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Bios:Bugs
My daughter wants to be an entomologist. Normally we’d chalk it up to passing whimsy — she’s only eight, after all — but that’s been her consistent answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” for something like four years now. She loves the things. Potato bugs, caterpillars, earthworms, she’ll dig ’em out of the ground and care for them, but only for a while before insisting they need to be returned home lest they perish in a mason jar.
Bios: Mesofauna, designed by Phil Eklund (yes, that one), acts as a sister title to Bios: Megafauna, this time focusing on bugs rather than ten-meter sloths. It treats its insect playthings with significantly less gentleness than my kid.
More Than Merely a Civilization Game
When I complain about civgames, my harping comes from a place of deep affection. It’s just that civgames tend to be very good at one model of how civilizations flourish, and very bad at every other model. If it isn’t steady border expansion and technological growth, with very little diversity or ideological synthesis, it doesn’t usually rate. Because really, how many civilizations have spanned from remote BCE to far CE without redefining who they are? Without changing languages, dynasties, ethics, goals? I’ll give you a clue: not many. Even fewer were captained by Sid Meier’s immortal and nuke-happy Gandhi.
Enter Phil Eklund and Jon Manker’s Bios: Origins. As the third in the Bios trilogy, set after the multi-cellular life of Genesis and the prehistoric beasts of Megafauna, Origins is a civgame right down to certain familiar trappings. Tech tracks, cities, and special resources are all present and accounted for. But these trappings are only part of the story. What makes Origins special is the way it answers the questions that other civgames don’t even begin to think about. Questions like who you are — you, the player — what you want, and how very different peoples and civilizations can prosper across the ages.
The Future of Pax, the Future of Us
The Pax Series has always been a treasure trove for those who could spend their entire night clicking on blue words in Wikipedia. It might be the impact of Mormon timber on Mexican politics, Bukharan Jews upsetting the commercial balance of Afghanistan, Isabella of Castile’s nuptials unleashing her noted repressiveness, or how Immanuel Kant’s lofty ideals don’t ship much beef when it comes to the practical business of manumitting slaves. These are more than names on cards. They’re gameplay effects, watersheds, even inside jokes. History’s peculiarities as a box of toys, as a magnifying glass, as a polemic, as a gentle ribbing.
With Matt Eklund’s Pax Transhumanity trading the historical for the speculative, it seemed natural to ask whether it could retain its sense of wonder, reverence, and playfulness for the triumphs and foibles of the past. Turns out, there was no cause for doubt. The strengths of the series are not only present, but emphasized, resulting in one of the most important science-fiction board games ever crafted. And it has everything to do with how it uses those cards to tell unexpected — and even profound — stories about where our species might go from here.
Pax Polemical
Phil Eklund’s Pax Series has always sparked controversy, although never to the extremes of Pax Emancipation. Its mere announcement prompted concerns ranging from the assumption that it would defend the practice of slavery (it doesn’t) to wondering if Phil’s libertarian worldview would color the game’s approach to history (duh). The game itself was almost secondary.
In person, there’s nothing secondary about it. Pax Emancipation stomps into the room with all the bashfulness of a rhinoceros, demands everybody’s attention, and proudly proclaims its views on a whole range of topics. And then, like an actual rhinoceros, it makes a big steaming mess on your carpet.
Bios: Mega-fun-a
One of the most-repeated criticisms of Phil Eklund’s designs is that they hew closer to simulations than proper games, complete with persnickety rules exceptions, icon-strewn layouts, and overly dense rulebooks crammed with scientific and historical footnotes. And that’s to say nothing of the gameplay itself. If Eklund feels that the outcome of the Renaissance was due to some nebulous conflagration of commerce, class, religion, and imperialism, then by hook or by crook his game on the topic is going to contain a nebulous conflagration of commerce, class, religion, and imperialism.
At first glance, the second edition of Bios: Megafauna — which Eklund co-designed with Andrew Doull and Jon Manker — appears determined to prove the stereotype, with a rulebook liable to make even a veteran gamer’s mind wander somewhere between defining Cheshire cat mutations and the sprawling glossary where certain rules have been sent to wither in obscurity. And don’t even get me started on the mental gymnastics necessary to forge your way through that first learning game.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that this just might be Phil Eklund’s most accessible game since… scratch that. Most accessible, full stop.
