initially played face-down and must first be revealed — “discerned,” in game terms — and then discarded (“intercessed”), a multi-step process under even the best circumstances. But this trickle threatens to become a flood as you recruit new members. In one of the game’s more human touches, converts may bring troubles with them. Sickness, pride, the occasional demonic possession. One of my friends has drawn the racism card in every single session. Solved it, too. We keep wondering where he’s been all this time.

The Great Commission functions solitaire, presenting your church as a lone warning beacon in the darkness. In multiplayer it tells a different story. Prayers can be offered for churches in far-off places. More materially, they can be sent aid in the form of members and activity cards. Blessings, the game’s ultimate power-ups, might attach spiritual gifts to your members or trigger powerful one-time effects. This hints at the early church’s communal nature more than stating it outright, but it’s a welcome inclusion all the same.

What else is there to say? The Great Commission is a functional game. It’s better than I expected, if not especially mind-expanding. The anxiety of its evangelizing, the pressure when too many troubles stack up too quickly, they are keenly felt at every point.

So, too, is the potential of your congregation. From a purely mechanical perspective, this is a game about hunting for and enacting synergies, and there are plenty of offerings to consider. My priestess discerns the troubles that afflict our congregation, then our soldier smooths over any internal disputes. Our city clerk informs us of what awaits atop the world deck, then our innkeeper uses his talent for hospitality to make our guests feel comfortable in the prayer circle. Our Nazirite prays to encourage a worn-out innovator, who then travels to one of our sister churches to lend assistance.

The overriding sensation is that of being simultaneously beleaguered and hopeful. When a member of your congregation dies, their loss stings. Provided you don’t just resurrect them, anyway. When somebody comes down with a demonic possession, it’s a real pain to cast the thing into some swine. When your entire congregation is tuckered out and you can hardly spare the actions to let them rest… well, yeah, that’s not the most exciting problem in the world. But it’s a relatable problem.

Do I like The Great Commission? Sure. Is it — pause for effect — fun? I suppose. Do I have hangups with it? Of course. But it’s significantly harder to talk about those than to detail how the game operates. But I need to try. I don’t think I would feel right with myself otherwise.

So. I’ll try.

One of the biggies.

Exe-History and Eise-History

Spend any time in Biblical history circles and there are some terms you’ll hear. Two of those terms, exegesis and eisegesis, are particularly loaded. Both derive from the Greek word hegeisthai, literally “to track” but more figuratively “to guide” or “to lead,” which is incidentally also the probable root of “hegemony.” Their prefixes, meanwhile, are opposites. Ex means “out of,” eise means “into.”

Summary: exegesis means “guide out of,” while eisegesis means “guide into.” When you practice exegesis, the idea is that you’re letting the text guide you. Practicing eisegesis, on the other hand, means you’re guiding the text.

Right away, though, we run into a problem. Because it turns out that reading ancient texts is hard. For one thing, very few people actually bother. It’s more common, for obvious reasons, to read translations of translations, mediated through translators and interpolators and tradents and critics and theologians and heretics and amanuenses, all in a long line of transmission, all of whom have left their own fingerprints and ink-smudges on the book that has come to sit on one’s bedside table.

Since we’re spending time in Biblical history circles, it also becomes swiftly clear that everybody thinks they’re doing exegesis while everybody else is doing eisegesis. The text is not one thing. It’s a sprawling, complex, often contradictory Rorschach test. And like a Rorschach test, the image it presents is completely obvious to whomever is describing it in the moment — and often only to them.

Take, for example, the Rapture, the end-times event when dead Christians will be resurrected and those still alive will be taken up to meet Jesus. Living in the United States, one might assume that the Rapture is this universally agreed-upon event. It’s the entire basis of those freaky Left Behind books, for heaven’s sake! But the Rapture is a fairly recent innovation, dating only as far back as the 1830s, and most Christian denominations don’t agree with it. For many Christians, the perspective of Evangelical Protestants qualifies as light heresy, potentially harmless but nevertheless wrongheaded. Show two Christians the exact same passage in 1 Thessalonians, even from the same translation, and you might hear two totally different perspectives on its meaning. Now ask them whether they’re performing exegesis or eisegesis. Of course, nobody’s going to cop to the latter. Both are only reading the words in context. It’s their opposite member who’s inserting their cultural assumptions into scripture.

To be clear, these theoretical exegetes are not emblematic of all Christians. Many are humble and curious and willing to hear out their fellow interpreter. Nor is this to argue that Biblical history is hopelessly subjective. Only that it’s very hard, and very slow, and very much about the practice of doubting one’s sources, convictions, and received traditions. Above all, it’s challenging. Because if we look into the past and see only ourselves, we aren’t really looking into the past. We’re looking into the mirror and seeing ourselves in cosplay.

When it comes to an artifact like The Great Commission, I mentioned earlier that it presents a particular interpretation of Early Christianity. As with all interpretations, some details don’t matter. If I were to look at the illustrations and gripe that the Roman commander’s cingulum isn’t drawn exactly as they were manufactured, that wouldn’t be a substantive critique. It’s clear that this game was crafted with care and attention, that it hopes to convey something true about how these events played out.

But that portrayal is looking through the glass darkly. Or, perhaps more accurately, through the mirror of what (some) modern Christian churches look like. They’re churches, for one thing, urban and cosmopolitan in nature, with congregations of integrated converts from a wide range of backgrounds. To some degree, this is an accurate portrayal. The early movement that became Christianity was, in some places, a rather diverse cast, cutting across boundaries of class, culture, and gender.

In other senses, it doesn’t quite hit the mark. There’s none of the domesticity of those early house-churches, none of the sense that these were some of the few spaces in the Roman world principally led by women. Nor are they especially Jewish, despite the presence of Herodians and Pharisees. The issues they face are more modern than ancient, the persecutions they endure are more organized than they were in this period, and there are references to heresies that will not exist for centuries to come.

