In a twitter poll I recently launched, I asked people in my wider social media circles about their views on board games. Specifically, I wanted to know if it was acceptable to talk other players into working against the assumed leading player in a competitive game. The result on both my German and English twitter account was quite decisive. A great number of people sided with talking players into taking action to prevent somebody else from winning. It was even argued, that that’s what playing games is all about.

I was somewhat surprised by that result. After all the very same behavior gets heavily criticized in cooperative games. It’s even reason enough for some people to avoid cooperative games altogether.

Nobody likes to be bossed around, even with the well-meaning intention of winning the game for everybody. Your enjoyment of a coop game will invariably suffer with such a player at the table. One of the most important qualities of a board game lies in giving players agency. That’s why some games lose their appeal the moment you’ve discovered an optimal strategy to win. The same is true for any game in which averting defeat is only possible if you pick the one, correct response to any of your opponent’s moves. If one of the many options available to you after a player’s move stands out as the optimal choice, it doesn’t really feel like agency. You get played by the game, instead of the other way around. This is true, even if it’s not the game that removes your agency but another player.

Apparently, competitive gamers arent’t that fussed about this issue. A notable number of players consider it perfectly valid and even part of a game’s core appeal to talk other players into doing something, in an attempt to prevent somebody else’s victory. Some circles consider this style of arguing and haggling “political play”.

Regardless of what you want to call it, these games possess an additional layer to play and require a wider understanding of what is contained within the game. This carries some notable risks with it. When your success is undermined or even invalidated, because you couldn’t counter the skilful rhetoric and persuasion of another player, it can be irritating and annoying. Not least of all, because there might have been some disagreement as to what behavior was or wasn’t part of the game. A game may start off as being about strategic considerations of tactical decision spaces only to wrap up as dramatic argument between amateur salespeople.

When a game’s arc causes players to get angry or despondent, people tend to look at drawing up new rules to deal with the situation. An unbeatable strategy gets defused by changing certain rules or values in the name of game balance. If the game’s setting is the reason to avoid it, it is reworked to be more acceptable or appealing to people. When the way players exerting influence over each other leaves some with a bad taste in their mouth, the most common response seems to be to simply play a different game.

This can’t be said for cooperative games, though. Here this artful persuasion is so strongly rejected that many reviewers seem to praise games, that introduce rules to make it (nigh) impossible for one player to play quarterback to everybody else. Which makes it even more interesting that in competitive games similar rules are rarely celebrated, if they included at all. Instead this behavior is tolerated as a natural aspect of competition and in some cases even considered the core of the game. Luckily this is the kind of viewpoint you can take disagree with. I would even go so far to say, that most gaming groups make very fine distinctions when and how you are allowed to influence the decisions of other players. But I think these distinctions aren’t inherent to the games themselves, but instead made by the groups. It’s not the rulebook but the players themselves who elect to accept certain behavior as part of a game or not.

Regardless of whether you’re playing cooperatively or competitively, at heart this question is about balancing personal ambition with the shared experience of playing together. If claiming victory is the highest and only priority of playing with others, allowing an alpha player to roam free is a small price to play to win. In a competitive game you are more likely to make the table laugh than draw their ire, if you start to explain how to best block the leading player from winning the game.

But normal gaming groups take other facets of gaming into account. Beyond the wasteland of competition, games offer a number of reasons to get them to the table. Whether it’s exploring the tactical options of a game, experiencing the tense decision points it offers or even the shared misery of arduously scraping together small victories against a challenging system. A game isn’t memorable because of how well you scored, but because the decisions you made were responsible for the game’s outcome.

There is no magic trick to know when influencing the decisions of another player crosses a line. It only takes players who can and want to understand why they’re playing this game right now.

