Avidly Reads Board Games. Eric Thurm
In 2017, Greater Than Games published the designer R. Eric Reuss’s Spirit Island, an attempt at a colonial revenge fantasy in which players take on the roles of the nature spirits on a mostly pristine island. Invaders—colonial powers, pointedly represented by white plastic conquistador figurines—have attempted to take over the island, stripping the land for resources and blighting it in the process, unsettling the natural harmony. You, the spirits, have to wipe them out while working together with the native humans to protect the island from further damage.
In creating Spirit Island, Reuss was responding to and attempting to “reverse” the trend of strategy games that uncritically posit players as colonizing forces leading European fleets. In one section of the rule book, Reuss writes, “I wonder how ticked off the locals are about this new colony of foreigners. Well, we’ll never know because this game has entirely abstracted away the people who already lived there. That’s rude.” Putting aside the effect of referring to colonization as “rude,” it’s a noble impulse and one that wound up being highly rewarding in game form.
While Reuss cites several other Eurogames as partial inspirations for Spirit Island, it’s impossible not to look at the board—a seemingly untouched island divided into several types of territories, bordered by ocean—the cities and towns that make up the invaders’ homes, and the box’s description of the game as a “settler destruction strategy game” and not see it as, at least in part, responding to Catan. Depending on how you pronounce it, “Dahan,” the name for the native people of the island, sounds awfully like “Catan.” Reuss claims this was a coincidence, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s still there for the players, if they want to find it.
Spirit Island is a cooperative game, which means the players aren’t competing against each other. Instead, a deck of cards sets the invaders’ actions in motion, and you win or lose as a group. (More on this later.) This change alters the character of play enormously, leading interaction with the rules to mostly take the form of collective conversations about the best way to push back against them—how to stop the invaders from building a new city, how to make sure they don’t ravage the island’s wetlands, how to strike enough fear into their hearts that they’ll turn and flee.
Catan is the type of game that appears complicated at first but quickly reveals itself to be relatively simple. Spirit Island is . . . a little more intense. Like an arcane war game re-creating D-Day, there are all sorts of hidden or nested rules that pop up to ruin your game just when you think you’re on top of the settlers. I didn’t even finish playing my first game with some of the members of a weekly board game group I frequented in March 2018—partly because we foolishly and arrogantly thought we could learn how to play at a bar and partly because the spiraling nature of the invaders’ attempts at conquering the island made it almost impossible for us to understand what was going on. After two or three turns, we packed the box away, and I took it home in shame. Eventually, two of my roommates and I began playing semifrequently, at least once or twice a week, until we started to get a better handle on the rules and how to work together to subvert them.
According to the background in Spirit Island’s rule book, the Dahan were originally at odds with the spirits, eventually forming a literal contract to make sure that both parties were capable of living at peace—the sin of the invaders is not that they wanted to take the land, but that they didn’t sign anything before doing so. This, in a sense, mirrors the arrangement that establishes the pretext for any shared game experience, in which all players decide on what they’re about to do and enter into a sort of loose pact to obey the rules. When my siblings sit down to play a game of Catan, we’re all in rough agreement about what it is we’re going to do.
Still, for all of the evident care Reuss has taken to try to make the island feel like its own, original creation without appropriating or aping a preexisting culture or colonial struggle in the manner of the games Faidutti criticizes, the end result is a little toothless. It’s harder to get a sense of what might be at stake if the people you’re defending never existed in the first place, to say nothing of the magical spirits that (probably) didn’t exist. At the end of the rule book section that finishes laying out all of the actual rules needed to play Spirit Island, Reuss dramatically asks, “Can you save the island?”—a question that invites you to ask what happens when the island isn’t saved. The answer is something very similar to our own world, where colonial invaders did succeed at mostly wiping out and subduing native populations. We’re already living in Spirit Island’s worst-case scenario, and part of what the game provides is the opportunity to methodically act out a fantasy of things going differently.
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Whether it’s Catan, Spirit Island, or The Funny Game of Hit and Miss, board games communicate ideas, just like any other piece of culture. And though board games are more popular than they have been in decades, the tools to think about the ideas they contain are unevenly distributed—the relatively closed-off world of academic game studies here, a review site or two there, largely operating from within the hobbyist perspective (i.e., people who are interested in and know a lot about board games talking to other people who are interested in and know a lot about board games). These types of conversations are absolutely important, and I’ve learned a lot from them. But criticism proves valuable in a number of different ways, and one of them is reaching laypeople, both as an act of recommendation (what should I buy?) and a way of getting them to think about art—and their own lives—in a different way. We’re a ways away from having the tools to think and write that way about board games, to listen to them on a broader scale.
A game like Spirit Island doesn’t exactly speak to you—not directly, at least. The whole point of the medium is the way it sneaks into your play experience, the way that there isn’t really a game when you’re not playing, at least not in the same way there’s a film when you’re not watching it or an album when you’re not listening to it. Instead, there’s the space that’s created by the rules and by the agreement everyone has made to abide by them, whether that’s happening at a party, in a sticky living room, or on a dining room table. Board games are systems, scaffolds that we hang our experiences on, crucibles that form moments like sitting in a hospital waiting room, half watching Vanderpump Rules, running out the clock.
About two-thirds of the way through that game in the hospital, our parents came over and tapped us on the shoulder, signaling that it was time to go to our grandfather’s hospital room. I’m not especially interested in talking about what happened in the room, other than to say that it was a numbing experience, of the sort that is so vivid you can remember all of the small details any time you try to remember it, even if you don’t want to. But once we’d finished our too-brief moment of saying good-bye, our family went back to the waiting room. Everything was the same, everything was a little different. My brother, sister, and I sat down, looked at each other for a moment, and, without a word, started rolling the dice.
2
Playing Along with Complicity
For the first time, my Brooklyn basement was packed full of Jews hungry for Shabbat dinner. Ten or so people had come over to eat falafel out of plastic dishes, drink kiddush wine from a glass I’d borrowed from my parents, and wear yarmulkes I’d bought at a nearby Judaica store. But they’d also come over on that misty, brisk night in February to play Juden Raus, a Nazi Germany–era game about forcibly removing Jewish families from their homes in order to deport them to Palestine.
After saying the necessary blessings and tucking into the food, a few of us moved over to a coffee table in a corner of the basement where I’d set up the makeshift Juden Raus board, printed out on a large piece of poster paper. Our version of the rules had been loosely translated from the original German by a friend and read off my phone. We used pieces from other games, since I didn’t have the original wooden pieces depicting German police officers, and I definitely didn’t have the wooden hat pieces that represented the Jewish families we’d be deporting, each one marked with a face sporting a grossly anti-Semitic scowl.
Still, I was excited: I’d been looking forward to playing Juden Raus. I spent weeks casually mentioning