Now, these are critiques I hesitate to offer. We’re talking about a board game, after all, and a slender one at that. Of course there are omissions. Not everything can be included. But these churches, with their member-by-member emphasis on an evangelizing mission, their close-knit collaboration between far-flung congregations, and their siloed internal problems, present a rather cozy vision of early Christianity indeed. There are disputations, of course, but they’re troubles to be resolved at your church’s earliest convenience. There’s no such thing as, say, my church and your church having a falling out over some fledgling issue of doctrine.

The irony is that ancient Christianity looked very much like modern Christianity — complicated. Even in its earliest stages, this was a tangle of competing ideas and beliefs. Despite thinking it’s sticking to “just the facts,” the authors of The Great Commission put down stakes. It’s more Pauline than Petrine, more Evangelical than Catholic, more masculine than feminine, more Gentile than Jewish, more ideological than material, more futurist than apocalyptic.

Look, I’m not saying I don’t like the game. On the whole, I’ve enjoyed my time with The Great Commission. I would even use it to demonstrate certain things about the period. But those demonstrations would come with long list of qualifiers. This is a presentation of an ideal, scrubbed of the messiness that makes the period such a thrill to uncover but also so uncomfortable for those of us who came to the history because of our faith. It’s a presentation that some folks will look at and, thinking that they’re performing exegesis, say, “Yes, this is how it was,” without realizing that it’s eisegesis all the way down. Much like everything else.

Because, no, this isn’t how it was. It was many more things than this. It was larger, and wilder, and bloomed with many more flowers and fruits and, yes, poisonous mushrooms, too. But to talk about that, we would need a very different game indeed, one that is a little more questing and a little less willing to believe the stories it tells about itself.

Print this on vinyl stickers and slap it on your wall.

A Secular Sermon

When I started writing about The Great Commission, I said it was a game about doubt. That’s true. Only the doubts are always somebody else’s. They’re the doubts of the Greeks and the Jews in the world deck. They’re the doubts that lead the eunuch to demand baptism right this very instant. They’re the doubts that make for great pulpit pounders, sending shivers up everybody’s legs. But it’s doubt all the same. Because to ask somebody to believe the gospel you’ve brought, there’s no escaping that you’re also asking them to question theirs.

Sometimes a student will ask to meet with me. Usually, I can tell what’s coming. I have office hours for the usual stuff, help with papers or a master’s thesis, but these conversations require their own block of time. I’m happy to listen. That’s what it comes down to. Listening. Because even though they’re the ones asking me a question, what they really need is somebody who will sit with them for an hour. Just to hear what they have to say.

“How can you still believe?”

I’m as disappointing a believer as I am a teacher. Because, at that moment, what they want to hear is the answer. The thing that will resolve the doubts. But I don’t have that. I haven’t resolved the doubts. Most days, I don’t believe in anything divine. When I pray, I don’t expect an answer. Sometimes I think the only thing I’m good at is doubting.

Here’s what I do believe: we can make this world a beautiful place. We can feed the hungry. We can clothe the naked. We can visit the prisoner. And we never needed a Rapture to do it. But the people who insist on the Rapture are always coming up with explanations for why we don’t need to do those things. Reasons for the death penalty, or why women shouldn’t be allowed to control their own bodies, or why I need to worship the same runty emperor as them, or why we shouldn’t fund school lunches for starving children, or why it’s okay to shoot priests in the head with pepper balls. Christian priests. My God. They tell me we’re being persecuted as Christians, but they always chase it down with a list of reasons why it’s not a big deal when the persecution comes from other Christians. Something about eisegesis, maybe.

More often than not, this is what those students tell me. It isn’t the complicated stuff in history that does it. Sure, that stuff is challenging. It doesn’t conform neatly to the words in the book. But what really tears them up — what tore me up — isn’t all that. It isn’t even my secret agenda to de-convert them from their childhood religion. (That’s a joke.) It’s the way the faithful, at least the loudest ones, can’t seem to handle the slightest strain. It’s the way they react with such venom to curiosity, to people who are on their side but not in the most traditional way, to those whose needs are out of step with their own. My students don’t ask, “How can I make the world fit together again?” They ask, “How can I fit into this church that won’t make room for me?” Whenever I write about religious board games, I receive death threats, among other things. “You’ll burn in hell.” Okay. “You let yourself lose your faith.” Correct. “You’re lucky we don’t do crusades anymore.” Aren’t we all. These notes never come from atheists. Never once from a Muslim. Always, every time, from followers of Jesus Christ.

When I play The Great Commission, there is a bright moment when the game is simultaneously at its best and at its worst. It’s when I look down at my congregation, all those members from a half-dozen backgrounds. Many faces, many hands, pulling toward the same goal. There’s a verse in Galatians that many scholars believe is an early baptismal formulation. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

I find that beautiful. Even now.

But you know what I find even more beautiful? The idea that we can coexist without the prerequisite of conversion. That we can be neither Christian nor nonbeliever, neither doctor nor working class, neither cis nor trans, and still treat one another with dignity and respect and an eye toward our mutual prosperity.

The Great Commission brushes fingers with the possibility. But it pulls back. In presenting these churches as mundane, common things, as fitting into that singular model — when it looks into the mirror and thinks the image staring back is as good as it gets — it stops short of revelation.

Amen.

A much bigger church than before.

Welp. That was pretty heavy for a board game review. But there it is. The Great Commission. It can be purchased from Word for Word Bible Comics for £34.99. Just be careful about the coins you exchange for it. I’ve heard some might have Caesar’s visage stamped on them.

A complimentary copy of The Great Commission was provided by the publisher.

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