Blog Archives
Talking About Games: Against Repeatability
There’s a recurring series I write on Space-Biff! called New Year, Old Year, which looks back on the games highlighted in Best Weeks past and evaluates them from a more updated vantage. When I began writing it back in 2017, there were two purposes behind the series. The immediate function was prophylactic. I’m often asked whether this or that game has held up since its release. New Year, Old Year could function as a repository for keeping my readers updated. Also, sure, so I had something to link to instead of answering those questions over and over again.
On a more personal level, New Year, Old Year also functioned as a form of accountability. A gut-check on my own tastes and attitudes. It was valuable to look back on the lists I’d written years before. With the benefit of hindsight, it was easier to see where I’d steered wrong, the gaps in my recommendations, or where my initial enthusiasm had been misplaced. The series was a corrective. It helped me not only reevaluate previous titles, but approach the games I was playing and reviewing right now with some additional perspective.
But something happened last year. When the appointed time came around to write about Best Week 2021, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Something I’d left sitting on the windowsill for far too long had finally curdled.
Space-Cast! #29. Enduring Snake-Eyes
What’s the commonality between Shackleton’s voyage to the Antarctic, brain hemorrhages, and the virtue of watching R-rated movies? Today, it’s Amabel Holland’s Endurance, a board game about the strength of the human spirit in the face of abject misery. Join Dan and Amabel as we chat about this game’s difficult development, throwing out historical determinism, and why not every game should have a victory condition.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
They Survived
One of the big questions in wargame design is how one ought to simulate the range of possible outcomes. Take the Battle of the Bulge. Should a designer concede to playability by pretending that the German Ardennenfront could turn aside the Allied advance? Or should they instead presume that German victory could only be measured by some other metric, such as days or weeks of delay? Press a little deeper and you get questions about balance and historical determinism. Maybe, just maybe, we can rethink what it means to “win” in the first place.
That’s exactly what Amabel Holland has done with Endurance. Right from the outset, her rulebook warns that the survival of Ernest Shackleton and the twenty-seven members of his crew is not a historical given. Their escape, in her words, was “a fluke.” It shouldn’t have happened. It nearly didn’t happen. Roll the dice a hundred times in a hundred parallel simulations and it might never happen again.
That’s the first thesis behind Endurance, but it isn’t the most essential of them.
SPACE-BIFF! 