Monthly Archives: August 2020

Decolonizing Your Board Game Design

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Colonialism in board games has been a frequently touched-upon topic. Many mainstream hobby games like Puerto Rico and Catan have colonialist themes in varying levels of subtlety, and part of the progress towards a more open and inclusive tabletop community is excising these themes from future designs.

While most discussions of colonialism in board games are thematic dissections of already existing games, noticing problematic elements in unpublished game designs and removing them before the game is complete is more productive and something I feel more qualified to discuss; this article will go into “decolonizing” your designs.

Defining Colonialism Mechanically

Colonialism is a multifaceted topic that’s far beyond my knowledge level to discuss in full. However, in tabletop game design it’s easier to narrow down a definition – colonialism, as a game concept, justifies the concept that players can take control of areas that weren’t there originally and plunder its resources; there either aren’t preexisting inhabitants of these areas or these inhabitants don’t “deserve” to have them.

Avoiding colonialism in your board games in terms of picking a theme can be easily summarized as “don’t make a board game about the Scramble for Africa.” What’s more difficult to notice is mechanics that can easily, almost accidentally, express colonialism as a philosophy, even in more sanitized settings like fantasy or science fiction. This article will primarily focus on common mechanical expressions of colonialism and ideas of how they might be altered.

(This article is not an exhaustive list list of potentially fraught possible mechanics, just the ones that immediately sprang to mind while I was planning this.)

Exploration and Development

The idea of exploring a new world and building a civilization on it is a well-trod concept in tabletop games, with Catan being the best known. Many of these games aren’t colonialist explicitly, which is sort of the problem. These games show players a pristine map, uninhabited until right now, with no ethical reason preventing you from doing as you like to it.

Unfortunately, we cannot truly separate the content of a game from the ethos of those playing it. Games like this sanitize the fraught idea of settling and developing upon land that wasn’t originally yours; they create an environment that’s uncomfortable for people whose lives are more strongly affected by the world legacy of colonialism.

The good news is that board games are inherently an abstract medium, which makes it possible to find lots of ways to retheme a game about exploration and development that aren’t colonialist. Blackout: Hong Kong is a great example – it’s a territory control game, but it’s about providing electricity and emergency services to a region instead of carving it up for the players’ control. Far from displacing the inhabitants of Hong Kong, you’re aiding them. Terraforming Mars is another, as unlike a fictional world where it’s suspicious that these lands have remained pristine and unclaimed until the players showed up, we know for sure that Mars is uninhabited.

NPCs

The primary ethos of colonialism is that the colonizing people is superior to the colonized, whether it’s because of divine benediction, superior technology, or some other means. In the real world, we can easily tell that these distinctions are false and harmful. However, in the world of tabletop games, there really is a “divine benediction” that separates some groups from others: Whether that group is controlled by a player.

Think about the average role-playing game. There are many, many stories about the party of PCs massacring whole towns of NPCs; however, once the PCs start attacking each other, that’s a clear sign that the party is out of control. The NPCs’ lives are worth less than the PCs’ because they aren’t controlled by a player.

This isn’t to say that all NPCs are colonialist, because that would be wildly overreaching. However, when used in conjunction with themes of conquest and control, they can add to the problem. The game Small World is a good example, especially because it casts the players in the role of literal gods. The original inhabitants of the board, who don’t have the blessing of being controlled by players, are “Lost Tribes” whose job is to serve as a minor speed bump to the players and their “blessed” races. It’s similar to the Civilization game franchise and its “barbarians,” whom you can kill with no political repercussions.

Whether NPC-controlled factions are representations of colonialism in your game, and how to solve these problems, are dependent on the design. In the case of Small World, for example, you could reskin the Lost Tribes to be controlled by different players. That way, removing a Lost Tribe from the board carries at least a small amount of weight with one of the players, instead of being completely forgettable. It’s not a huge improvement, but it’s a start.

Making Your Players Do Bad Things To Win In The Hopes They’ll Feel Bad About It

Some games, both video and tabletop, are based on the well-intentioned but misguided concept of rewarding players for doing explicitly awful things, with the intent of making them realize that their seemingly innocuous actions in other games have a cost attached. Spec Ops: The Line is an archetypal video game example, and the most explicit version of this in board games is the literally named Colonialism.

The issue with this is that you can’t assume your players’ emotional or intellectual reactions to your game are what you intend. If you leave any ambiguity towards whether you condone or condemn an action, you’re allowing the possibility that people will treat committing atrocities as a necessary cost, or worse, as acceptable by your standards. (Games like Brenda Romero’s Train are an exception because as far as I know they are played under direct supervision of the designer.)

The aforementioned Colonialism is a good example of how these things can go wrong. Despite its very obvious condemnation of colonialism (the cover has a ball and chain on it, for heaven’s sakes) and its attempt to make explicit the extermination of colonized peoples in its gameplay, the gameplay itself is a fairly standard resource management game. The player doesn’t feel bad about committing these actions because they’re both incentivized and obligated to do so.

Exploring difficult themes in games is possible, but it has to treat bad things as unambiguously bad to ensure that portions of the audience don’t draw the wrong message from it. Freedom: The Underground Railroad and Spirit Island are good examples with varying tones. It’s unfortunate, but board games are not a great tool for nuanced exploration of social injustice, so you have to be careful with your expectations.

Conclusion

This article isn’t a unilateral condemnation of any of the mechanics above (except perhaps guilt-based gameplay); it’s merely a request for designers using these mechanics to consider if they’re subtly promoting philosophies that you don’t want to promote, and if so, that you change them. Board games aren’t necessarily the most efficient political medium, but addressing the politics of board games in a more inclusive way is the best way to open up tabletop gaming and ensure its longevity.


