Avidly Reads Board Games. Eric Thurm
and put in a concerted effort to rip their shoes off the permanently sticky basement floor while weaving through an equally permanent haze of cigarette smoke. As an eighteen-year-old prospective philosophy major who had already planned out a senior thesis about the intersection of neo-Kantian and neo-Aristotelian ethics, it seems safe to say I was on pretty solid footing when I mocked the two teens for being nerds.
They were right to blow off the party. I don’t remember much of that night in the basement, but, faded as I was, I still remember my first game of Catan. Or, at least, I remember how it made me feel: my initial confusion, followed by the slow sensation of starting to understand how to speak a new language, followed by the sort of pleasant frustration that comes with getting your ass kicked in an exciting new game, followed by a commitment to playing again and again until I won. When I learned about the Longest Road, a mechanic in which the player with the longest contiguous set of roads nets two victory points, I seized on it as somehow crucial to success and feverishly spent my first six or seven games trying to acquire it, to the detriment of literally every other part of the game. (It took me a while to realize an important fact that might be useful for new players: Longest Road is a tactic for fools. It can easily be disrupted or stolen by someone else, while the resource production of cities can be reinvested in development cards while making it easier to do everything else. Trust me.)
I lost that first game very badly but discovered that a fire had been lit somewhere in the lower-left part of my skull, and not just by the frat house’s accordion gravity bong. I simply could not stop playing Catan, I told myself, at least not until I’d won a game. I stumbled around in the dark both literally and figuratively for several games, slowly trying to grasp how the rules fit together. Eventually everything started to snap into place—in a flash, the small wooden buildings that initially seemed like chunky versions of Monopoly houses and hotels became settlements and cities, habitation that I had carved out from the raw materials of the island and that I could then use to produce sheep, wheat, ore, lumber, and brick, which I needed to build even more settlements and cities and, after some time, to win the game. When I moved the robber piece, I wasn’t just taking a card from one of the other players; I was cutting off an entire area of the island, where their villagers would otherwise be hard at work. My goal of ten, abstracted victory points was a clear horizon, but charting a straightforward course there was anything but easy. After a few weeks of failed attempts, I finally won a game. (To the best of my recollection, by not pursuing Longest Road.) I was hooked.
In the seemingly endless stretch of Catan games I played over the next two years, I would insist on everything being just right: a dim room, lit by a lantern my roommates had bought online (also while drunk); music that wasn’t necessarily Howard Shore’s score for the Lord of the Rings movies but that wasn’t not Howard Shore’s score for the Lord of the Rings movies; a shaky, single-game story that expanded to contain all of the quirks of resource distribution and building. (Did you build a settlement in the middle of my road, cutting off my path to build more? Think of the children!) One of the people in the fraternity moved out of the house, leaving behind a copy of the official Settlers of Catan novel, which he was then too embarrassed to claim. I promptly stole it and made a habit of reading a paragraph out loud in the middle of every game of Catan I played without knowing anything else about the plot or setting. The book, which I gathered was about a bunch of characters with names like “Candamir” and “Osmond” complaining about traveling up and down a mountain while dramatically expressing that they were also wary of witches, felt like the apotheosis of using the game to tell a story, albeit a bit too seriously.
Playing Catan in a darkened room under perfectly replicated conditions is a very silly habit, but it’s representative of a huge piece of what draws us into board games: the story. Not the story of the game itself, necessarily—Catan isn’t Dungeons & Dragons, and no one goes into a play session hoping to fall under the spell of an engrossing narrative. But you do participate in making the story every time you sit down to play the game, even if it’s just the events of that individual session. Each time you prepare a game of Monopoly, you and everyone else in the room are consciously deciding to enter into an abstracted real estate market, where only one person will emerge victorious with all of the money. Constantly negotiating what is actually happening within the game is just one part of allowing the rules of the game to fully enmesh you; even at the same time that you put a red block on a Catan board, you’re also building a settlement. It’s an engrossing experience, alluding to what the pioneering cultural historian Johan Huizinga referred to as the “magic circle,” a concept has been taken up by games designers and scholars for years and used to delineate the distinction between a game and the rest of one’s life.
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As products, board games are thriving. The amount of money Americans, in particular, spend on board games has skyrocketed in recent years, and global board game sales have started to approach $10 billion. But that doesn’t mean board games are always taken seriously. No one bats an eye at books aimed at mass audiences analyzing film, television, and, increasingly, video games, but it feels absurd to imagine a newspaper hiring an in-house board game or tabletop game critic to think about the ongoing evolution of the medium. What is there to learn from the bad luck of landing in Monopoly jail or the zing of tweezers touching metal in Operation anyway? It’s only so much cardboard and plastic. There’s quite a lot to learn, as it turns out: board games have been used as teaching tools since their inception.
Chess, along with many other popular games, was originally a war simulation, used both as a way to spend an afternoon and as a tool for developing strategies on the battlefield. The game now commonly called Chutes and Ladders began its life in India over two thousand years ago as a sort of illustration of karma, with each snake and ladder representing a vice or virtue. The original Checkered Game of Life, the game published in 1860 by Milton Bradley that eventually became the household staple Life, used a similar approach to modeling right conduct, asking players to aim to land on values like perseverance and industry while avoiding the pitfalls of idleness and gambling. It was one of many successful games from the Victorian era, when publishers could begin to mass-produce their offerings—the beginning of board games as we know them today.
Most early board games were simple race games: boards where players rolled the dice and moved along a prescribed track, following orders on any given space, until they reached the end. (Many popular board games today have yet to go beyond this mechanic, or rule structure.) Passing through these scenes while subject to the whims of fate was, in theory, enough to mold young minds to any end game designers had in mind, whether civic virtue, workplace efficiency, or education about exciting new technologies. Or, at least, the world’s board game manufacturers managed to convince large numbers of parents this was the case.
McLoughlin Brothers, for years one of America’s biggest board game manufacturers, promised that its 1895 Game of Mail, Express, or Accommodation would “impart to the players a considerable amount of geographical and statistical information, and convey a vivid idea of the variety and extent of our country’s productions.” Manufacturer J. W. Spear & Sons’ early 1900s game International Mail: An Instructive Game proclaimed, “the usefulness of such a game as this is obvious.” McLoughlin Brothers described its North Pole (1897) game as the children’s equivalent of a “cinematograph lecture,” delivered by a real Arctic explorer. Play required moving between spaces depicting episodes of ice fishing, setting up camp, and dog sledding. How else were North American youth to learn about conditions in the tundra?
Of course, this wasn’t all that early board games taught children. The cover of another McLoughlin Brothers game published around the turn of the century, The Funny Game of Hit or Miss, depicts a caricatured black boy with curled hair pulling away in surprise as he is whacked in the face with a ball. In the game, players spun a teetotum (a sort of top that replaced dice for gambling-averse parents) and moved across the red-and-black checkered board to see if they would “hit” or “miss.” “To hit,” the rules told players, “is to stop on a Negro head.”
To play a board game about a given subject is to be told that it’s worth spending a lot of time thinking about the topic, even if it’s something