Recently a book publisher friend told me that the #1 thing he seeks from his authors is longevity. “If you haven’t spent at least 10 years working on a problem that a lot of people share, it probably isn’t a book for us.”

I’ve thought about this perspective a lot lately. I’m fascinated by anyone who takes that much time to work on a single project, though it didn’t seem like something I could possibly endorse to tabletop game designers. 10 years is a long time to work on the same game! Even Vantage “only” took 8 years for me to create.

But something clicked yesterday when I saw The Enigmatist in St. Louis. David Kwong is a magician, NY Times crossword designer, and an avid puzzler and gamer. The 2-hour show is full of riddles and puzzles for the audience to solve (if they wish), and Kwong seamlessly intertwines them with some more traditional magic elevated by his remarkable vocabulary and memory. We had so much fun at the show, and I highly recommend seeing it in St. Louis at The Rep over the next few weeks.

What I realized in experiencing the show is that Kwong has been working on this show for many years. While The Enigmatist itself didn’t exist 10 years ago, Kwong was cultivating his craft. I’m sure the show itself took years to create, and he originally performed it in New York in 2019, so The Enigmatist has existed in some form for 7 years. Along the way, Kwong wrote two related books and created a deck of playing cards that is also a series of puzzles.

In other words, David Kwong has devoted himself to this 2-hour show for at least 10 years. He worked hard to create something great, and he continues to share it with as many people as possible (likely while improving and enhancing it along the way).

One of the reasons I was hesitant at first to write about this topic was that it truly felt like a luxury to work on Vantage for 8 years; how could I possibly recommend that approach to other designers and publishers?

But Vantage isn’t alone in this category. A few other examples of games that have been someone’s primary focus for many years are The Old King’s Crown (Pablo Clark), Obsession (Dan Hallegan), Galactic Cruise (T.K. King), and Stardew Valley (Eric Barone). All of those tabletop games are rated 8.1 or higher on BoardGameGeek, and Stardew Valley is one of the top-rated, most-played digital games of the last 10 years.

In other words, if you have the opportunity to work on a passion project for many years, it could lead to something truly special, especially in a time when it’s more difficult than ever for a game to stand out from the deluge of high-quality projects.

Also, working on a project for 5-10 years doesn’t mean you can’t work on other projects in the meantime. I’ve found it incredibly helpful in my design process to have 2 games in the works at the same time. When I run into a wall on one game, I bounce over to the other game for a while.

That said, there are certain risks that accompany long-term passion projects. If the investment of all that time (and probably money too) doesn’t lead to something that resonates with people, you may just be making something for yourself. A safeguard for that is to not work in a vacuum–include others in the process and welcome their feedback.

Also, the world (and your world) can significantly change over 10 years. Something that might be exciting and innovative today might feel outdated in 2036. I tried to stay flexible and open-minded while creating Vantage; I constantly researched and played other open world games during the process.

10 years is a long time, though I don’t think that’s some magical number for longevity. Rather, this is more about a patient commitment to excellence. I want to give our projects the time they need to truly shine, quality over quantity.

I’ve only named a few high-profile projects here; can you think of any others? What are your thoughts on having a long-running project (even as you might work on others in the meantime too)?

***

Also read:

• Your Best Work, Mediocrity, and Creating for Creation’s Sake
• Meaningful Creations, Play, Elevation, and Connections (2025-2026)

If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.

There are few acts of violence more righteous than killing Adolf Hitler. On July 20th, 1944, German Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg attempted to do just that. Not to spoil the 2008 Bryan Singer film, but von Stauffenberg failed thanks to the leg of an oak table. The 2016 board game Black Orchestra allows players to…

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Welcome to this week’s batch of crowdfunding campaigns. We have a variety of offerings here, so we hope you will find something that catches your eye. Also, if you want to chat with the BGQ team, join our Discord Server where we talk about games, movies, sports, and other fun stuff. Or, if Facebook is […]

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by Justin Bell

Most people in The Hobby are familiar with the term “the shelf of shame”, a funny name for the games on your shelf that you bought weeks, months, maybe even years ago and still haven’t bothered to play. (Maybe you bought the game because the box’s color scheme paired so well with the other titles on the shelf second from the bottom…maybe.)