From Soup to Seaweed
Two of my favorite games by Phil Eklund, Greenland and Neanderthal, also happen to be two of my favorite games full stop. One of the reasons is their willingness to employ a particular scope, which in turn gives their subject matters room to breathe. Greenland, for example, takes place over the course of approximately four hundred years. Neanderthal sprawls over four hundred years per turn. Both are about a lot of things, from the way cultures or brains develop in response to environmental pressures to the profound unfairness of how a group might rise or fall into extinction through sheer luck. They’re narrative masterclasses, micro history seminars, and compelling play experiences rolled into one.
Bios: Genesis takes this broad view and stretches it, taking place over the course of, oh, four billion years. That isn’t a typo. Billion. Four of them. This is a game that will cast you as primordial soup, single-celled bacterium, all the way up to the grandeur of sea stars and trilobites. As a next step in Eklund’s “survival” series, it’s a bold one.
It’s also a huge pain in the ass to learn.
Here I Stand II: Renaissance Gone Wild
![In Old French, "Renaissance" translates roughly into "before [they] knew to look straight at the camera."](https://thurotdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/1-header-renaissance-which-is-kind-of-a-big-deal.jpg?w=604&h=240 "In Old French, \"Renaissance\" translates roughly into \"before [they] knew to look straight at the camera.\"")
Let’s say you’re making a game about the Renaissance. Not merely a slice of it. Not patronage of the arts, the rise of science, Florentine or Venetian city councils, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, trade routes and the tension between East and West, or the exploration of the New World. I mean all of it. The entire thing. The whole loaded ball of wax. Where do you start? Where do you finish? Perhaps most importantly, who are you, the player?
Pax Renaissance is a game with aspirations no less grand than capturing the entire ideological struggle of the Renaissance, the churn of ideas about religion, state, art, science, law, and every other little thing that produced Western culture as we now see it. Which isn’t actually all that surprising, given its pedigree. Both Pax Porfiriana and Pax Pamir were ambitious games as well, functioning as statements and simulations and playthings with equal mettle. This is the broadest topic yet for the Pax series, however, and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the entire thing going up in flames as surely as Girolamo Savonarola’s attempt at governing Florence.
And yet, while Pax Renaissance is forced to make a few compromises in service of its gameplay, the final result is nothing short of a triumph.
The Great Game Plus
In more ways than one, Pax Pamir is essentially my Platonic Ideal of a board game. It was even my favorite game of 2015. It’s deep and multifaceted, yet lean. Political, but careful to prevent alliances from lasting more than a few moments. Mean, but… well, it’s mean. That’s a good thing. Victory in Pax Pamir nearly always meant you had stripped everyone else’s aspirations of ruling Afghanistan to the bone, one assassination and taxation and military campaign at a time. Ruthless.
And from now on, I’ll never again play Pax Pamir without its expansion, Khyber Knives. Let me tell you why.
A Great Game about The Great Game
In the second quarter of the 19th century, the crown jewel of the British Empire was unexpectedly placed under threat when the Russian Empire began a period of aggressive expansion into Central Asia. India had been the linchpin of the British Empire’s interests abroad for nearly a hundred and fifty years, so the prospect of a Russian frontier bypassing the khanates and the Afghan emirate that had previously stood as a buffer zone between the British Raj and the Russian Empire sparked a flurry of activity. Spies, armies, diplomats, and traders poured into the region. Just like that, the tribal leaders of Afghanistan found themselves squeezed between two desperate empires.
Welcome to what came to be known as The Great Game.
On the Origin of the Dice Game
By this point in their evolution, most dice games have become kindly creatures. Gentle, even. They want you to have a good time, to roll some bones and chuckle at your fortunes, to relax and have a straightforward and undemanding evening. They may have descended from wilder ancestors, but they’ve become tame, domesticated beasts along the way.
Neanderthal, the prequel to Greenland, is anything but that sort of dice game. It doesn’t care about staying late. Nor does it plan on playing fair. It embraces player elimination — or, perhaps worse, making the unlucky player sit around for rounds at a time with nothing to do. It’s complicated, rough, talks loudly about sex at inappropriate moments, changes the rules halfway through, and sometimes slaps you on the back so hard that you end up with Dr. Pepper charring your sinuses. In short, it has no interest in seeking mainstream appeal. And that’s precisely why I find it so fascinating.
SPACE-BIFF! 