A Tale of Two Monopolies

Posted on by Jeremy Geist

Monopoly is one of the fundamental pillars of American board gaming. It’s what every non-hobbyist thinks about when they’re asked to name a board game, and its enduring popularity (along with the difficulty of copyrighting a board game) has inspired a slew of imitators. But why is this?

Furthermore, while there are many games that rival Monopoly in popularity, such as Scrabble or Clue, none of them have as esoteric a rule set. Monopoly has many rules that the average player gets wrong: Most casual players don’t auction off properties they don’t buy, collect a bunch of money when landing on Free Parking, and may buy hotels and houses without a monopoly. Why, if the game is so complex that people routinely get the rules wrong, does it remain so popular among groups that otherwise don’t play many board games?

In this article, I will argue that there are actually two kinds of Monopoly: the Monopoly as described in the physical rulebook and a kind of folk-Monopoly devised by families after a century of repeated play. By looking at the differences between these, we can not only answer these questions but find insight into how people interact with tabletop games as a whole.

It Was The Simplest of Games, It Was The Most Complex of Games

Here are the rules to “Monopoly-R” (R for Rulebook). It’s in here to illustrate the difference between the two games, because you probably know how to play Monopoly.

In Monopoly-R, players travel around the board, purchasing properties. When a player lands on an unclaimed property, they can purchase it or auction it off to the other players. Players can trade properties. When a player has a “Monopoly” of properties of the same color, they can build houses and hotels to increase their value. When a player lands on another player’s property, they pay that player in rent; the game ends when all players but one are bankrupt.

In contrast, here are the rules to “Monopoly-F” (F for paying respects Folk).

In Monopoly-F, players travel around the board, purchasing properties and building houses and hotels on them. Players can trade properties. When a player lands on another player’s property, they pay that player in rent. The game ends when everyone’s bored and wants to do something else.

Critics complain that the house rules in Monopoly-F make the game last forever, which is true if you’re playing to an actual conclusion. But I would wager that most games of Monopoly-F don’t “end” in a conventional sense, as it’s more of a social activity/parlor game than a traditional orthogame. Tag lasts forever too, but nobody complains about that.

It Is A Far, Far Better Game To Design…

So how is this important to us as designers? To find that out, let’s look at where the two Monopolies diverge.

All of the rules omitted from Monopoly-R happen to be rules that can’t be easily confirmed from looking at the board and cards. Only the rulebook says you have to auction properties off if you don’t buy them, for example, and since the game functions just fine without that rule, most people end up ignoring it for the much simpler system of “leave the property alone until someone else lands on it.”

As it turns out, this is a common thing that happens even in games targeted towards more enfranchised audiences. The issue is usually a rule that has no prompting from any of the components and no logical progression from any other rules. My game Happy Daggers requires players to move a marker up on the Dramatic Tension track at the end of every turn; a lot of time was spent crafting ways to remind players to do so instead of just moving on to the next turn and ignoring the track.

The common Free Parking house rule, where money lost is put in a central pool and whoever lands on Free Parking gets to keep it, is an interesting reverse of this: It explains a component that has no indication toward what it actually does. It’s unintuitive to assume that a space with a unique symbol and text is just “nothing”, so players came up with the best possible explanation for it.

The point of this is that Monopoly-F is an excellent road map towards designing games aimed toward a casual audience. By seeing which kind of rules are most frequently forgotten or misinterpreted, you can apply this to your own design and either get rid of fiddly rules that people won’t remember anyway or repackage them in a way that’s easier to remember.

I’m Going To Be Honest, I Haven’t Read A Tale Of Two Cities So I Ran Out Of Header Titles

Interestingly, there’s a different rule that, like the auction rule, has no indication it exists on any of the components, but remains mostly intact in Monopoly-F: Getting to take an extra turn if you roll doubles on the dice. This is because, compared to the bad judgments and hurt feelings of an auction among casual players, getting to roll dice and take more turns feels great.

The viscerality of a board game is important, especially for games aimed at more casual audiences. Peggy Hill was pretty close when she said that the best board game would be 100% spinning (visceral, tactile) and choosing (strategic). Monopoly-F, by excising the more complex and “talky” rules from Monopoly-R, focuses the game more around the fun, visceral parts of Monopoly: Rolling dice, moving your little pewter dog around the board, and grinning smugly as you present your card and get out of jail free.

(This isn’t to say that casual audiences are stupid, just that a fair amount of enfranchised players are willing to put up with worse components or tactility if the game’s fun. This is why Princes of Florence exists.)

Why Monopoly-F is more likely to have trading than auctioning is an interesting question; it could be that actions that give the players more autonomy are more fun than actions that take up a lot of mental processing power for not much gain. Definitely something to think about.

In any case, Monopoly-F‘s retention of the extra turns mechanic is an insight into what rules people love to interact with.

Conclusion: I Need To Read More Classic Literature

Feeling clever or intelligent is a fundamental building block of our self-worth. (I’m willing to believe it’s more of an American cultural thing, but I don’t know for sure.) This leads to a strong impulse to, when faced with something like Monopoly being wildly popular among casual board gamers, shrug and say “I guess everyone is stupid except for me.” This is insulting to other people and terrible for creative development.

When you see a phenomenon you don’t understand, don’t just throw up your hands and quit. Ask yourself, “Why is this?” and “What can I learn from this?” You’ll surprise yourself with how much you learn and how much you can apply to what you’re working on.