It’s been about a week since the winner of the Spiel des Jahres 2020 award was announced. Pictures by Daniela Stöhr and Christian Stöhr, published by PD Verlag, was given the highly prestigious red award. I haven‘t played the game yet, but from what I have read about it, this decision seems entirely reasonable. But like in years past, some people took to complaining about the wrong game being chosen. These same people often can’t help themselves to mention, that games nominated for the award have become increasingly shallow. It’s also common to naggingly observe that winners of past awards would have a hard time to be nominated today; and are more likely to be sidelined as expert games instead. I’m particularly enamored with people who feel to need to publicly announce how little interest they have in the Spiel des Jahres, how removed it is from their personal gaming preferences and that they have moved on from these types of games altogether. Where would board gaming be today, if it weren’t for those valiant truth tellers to remind us how unimportant these awards and their winners actually are?

These discussions often follow a similar pattern. There are gamers, who want to explain away the award’s relevance by bringing up all the games they like to play. Just as there are gamers who defend the jury’s decision, and champion the games that are criticized. Some arguments that were brought up in this context, have given me pause, though.

It’s been argued, that board games can only find broader acceptance and visibility, if an award-winning game draws new people to the gaming table. I agree with that. If a game’s concept or presentation is aimed at experienced gamers, they are the ones most likely to find such a game appealing. It’s also been argued that inexperienced players are intimidated by complex games. With some caveats, I’m willing to go along with this argument as well. Complexity has many different ways of being presented in a game. But if a game’s designer and developer do a good job, even a multi-faceted game will still feel approachable. But then, the argument would go, that based on those two facts, it must follow that a Spiel des Jahres winner can never provide the kind of depth and challenge that experienced gamers have come to love about board games.

This is where I had to take a step back. Treating complexity in a board game as something that can only be handled with sufficient experience is not only gatekeeping, but reeks of self-satisfaction. I can understand this kind of slip-up to happen in the midst of a heated discussion. But there is quite a lot of condescension wrapped up in this argument. It is another way of saying that occasional gamers or people who have only noticed board games in the periphery of their cultural life, can’t recognize the appeal of complex or strategically deep games.

It draws a line between those who know games well and those who are just starting out. It might be done with the best intentions of meeting new gamers halfway, but it is also patronizing. It’s looking at games by what new gamers are able to deal with. As if a game that introduces people to board games, should be one with training wheels on and not a shared social experience between equals. It’s been those experiences, after all, that helped us become passionate about games.

If we want to share board games with people, who don’t have the same wealth of experience with the medium as we do, our choices should be guided by what makes each individual game appealing to begin with. Whether a game is suitable for players new to gaming, should be based on what playing it feels like. Admittedly, the effort a group has to put into a game to fully grasp its unique charms shouldn’t be ignored, either. Game length, player count and even the time it takes to explain the basics of the game can be insurmountable hurdles for some groups.

But choosing the right game for inexperienced or occasional gamers, should be about how and what it makes us feel. We should be looking for the kind of experience that is most likely to help new gamers understand why board games can be a source of passion, excitement and joy to their players. A game that succeeds in doing that, doesn’t have to be simple, but it has to be good.

A few days ago, a friend of a friend passed away unexpectedly. I only knew him from the number of times we’d played together in the last seven or so years. Maybe longer, even. He was not a childhood schoolmate of mine, nor did we have many opportunities to spend time together outside of games, cons or the like. He was part of somebody else’s weekly game night, mostly made up of friends going back to their shared school days in the 90s. I would join their game nights on a semi-regular basis for a while. When my son was born I became a less frequent guest and when I moved to the other end of the city, I rarely had time to join them for a few games. We ran into each other at Spiel in Essen, and promised to play together again soon. And now that’s a promise we can no longer keep.

There’s this accepted truth among a great number of reviewers, designers and players that games are, when it comes down to it, trivial. That they are inessential luxury items, with which we indulge our escapist impulses. The belief persists that games are mere consumerist distractions, made to occupy our idle minds before we engage in something with actual merit. This stance never really sat well with me. But right now, I feel offended and insulted by it.

I feel a sense of loss that I won’t get to play a game with him again. That his passing has robbed me of something valuable and irreplaceable. I can barely imagine the pain his close friends and family feel. They had a much deeper connection to him after all. They grew up with him, they met regularly, had dinner and his friends lived in the same neighbourhood for a number of years.

