“For some, this might be old hat, and -for others- a revelation”
February 26, 2021 10:08 AM Subscribe
No Pun Included is a board game review YouTube channel and podcast run by Elaine and Efka.
As you’d expect, it features board game reviews, best-of-the-year assessments, Let’s Plays, and theme episodes like “It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Catan (and say hello to three other games)” and “Weird Games I Found At Essen Spiel”.
Earlier this year, on (one of) Lithuania’s Independence Day(s), Efka recorded an episode looking at Colonialism as a theme in board games.
As you’d expect, it features board game reviews, best-of-the-year assessments, Let’s Plays, and theme episodes like “It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Catan (and say hello to three other games)” and “Weird Games I Found At Essen Spiel”.
Earlier this year, on (one of) Lithuania’s Independence Day(s), Efka recorded an episode looking at Colonialism as a theme in board games.
I get that wargaming, where you marshall military might against other great military powers, might be largely inspired by historical simulation, so some level of engagement with colonialism is likely to occur, and will not typically focus on the colonized who have no power to resist. (Though Pax Pamir does attempt to be historical conflict simulation with a bit more representational balance).
But it is supremely offputting that one of the most revered designs in Eurogaming is one in which you acquire slaves and plantations for profit (and points).
Gamers might be interested in Dog Eat Dog (previously). And in the process of finding of that link, I did come across this list, which might be of interest for anyone looking for further reading.
posted by pwnguin at 11:01 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]
But it is supremely offputting that one of the most revered designs in Eurogaming is one in which you acquire slaves and plantations for profit (and points).
Gamers might be interested in Dog Eat Dog (previously). And in the process of finding of that link, I did come across this list, which might be of interest for anyone looking for further reading.
posted by pwnguin at 11:01 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]
But it is supremely offputting that one of the most revered designs in Eurogaming is one in which you acquire slaves and plantations for profit (and points).
Puerto Rico came out in 2002, before you saw the critical eye turned towards colonialism, stereotype, and slavery. Compare to the controversy about Five Tribes' slave cards a dozen years later.
I'm not excusing Puerto Rico; it was wrong then and the designers should have known better. I am saying that if Puerto Rico came out today it would be a very different game (fundamentally it's a well-structured Euro game; you could easily redo it with a better theme.) I'll note that San Juan, which is a simplified Puerto Rico that came out two years later, elided slavery and colonialism and treated it as economics. (Is that better to not show the real truth about how you get all that indigo and rum? That's a whole other discussion.)
posted by dw at 11:23 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
Puerto Rico came out in 2002, before you saw the critical eye turned towards colonialism, stereotype, and slavery. Compare to the controversy about Five Tribes' slave cards a dozen years later.
I'm not excusing Puerto Rico; it was wrong then and the designers should have known better. I am saying that if Puerto Rico came out today it would be a very different game (fundamentally it's a well-structured Euro game; you could easily redo it with a better theme.) I'll note that San Juan, which is a simplified Puerto Rico that came out two years later, elided slavery and colonialism and treated it as economics. (Is that better to not show the real truth about how you get all that indigo and rum? That's a whole other discussion.)
posted by dw at 11:23 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]
Not sure when Efka recorded that video on Colonialism, but it was released not long after there was a situation in the industry wherein by he was informed of, and correctly called out Daniele Tascini (Teotihuacan|Tzolk'in) for using a racial slur in Italian on Facebook; it was revealed that Tascini also has a history of questionable answers in response to inclusivity in gaming. There was a bit of a stir online as the community came to divided sides about how to react to Tascini's comments. Other content creators like Rahdo waded in (clumsily, and who then deeply apologized for his remarks) and "Cancel Culture!" was shouted in forums in various places. This was immediately on the heels of once again Phil Eklund, another game designer, coming out as a Covid-denier *on top of* his history of gaming footnotes to justify or handwave away all sorts of evils (rape, colonialism, slavery) in a historical context.
I myself came to terms last Summer 2020 in reckoning with my white privilege that I can never play one of my favorite games ever again, Mombasa. I was squeamish when I first bought it, but justified to myself that the colonialism is so abstract and it's really the mechanics that are the game. One group I taught the game to didn't even realize the map represented Africa! But in the end, the setting is winning by who best exploits Africa (even if abstractly) with the peoples and cultures completely erased... and erased exactly because it's so abstract. My justification to myself to buy it originally is now the reason I won't play it. The designer, Alexander Pfister recently mentioned wanted to re-release it with a different setting, so it sounds like he has grown since 2015 as well. Fingers crossed that is realized. I can't imagine sitting down to play Mombasa with a black friend and saying that the context doesn't matter because the gameplay is so good.
