Avidly Reads Board Games. Eric Thurm

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

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      © 2019 by New York University

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      References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Thurm, Eric, author.

      Title: Avidly reads board games / Eric Thurm.

      Other titles: Board games

      Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Series: Avidly reads | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019006919| ISBN 9781479856343 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479826957 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Board games—Social aspects.

      Classification: LCC GV1312 .T58 2018 | DDC 794—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006919

      New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

      Manufactured in the United States of America

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      Also available as an ebook

      To Sammy — time to uphold your end of our deal

      Contents

      1. Enter the Magic Circle

      2. Playing Along with Complicity

      3. Monopoly and Its Children

      4. Can Friendship Be Stronger than War Games?

      5. Legacy Games and the End of the Campaign

      6. Game Night

      Gameography

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      1

      Enter the Magic Circle

      On a stale Florida day at the end of March, my family languished in a hospital waiting room, staring intensely at nothing in particular. We’d waited in the haze of the hospital’s lobby for several hours before being led up to the dimly lit waiting room. Eventually, we would be taken to my grandfather’s bed. He was in the late stages of pancreatic cancer, and we had come to say good-bye.

      The waiting room was a grim, foreboding space, covered in old magazines and dull, browned tile. The television sandwiched into a corner of the ceiling was set to a Vanderpump Rules marathon, airing all of the drama leading up to a reality TV wedding. We could have chatted about nothing to fill the time, but a pair of women were rooted in chairs, silently perusing their copies of People; as painful as our situation was, we didn’t want to disturb other people in a similarly fragile state. And besides, there’s not much you can say, sitting around waiting for death. So my brother, sister, and I did the only thing we could think of: we took a big, red cardboard box out of a tote bag, sidled up to the table at the center of the waiting room, and started setting up a game of Catan.

      The three of us had been playing the game originally known as Settlers of Catan obsessively for over a year by this point, so we had all of the steps down cold, like a pit crew mechanically getting their car ready for a race. We fit together the skeleton of the board—six pieces of coast that create the outline of the island of Catan, filled in by hexagons representing the island’s various resources. We knew the cost of building roads, settlements, and cities—the elements of your civilization. We knew the uses and abuses of each of the game’s development cards. We even knew the particular circumstances under which it makes sense to trade resources: when one of us wanted to swap a lumber card for an ore, we would simply point or gesture without needing to speak. Save for the intermittent rolling of dice and the incidental wooden plunk of a road or settlement, there was no sound.

      No games are good for waiting to say your final good-bye to a dying relative, but all things considered, Catan isn’t a bad one. You can play without talking, if you need to—in theory, a game could play out entirely in silence, letting the dice and each player’s individual choices guide the outcome. This also means Catan isn’t overly competitive, unless you want it to be. The players can largely ignore each other if they so choose, instead focusing on their own strategies, whether that’s building up cities and settlements or pursuing the floating Longest Road and Largest Army cards. More than anything, the Catan system is accommodating, which might partially explain why it’s one of the most popular board games in the world, with more than eighteen million copies sold since its publication in 1995.

      Catan’s flexibility is part of why it’s a sort of ambassador for Eurogames, a popular genre of board game built on the principle that, broadly speaking, games should be more about creating a shared experience of play than about the singular pursuit of victory that characterizes the classics of the American dining room table. Players in Eurogames are rarely eliminated before the end of a game the way they are in Monopoly; there’s more strategy required to win than in the functionally random Candyland; and players are encouraged to focus more on trading and accumulating resources rather than crushing their opponents as in Battleship or Stratego.

      Well-designed Eurogames, and Catan in particular, are perfect cushions for your time: complex enough that they can command the bulk of your attention, preventing you from thinking about other, less pleasant things, but not so complicated that they cause a mental short circuit. They’re bearable in painful situations—this particular game of Catan functioned much the same way the People magazines did for the other women in the waiting room.

      This quality also means that these games are very fun to play while drunk: my first game of Catan was with a few members of my college fraternity, who insisted that I would, in fact, have a good time trying to build across this abstracted, fictional island. It helped that I was not exactly sober at the time.

      In getting me to hunch over the board, laid out on a dirty glass table in front of a busted pleather couch, my friends were overcoming considerable internal resistance. My first encounter with Catan was about two years earlier, when a pair of high school students thinking of applying to my college decided to play Catan on their overnight visit to campus. For some reason, they had chosen to play this weird-sounding game instead