All that really connected me to him were the games we played together. Some as competitors, some as allies. Sometimes we plotted against our host, sometimes we plotted against each other. He was a very capable player, tactically minded and strategically skilled. What made him a great player, though, was that he understood he was always playing with friends first and against competitors second. We also had a similar sense of humour, so even when things weren’t going our way in a game, we could crack jokes for each other.

I am going to miss those moments. Because they’re not trivial or meaningless. The games I had the chance to play with him, even the crowd-funded ones, were not consumerist distractions. They were a chance for us to connect and bond. They were not without merit, just because I didn’t publicize them to turn them into other people’s entertainment. The grief I feel does not even begin to compare to that of his close friends and family. I don’t need to be reminded of that. It will not take years for me to accept this event and move on. New people will eventually join my social circles, who I will share a game night with and maybe connect with as well. But I also recognize that games are the reason I can even begin to feel grief over his passing. They are the reason why he isn’t somebody else’s friend who has died, but also mine. Under the intellectual challenge, the moments of tension and the emotional ups and downs as we jockey for victory, games offer us, when it comes down to it, a chance for human connection. That is not meaningless. It is not trivial. And neither was the time I got to spend with my friend.

Goodbye Alex.

The other day I had the opportunity to be taught some new games. As is so often the case, the explanation began with the unassuming phrase, that nevertheless made me stop and wonder. „This game is about…“

Every rules explanation or introduction begins with a phrase like that. It’s the necessary framing so the rules can make sense. So I wondered who gets to decide the framing of a set of rules. A quick glance at the rulebook or the game‘s box generally offers its own framing. This game is about being a daring adventurer in a dangerous fantasy world. Maybe it‘s about making loads of money as an industrialist. Or maybe it‘s about leading a civilization towards world domination.

But that‘s really just the game‘s setting. It‘s a filter we use to make play more fun, but it‘s not what the game is about at its core. A game is about play, i.e. what players actually do. But if we only look at the rules, we‘ll soon notice how similar they all are. There‘s a goal you‘re supposed to reach. The rules present you with a number of things to do, in order to overcome the obstacles standing in your way.

So if the rules are the ones to tell us what a game is about, the answer is always the same: playing games is about winning. Either against other players or the game itself. But experience shows, that this answer is also incomplete. If only the game‘s goal matters, then no game can be said to have any relevance to its theme. Puerto Rico would be just as controversial as Jenga. The difference between a game like Secret Hitler and Azul would be merely mechanical. The historical background of war games and conflict simulation games would be mere coloring. There would be literally no point to them.

But games resist such a simple reductionist view. They‘re not about setting or mechanisms alone. You have to merge the two in order to truthfully answer what a game is about. This isn’t done by the people you’d necessarily expect it from. Because a designer doesn’t get to choose what their game ends up being about. Once the rules are set, their authority over the game’s meaning evaporates. Even additional clarifications in the rulebook or a blog, do not lend them power over how theme and mechanics come together to create the actual game and how it’s played.

It‘s the gaming group itself, that definitively answers the question of what a game is about. We determine it as we try to grasp the game, mentally sort through its mechanics and turn our attention towards the things we care about. The path to victory points, the feel of new mechanisms or even the exotic setting the game presents us with. Games become about the things we care about in them. Our decisions reveal our convictions about games.

In comparison, the designer’s work consists of presenting us with a range of elements to choose from. What is included in this selection, though, can be just as revealing as the things that are not. A small detail we would do well to keep in mind when we talk about the artistic merit of a game.

In the late 90s Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker starred in an action-comedy called Rush Hour. It was the story of Detective Inspector Lee (Chan) and Detective James Carter (Tucker) having to bridge their personal, cultural and at times lingustic differences in order to solve a kidnapping case. In one scene Lee enters a bar and greets the bartender by copying the words he has seen Carter use earlier: „What‘s up my n—-a?“. Naturally a brawl ensues afterwards. It‘s a case of dramatic irony, since the audience is aware of the offensiveness of the phrase, whereas Lee is utterly oblivious to it. The scene hinges on the bartender neither realising nor accepting that Lee has no idea what he‘s saying. (There are some problematic metalayers to this scene, too, that I don‘t have the time to get into here.) Regardless of what Lee, the bartender or we may or may not know, the phrase remains offensive.

