Blog Archives
Winds of Change, Part One: Palestine
If you’re invested in historical board games, you’ve probably heard about Phil Eklund’s infamous essay defending British colonialism. Personally, the backlash against that essay was a pleasant surprise. Perhaps I had become numb to imperial apologetic. To me, the essay was merely the latest impressionable perspective in a century that had been meticulously prepared for selective memory. The notion that the British Empire was a gentle overlord has been a constant drumbeat across its tenure, from its earliest adventures in the New World to its participation in my generation’s quagmires in the Near East and Central Asia. Where other empires were vicious taskmasters, so the story goes, the British were invested in winning the hearts and minds of their colonial subjects.
That’s precisely the topic behind The British Way by Stephen Rangazas. This is the first official spinoff of Volkho Ruhnke’s now-formidable COIN Series. Rather than tackling a single conflict, The British Way functions as a folio series in a single box, covering four wars from 1945 to 1960. It has quickly become my favorite expression of the system. Which is why I intend to cover each of its conflicts separately. Today we’re looking at the first battle of the era: the Jewish insurgency against British rule in Mandatory Palestine.
The People Person’s People Power
Between its eleven volumes, two spinoffs, and a handful of spiritual successors, the COIN Series has covered a lot of ground over the past decade. It’s a series I’ve always appreciated for how it dusts the underappreciated corners of history for conflicts that are otherwise too unconventional for easy gamification. That said, it’s also a challenging series, both thematically and as player experiences, not least because of its unswerving dedication to force asymmetry. Perhaps that’s inevitable. It is, after all, dedicated to showing how small irregular forces can paralyze military juggernauts with their unpredictability and tendency to disappear into the countryside rather than trade blows with tanks and helicopters.
Somewhere along the way, the series morphed into a depiction of not only governments and insurgencies, but also popular movements. Kenneth Tee’s People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 leans into this more recent characterization. It’s also the simplest and most approachable the series has been since its second volume.
Slaying Probus
Ah, the third century. When men were men, women knew their place, and the Roman Empire was so tattered that the lifespan of its leaders was measured in months rather than years. Who wouldn’t want to be transported to those halcyon days?
If their previous design catalog is anything to go by, Wray Ferrell and Brad Johnson might volunteer. Time of Crisis and its expansion tackled the military anarchy of the third century with ease, highlighting the plagues, inflation, invasions, and civil war that were the hallmarks of the era. Their newest title, The Barracks Emperors, covers such similar ground that one might mistake it for another expansion.
In a Wooden Boat in the Shipping Lanes
Everybody’s racing to make the next half-hour CDG, both a testament to the staying power of Twilight Struggle and a play note that the thing had a tendency to drag on. The latest aspirant is Harold Buchanan’s Flashpoint: South China Sea. Buchanan, you might recall, is the designer Liberty or Death, the fifth volume in the lauded COIN Series, which for no specific reason remains the only volume I’ve never gotten around to writing about. South China Sea rather boldly, perhaps presumptuously, announces itself as volume one of the Flashpoint Series. It’s like the kids say: always be branding.
For what it’s worth, I do hope there’s a volume two. Although maybe not for the reasons one would expect.
Ole Snaggletooth Nevsky
Board games are fantastic at modeling complex situations. I suspect that just as music is the art of sound, film is the art of directing, and literature is the art of fantasy authors using italics to tell me when their characters are delivering moody internal monologues, board games are the art of reducing models to their most digestible format.
Volko Ruhnke is no stranger to setting cardboard and counters to this purpose. Best known for the COIN Series, which depicts asymmetrical insurgencies, revolutions, and ideological contests throughout history, Ruhnke has now delivered a second system. This one is called Levy & Campaign, its first volume is Nevsky, and it’s an exemplar of how to deploy incentives and constraints to teach us something about history.
Le Temps des Cerises
Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter was a lean, rangy filament of a game. After initially falling for its charms, I soon found its leanness and ranginess a little too emaciated, with not nearly enough muscle and fat beneath the skin. One of the reasons I play historical games, after all, is to see how the history is modeled, not to merely see it sketched out as the titles of locations and cards.