Pfister's game last year, Maracaibo, tries to ignore the colonial backdrop as well. (BUT WHY... WHY ARE THESE THREE NATIONS SAILING AROUND FIGHTING EACH OTHER?) I can see wanting to create a sunny swashbuckling adventure pirate game in the Caribbean, and for the most part it does that. There's one card that's is still bad and I won't play with it: Plantation Owner. The action of the card lets you put two "figures" representing people in your player color on the card, and then you can Buy... the People... from the Plantation Owner... to add them to your personal board to use them later. The analogy breaks down because those figures become analogous then to your Ship Crew going forward. Still, I'd prefer it if the card was called Port Tavern to hire crew instead of paying the literal Plantation Owner for your workers.
Or maybe create my own mechanic where I can send my swashbuckling heroes to that Plantation and free them from their white Owner.
posted by yeti at 11:45 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
I myself came to terms last Summer 2020 in reckoning with my white privilege that I can never play one of my favorite games ever again, Mombasa. I was squeamish when I first bought it, but justified to myself that the colonialism is so abstract and it's really the mechanics that are the game. One group I taught the game to didn't even realize the map represented Africa! But in the end, the setting is winning by who best exploits Africa (even if abstractly) with the peoples and cultures completely erased... and erased exactly because it's so abstract. My justification to myself to buy it originally is now the reason I won't play it. The designer, Alexander Pfister recently mentioned wanted to re-release it with a different setting, so it sounds like he has grown since 2015 as well. Fingers crossed that is realized. I can't imagine sitting down to play Mombasa with a black friend and saying that the context doesn't matter because the gameplay is so good.
Pfister's game last year, Maracaibo, tries to ignore the colonial backdrop as well. (BUT WHY... WHY ARE THESE THREE NATIONS SAILING AROUND FIGHTING EACH OTHER?) I can see wanting to create a sunny swashbuckling adventure pirate game in the Caribbean, and for the most part it does that. There's one card that's is still bad and I won't play with it: Plantation Owner. The action of the card lets you put two "figures" representing people in your player color on the card, and then you can Buy... the People... from the Plantation Owner... to add them to your personal board to use them later. The analogy breaks down because those figures become analogous then to your Ship Crew going forward. Still, I'd prefer it if the card was called Port Tavern to hire crew instead of paying the literal Plantation Owner for your workers.
Or maybe create my own mechanic where I can send my swashbuckling heroes to that Plantation and free them from their white Owner.
posted by yeti at 11:45 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
(Since we are building up comments and it seems kind of close to post time for me to be certain everyone has had time to watch/listen to the full video, for the sake of provided a bit of a gist I will note that Efka argues partly that games like Mombasa do a terrible job with handling slavery, partly that the notion of colonialism is pervasive and one person’s solution to how to wrangle with it won’t be the same as another’s, and partly that he’d like to see more “post-colonial” games - a nebulous category that he doesn’t really think exists yet.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 11:53 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]
Efka was actually active in calling out both designers over twitter.
I am glad that we are beginning to engage with board game themes. Shut up and sit down did a recent podcast on the game Carnagie where they devoted time to pointing out that he was not a hero that the game makes him out to be.
Puerto Rico is one of my favourite games, but its decision to set itself where and when it does is deeply uncomfortable, even as it calls all of the brown disks who represent your workers "colonists". We cant really do anything about these older games other than contextualize them, but we can certainly do better in future
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:15 AM on February 27, 2021 [2 favorites]
I am glad that we are beginning to engage with board game themes. Shut up and sit down did a recent podcast on the game Carnagie where they devoted time to pointing out that he was not a hero that the game makes him out to be.
Puerto Rico is one of my favourite games, but its decision to set itself where and when it does is deeply uncomfortable, even as it calls all of the brown disks who represent your workers "colonists". We cant really do anything about these older games other than contextualize them, but we can certainly do better in future
posted by Cannon Fodder at 1:15 AM on February 27, 2021 [2 favorites]
@NoPunIncluded: So, some thoughts on the reception of that video.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:50 PM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 5:50 PM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]
The comments Efka highlighted in that thread make me very angry indeed.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:14 PM on February 27, 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 6:14 PM on February 27, 2021
One of the comments, about the possibility of a worker-optimization concentration camp game, seemed a bit more misguided than about actively trolling - although ambiguous framing in such a context is its own problem. What it made me think of, however, were game designer Brenda Brathwaite’s subversive board games from a few years back - a series called The Mechanic Is The Message. In Train, the most famous of them, you discovered that the people you were sending back and forth on trains were actually -dun dun dun- Jews being shipped to concentration camps.
When I first heard about Braithwaite’s board games -almost all of which involve a kind of abstract simulation of bad historical events, sometimes paired with a malign paradigm shift- they seemed ground-breaking. But then, I think that malign paradigm shifts were generally in vogue at the time. (See Dog Eat Dog, above.) But Train isn’t really wrangling with the concept, it’s just kind of giving you a bad shock. Also -as someone who never played it, only read about it ages ago- it seems now to risk a kind of minimization: “Oh, those crazy Nazis, they were just playing a game.” Which, while yes, the Nazis were surely not thinking of Jews as people, they also weren’t thinking of them as tokens in an optimization problem either. Two difficulties in abstracting colonialist processes to make the point that they are bad remain that a) people will miss the point and think that they’re good, and b) your abstraction might miss the point as well.