Colonialism is a theme that continues to be used in board games. To a large extent, this is because most players are utterly oblivious about it. Within the context of a game it becomes a way to play out some approximation of history in an exotic location (or time). If you have even a rudimentary understanding of colonialism, these games feel decidedly different to play. Colonialism is a violence driven by racism and greed, which exploits and destroys other cultures while reliably commiting all kinds of crimes against humanity. In a colonialism-themed board game you win, if you get the most victory points.

The punch-up that Lee is drawn into in Rush Hour after his ignorant remark is as good as can be expected from a Jackie Chan movie. It‘s a very dynamic and inventive fight sequence. It‘s well-crafted and entertaining. In other words: it‘s fun. There‘s even a gag at the end, as Lee leaves the bar and slaps a cigarette out of a bystanders hand, with the admonition that it‘s „bad“. You might say it ends with a valuable moral lesson.

Sometimes similar moral lessons are incorporated to make the use of colonialism in a board game more palatable. In Endeavor – Ages of Sail, you lose victory points, if you have engaged in slavery and slavery has been abolished by the end of the game. The game gives you reasons why slavery should be unappealing to players. The benefit of this approach is that at least it doesn‘t justify such practices as an economic necessity. On the other hand, it also repackages them into a question of cost-benefit, downplaying its awful nature. Slavery becomes a bad thing, because it costs victory points and might threaten your victory. Ultimately, any attempt to express disgust or contempt for an action by employing rules is bound to reduce it to question of simple mathematics. Doing so subjects any board game theme to banality.

Action-comedies of the 90s didn‘t hold back when it came to killing off characters. About 30 people die in Rush Hour. Other movies of the time, like The Fifth Element or True Lies, have twice the body count. Still, 20 years ago I found Rush Hour quite entertaining. But that‘s not because me or the millions of people who watched it, were deeply ignorant. It also wasn‘t because we were indifferent to other people‘s suffering, or even that social values have decayed and turned us all into brutes.

Every medium, whether it‘s film or games, is made to fulfill a function. That is how it is used and understood. With books we distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. We perceive films differently when they‘re called dramas or documentaries. The same could be said for any of the countless sub-categories and genres. We use some for our entertainment, and others to educate ourselves; to learn, understand and engage with lived experiences that is different to our own. Games don‘t quite seem to fit into this broad pattern. They seem to do a little of both. We learn and are entertained. We are amused by them as we absorb facts.

This is often the last argument that is brought up to legitimize the use of problematic themes in a game. A game isn‘t just mere entertainment, it also uses its mechanisms to explore its theme. History is supposed to be communicated. The largers forces that shape society are supposed to become tangible and visible this way.

But any game that places as into the role of virtual historiographers needs to present a picture of history that matches our thus raised expectations. It also puts a great deal of responsibility on the shoulders of its creators to do conscientious work. More than that, the toxic beliefs that any era of history carries with it mustn‘t be blindly reproduced. Colonialism is deeply racist, but that doesn‘t mean its ideology has to be valid within the game. The competitive character of colonialist games invariably leads to a tacit justification of slavery, since its benefits might help you win the game.

History is trivialized when we only understand it as the backdrop to having fun playing a game. It becomes a danger, once we start to take this step for granted and do it uncritically. But I do believe that there are ways to oppose such a development. First we need to divest ourselves of the notion that games are an inherently trivial and superficial pastime. We have to normalize the idea that the content and the context of a game is part of our critical engagement with it. There is a wide spectrum that ranges from games that aim to educate and those that aim to amuse. It should go without saying that we have to evaluate a game like Freedom The Underground Railroad completely differently than something like Munchkin.

But it is also necessary for us as players to no longer accept certain themes, unless they are used responsibly and conscientiously. Just because a game is fun, doesn‘t mean that its chosen theme can be redrawn as an exotic, care-free backdrop for us to play around in. Games do not require us to slavishly reproduce historical events, but at the same time they mustn‘t be used to temporarily rewrite history to make it more comfortable to consume for us.