Enter Red Flag Over Paris. Designed by Frédéric Serval, it uses the system and leanness of Fort Sumter while still piling on, well, everything else. Its topic is the Paris Commune, the brief but fierce revolutionary outpouring that would prove so influential on Karl Marx — and become a stain on the early days of the French Third Republic.
Set Another One Afire
One of the things I value about the COIN Series, which stepped onto the scene back in 2012 with Volko Ruhnke’s Andean Abyss, is its ability to fill in the gaps of history. The Finnish Civil War was a bloody three-month conflict that left lingering scars for decades, yet it’s one of those wars that’s usually only mentioned in passing, more notable for how it impacted the foreign policies of its larger neighbors, especially Germany and Russia, rather than for the sovereign republic it ultimately birthed.
No longer! As the tenth volume in the Coin Series, All Bridges Burning is the first published design by VPJ Arponen. Never mind that. His confidence with the subject matter is evident in the game’s finest details. I’d even go so far as to call this one of the series’ most radical entries.
The Dignity and Indignities of Comanchería
Across the span of 1700 to 1875, the Comanche carved an empire into the American southwest roughly the size of modern-day Texas. Their instruments were both legendary and notorious: open-handed trade, remorseless warfare, unparalleled horsemanship. “Comanche” means “the people.” To outsiders, it came to signify “the lords of the plains.”
Comanchería, as their empire was called, would not survive. Between outbreaks of smallpox and cholera, the extermination of the great herds of buffalo, and continued incursions, the Comanche gave ground, then dwindled, then accepted the treaty that consigned them to a reservation. Far from the cataclysmic fall of a great empire, it was a succession of small cuts, gnawing infections, and inflicted indignities.
Joel Toppen’s Comanchería: The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire captures every excruciating detail. It is one of the finest historical games I have ever played. It also represents one of the hardest gaming experiences of my adult life.
It’s Pronounced Ver-sah-ay-LEES
Not to go all historian on anybody, but I’m going to say something that may prove contentious: matters of history are only settled when they stop mattering, whether through consensus or lack of interest. The corollary, of course, is that very little about history is ever settled. This is magnified when the topic occurred recently enough that people can trace a line from former circumstances to ongoing considerations. It isn’t hard to find examples. How often have you heard it said that slavery was sure terrible, but also a necessary evil? Or that Christopher Columbus shouldn’t be judged by present-day standards? Never mind that both statements can be torn to shreds. They aren’t said because they’re factual. They’re said because they point toward a moral framework that’s mutable. If yesterday’s suffering can be dismissed as necessary or chalked up to changing values, then today’s suffering can be similarly dismissed. It’s history as comfort food, carefully mashed so that no teeth are chipped and no stomachs are unsettled in the process of digestion.
The 1919 Treaty of Versailles no longer lingers in the historical vernacular, but experts in the field continue to debate its implications. We occupy a world shaped by its outcome, from modern political boundaries to the concept of a global governing body. Later conflicts, including the Second World War, may have been directly spurred by its approach to war reparations, and while the independence movements of the 20th century came of age after WWII, Versailles is where they were brought kicking and hollering into the world.
Which means that Mark Herman has now designed two games about shaping the past century through treaty-drafting. The first, Churchill, represents more recent agreements. But in its own way, Versailles 1919, which Herman co-designed with Geoff Engelstein, seems like the more relevant of the pair.
Colonial Struggle
Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta’s Imperial Struggle is a challenging game. In two senses, really. As a successor to the famous Twilight Struggle, it has significant boots to fill. As a meditation on the colonization of the wide world for the sake of empire — well, that’s a taller order in 2020 than in 2005, for better and for worse. It’s the sort of game that might easily spark a hundred think-pieces.
For my part, those dual challenges, heritage and setting, are the clearest lenses for framing what Matthews and Gupta have accomplished.
SPACE-BIFF! 