(NB: It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Train. Hopefully I’m not missing something key about it as well.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:59 PM on February 27, 2021
When I first heard about Braithwaite’s board games -almost all of which involve a kind of abstract simulation of bad historical events, sometimes paired with a malign paradigm shift- they seemed ground-breaking. But then, I think that malign paradigm shifts were generally in vogue at the time. (See Dog Eat Dog, above.) But Train isn’t really wrangling with the concept, it’s just kind of giving you a bad shock. Also -as someone who never played it, only read about it ages ago- it seems now to risk a kind of minimization: “Oh, those crazy Nazis, they were just playing a game.” Which, while yes, the Nazis were surely not thinking of Jews as people, they also weren’t thinking of them as tokens in an optimization problem either. Two difficulties in abstracting colonialist processes to make the point that they are bad remain that a) people will miss the point and think that they’re good, and b) your abstraction might miss the point as well.
(NB: It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Train. Hopefully I’m not missing something key about it as well.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:59 PM on February 27, 2021
I was going to post this as part of a post about colonialism and imperialism in games. Colonialist themes are something we consider when we bring in games and in fact there are games we won't stock at all because we the owners have decided that "it's just a theme" is the game equivalent of "it's just a joke": a lazy excuse for having a poor imagination and little understanding of what you're talking about.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:20 PM on February 27, 2021
posted by fiercekitten at 8:20 PM on February 27, 2021
I am saying that if Puerto Rico came out today it would be a very different game (fundamentally it's a well-structured Euro game; you could easily redo it with a better theme.)
I'll try and get this right: New Frontiers is the boardgame version of the Race for the Galaxy card game which is a reimplementation of the card game San Juan which is the card game version of Puerto Rico so...yeah?
(I have New Frontiers but I've not played it yet, and I played Puerto Rico like a billion years ago and don't remember it that well.)
posted by turbid dahlia at 1:53 PM on February 28, 2021
I'll try and get this right: New Frontiers is the boardgame version of the Race for the Galaxy card game which is a reimplementation of the card game San Juan which is the card game version of Puerto Rico so...yeah?
(I have New Frontiers but I've not played it yet, and I played Puerto Rico like a billion years ago and don't remember it that well.)
posted by turbid dahlia at 1:53 PM on February 28, 2021
I'll try and get this right: New Frontiers
But now that you know the theme of the game it's based on, even the retheme needs to withstand heightened scrutiny. If sci fi is an allegory for the human condition, what do alien races say about how creators view race in humanity on planet Earth? Not good things, I'd wager. The Race galaxy features a long lost superpower alien race, uplifted reptiles, and the usual assortment of weird faces along side humanity. I haven't looked in too much detail but there appears to be racial supremecist star-wars Empire vs a Star Trek multicultural Rebellion plot line as well.
Furthermore, you still find the colonial themes: you explore new worlds, but with the aim of expanding an empire. You can expend people and money to colonize new worlds, and they either become production factories, or in the case of windfall words, immediately ready for exploitation. You even have military conquest, but of the galaxy writ large, not your opponents in the game.
Finally, what happened to the brown "colonists"? In Puerto Rico they just showed up on a boat from Africa whenever someone wants it to, no price attached. New Frontiers is very similar, but you do at least need to pay money when you send them off.
This is what Efka means by setting vs theme. The setting has changed, but the theme of the core mechanics are still colonialist. Just with a slightly darker new coat of paint. I know a lot of people like the action drafting / variable phase order mechanic, and while designs could feasibly adapt it to new themes, this game did not.
posted by pwnguin at 4:21 PM on February 28, 2021
But now that you know the theme of the game it's based on, even the retheme needs to withstand heightened scrutiny. If sci fi is an allegory for the human condition, what do alien races say about how creators view race in humanity on planet Earth? Not good things, I'd wager. The Race galaxy features a long lost superpower alien race, uplifted reptiles, and the usual assortment of weird faces along side humanity. I haven't looked in too much detail but there appears to be racial supremecist star-wars Empire vs a Star Trek multicultural Rebellion plot line as well.
Furthermore, you still find the colonial themes: you explore new worlds, but with the aim of expanding an empire. You can expend people and money to colonize new worlds, and they either become production factories, or in the case of windfall words, immediately ready for exploitation. You even have military conquest, but of the galaxy writ large, not your opponents in the game.
Finally, what happened to the brown "colonists"? In Puerto Rico they just showed up on a boat from Africa whenever someone wants it to, no price attached. New Frontiers is very similar, but you do at least need to pay money when you send them off.
This is what Efka means by setting vs theme. The setting has changed, but the theme of the core mechanics are still colonialist. Just with a slightly darker new coat of paint. I know a lot of people like the action drafting / variable phase order mechanic, and while designs could feasibly adapt it to new themes, this game did not.
posted by pwnguin at 4:21 PM on February 28, 2021
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posted by St. Oops at 10:48 AM on February 26, 2021