Avidly Reads Board Games. Eric Thurm
For something to be the subject of a game, it must be a subject of play, something that can (and, at least in the eyes of the designer, should) be treated with a light touch—whether that’s the candy machinations of Lord Licorice, owning Monopoly’s Boardwalk, or repeatedly smacking a black child in the head. Board games help define what we consider broadly acceptable, both for children who have them in the house and for hobbyist adults.
Certainly, that’s been the case for most of my life. As a child in the 1990s, I played a healthy amount of family board games: Life, Stratego, the occasional game of Scrabble. Mostly, I used them as platforms to fantasize and daydream about other things—especially Road to the White House, a 1992 game that modeled the process for running a presidential campaign and included way too much paper money in the box, which I would stare at while imagining what it might be like to work in politics as an adult. I spent a lot of time looking at Road to the White House but very little time actually playing it. (As best I can recall, even as an eight-year-old, I had a lot of difficulty convincing my friends to play complicated board games.) Eventually, I developed cooler interests, like fantasy novels and anime, and left board games by the wayside for most of my adolescence. But once Catan got its hooks in me, I was a goner: by the time I graduated from college in 2014, I had returned to board games with a vengeance. I include this brief history not because I think it’s especially important that I used to play Stratego but because the way I’ve been shaped by games reflects, in part, the way other people are shaped by games—and the reasons games are worth considering and reading in the first place.
***
A year into my Catan phase, large portions of my life were built around the game. I used games as an excuse to suggest plans (hey, maybe we should go on a road trip to Milwaukee?), as a setting to talk through problems in a social circle (two friends in a social group who were dating had broken up, and we needed to figure out how to make things less awkward for everyone), and even as a way of feeling out potential romantic prospects (I’m ashamed to admit this worked several times). Just before my twenty-first birthday, my then-girlfriend lured me to a surprise party with the prospect of playing Catan. Greeted by most of my friends, a beautiful afternoon, and a healthy selection of drinks, I deadpanned, “Does this mean we’re not settling?”
Once I graduated from college, I moved from Chicago to New York, where, needing to start over with a new set of friends, I spent months futilely trying to lay the groundwork for a regular Catan league, complete with matching monogrammed bowling shirts. This would, in theory, be a regularly structured, regimented way of interacting with other people and forming long-term social bonds (read: avoiding loneliness in a newish city). It didn’t work, but I did cement a few friendships by playing one-off games. Catan’s game pieces became a cardboard foundation for my relationships, and I was not alone.
As it is for many enthusiasts, Catan was my on-ramp for modern hobby board games—the sort that most people tend to think of as overly complex, confusing, and in the province of nerds. (Many hobby games are Eurogames, but not all. “Hobby games” refers to games played primarily by adults who devote their time to gaming as a hobby, rather than any particular genre or rule set. Hobby games are, in turn, just one segment of tabletop games: all games that one traditionally plays on a table with physical components, whether that involves a board, cards, or other items.) As a relatively easy-to-play game that still sounds ridiculously complicated, Catan has often served as a stand-in for the larger popularity of those games. In a 2013 episode of Parks & Recreation, Adam Scott’s nerdy character, Ben Wyatt, insists on playing Catan at his bachelor party. (Mayfair, the company that publishes Catan, built a board for The Cones of Dunshire, the intentionally convoluted and obtuse game Ben creates in a later episode.) A crowdfunded short film called Lord of Catan depicts the breakdown of a couple’s marriage, played by nerd-favorite actors Fran Kranz and Amy Acker. Catan has appeared multiple times on The Big Bang Theory.
Catan is so popular that it’s even spilled over into areas of culture where you wouldn’t expect to find board games. In 2012, the Green Bay Packers football team, led by its offensive line, became deadly serious about Catan. After players started to talk about the team’s love of Catan on sports radio, football fans in Wisconsin flooded hobby stores demanding copies of the game. Eventually, the Wall Street Journal published a profile about the team’s Catan habit—games were so competitive that when a player left the room to finish grilling dinner for the other players, he refused to accept the eventual result of the game. (He did not win.)
As a piece of culture, Catan is essentially a crossover hit, finding purchase with audiences possessing different levels of board game experience and expertise like a massively popular space-opera film or highly specific house song that finds mainstream success. Its flexibility and complexity separate Catan from most American family games, which tend to take the form of chance-based races, miniature tactical simulations, and trivia contests. In this case, Catan’s crossover potential operates within any given game session. When you sit down to play, you might bridge the gap between different gaming communities and possibly even between dissimilar members of your family, actively inviting the two or three other players to join you in the magic circle.
Though the concept had been floating around for some time, designers Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen took up the “magic circle” in their 2003 book Rules of Play, where it is broadly used to delineate between a game and the rest of life. But after years of debate, Zimmerman had to clarify his meaning and take the concept of the magic circle down a peg in a 2012 online essay about a fictional “magic circle jerk.” (Apparently a person enamored with the structural implications of the magic circle and not a euphemism for an academic conference.) Here, Zimmerman condenses the useful part of what to understand about the magic circle as a lens for thinking about games: “when a game is being played, new meanings are generated.” The magic circle is the boundary within which everyone’s behavior becomes, if not governed by the rules of whatever game everyone has agreed to play, then at least influenced by it—within the magic circle, you aren’t just your D&D character or Colonel Mustard, you’re also trying to think the way the game wants you to think, to act the way the game wants you to act.
But of course, there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between game rules and how they influence players. Unlike a video game that frequently has a set way for you to play through it and lives as code, board games require other people, and they only exist when you choose to play them. Games take on different characters in different contexts, with the same set of rules conforming themselves to a smoky party or a family dining room. This power that a board game has—the way it invites you to interact with it, to become what it wants you to become—is the central thing I’m interested in when I play games and when I think about them. It’s the main thing I want to explore here. And, obviously, it’s why my family loves Catan.
***
In January 2016, after much prompting on my end, my brother, sister, and I played our first game of Catan together. My initial Catan obsession had cooled a bit, but I really wanted to find a game to play with them. The three of us had just become adult siblings—one day we struggled to find things to talk about, the next our relationships became comfortable and close in a way that has barely changed since. (I’m technically an adult man, but I spend a lot of time hiding with my sister in her room talking about Charmed when we’re supposed to be downstairs mingling at family events.) More accessible than most of the other games I was into at the time, Catan was a natural choice; it helped that, as a seasoned veteran, I steamrolled everyone in our first game. Or, at least, that’s my recollection. My sister claims she actually won our first game—but whom are you going to believe?
We became obsessed with Catan, playing it any time all three of us were in the same place. At first, our parents were excited that the three of us were spending so much time together, but as our dedication to fitting in more and more games grew (our record is five in a day, fifteen in a weekend), our mother began to greet the sight of the board with an exasperated sigh. And it didn’t help that my sister was in high school and ostensibly should have been doing her homework or something. It didn’t