I don’t want to discount what the shelf of shame represents. The people in my strategy group know that I’m always pushing people to only buy the games that they know they will play…and usually, they laugh at this advice and go hog-wild, buying everything in sight, whether they think they will ever really table those games or not.

To each their own. For many, simply buying a game and having a sweet new toy on their shelves feels good.

I don’t maintain a shelf of shame. Also, I don’t really have any shame. I do, however, have three games (from a collection of about 200) that haven’t been played yet, and in all three cases, the shrink has been ripped off, the games are punched, stickered, and ready to go, and I just haven’t been able to force them to a table yet. Give me another month or two, and those will hit a table sooner than later.

I’m a bit weird in that way: as soon as I buy a game, I get anxious; my new toy deserves to see the light of day, so I like to push those games to the table whenever possible. Otherwise, why buy the thing in the first place? I am also an enabler; friends know that I usually start game nights by asking if anyone has anything hot they want to bust out, especially if they just bought something they’re excited about.

Lately, though, I have been obsessed—truly obsessed—with tabling the games from a different part of my game closet. These games are known as The Maybe Pile…and I often wonder if everyone has a pile just like it.

***

My Maybe Pile began to form a couple years ago.

It’s such a tricky beast. That’s because The Maybe Pile includes games that have proven to be a challenge for one simple reason: “tablebility”, my made-up term for any game’s likelihood to regularly make it to my game table, given my personal gaming network.

Games that I did not enjoy typically go to one of three places: the sale pile, which usually amounts to the games I will sell or trade with friends or another player in my immediate network to ensure that I can still revisit the game later; my “review crew”, who get the lion’s share of my review copies; non-profit organizations which get my game donations, such as The Gaming Hoopla. The house is only so big, and I typically keep only the games I love.

Honestly, I am thankful each time I play a game that is either a banger or a dud…that makes the decision on what to do with it next very easy.

The Maybe Pile, however, is a problem, and it’s a problem that grows in scope each year. One game on the top of my Maybe Pile is Raising Robots, an excellent engine-building game designed by Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden, the same people who created my favorite auction game of them all, Stockpile. Each time I break out Raising Robots, everyone loves it. It’s the rare game that plays up to six players. It’s relatively easy to teach and doesn’t devour the entire table. I gave it a glowing review on Meeple Mountain.

Raising Robots is strong work. So, what makes it a Maybe Pile title?
-->Everyone enjoys playing it, but I can’t always get people to play it a second time.
-->Raising Robots is fantastic as a solo game…but I usually do not play tabletop games by myself.
-->I would happily give my copy away…but no one else in my immediate network has it, and I just KNOW the second I move my copy out of the collection that someone will show up at my house and ask, completely randomly, to play Raising Robots. (Yes, I do give games from the Maybe Pile to friends with the not-so-subtle request that they never sell it, so that I can continue to access the game occasionally while having it live in someone else’s home. Shortly after I do this, time and time again, they sell it anyway; it was their game at that point, after all. This is why I have trust issues!)

***

Other titles in my Maybe Pile have their own set of issues. Often, I think the game is a 9 or a 10 out of 10…but the people I game with disagree. A few of the medium-weight Euros in the Pile are good, but they’re an expansion away from being great, so I hold on, hoping the game has sold enough units to warrant additional content. In one case, there’s an 18xx title in the Maybe Pile that I love but it takes a solid eight hours to play. In a world where I have other great 18xx titles that can wrap up in 3-4 hours on a weeknight, I lean towards getting those to the table first.

Two Maybe Pile games are card games I enjoy, but their base mechanics are replicated in other titles more popular with the folks in my groups. Another game I really enjoyed, Zhanguo: The First Empire, is a blast and features a solid main action mechanic…but the teach is just enough of a lift to force some hesitation every time I want to get it back to the table. Arcadia Quest is such a joy, but getting even a short campaign game rolling is becoming a task with my play groups.

In a good year, I get 30-40 of the games in my personal collection to the table with my game groups, and another 20-30 games are popular enough with my kids that they come out all the time at home. But, that’s it. I’m a game reviewer, so I spend most of the year working through review copies provided by publishers. My first priority is playing those review titles first, and I’m often quite satisfied with that responsibility.

That SHOULD mean that every title on the Maybe Pile should move out of my personal collection. But just staring at the games in the Pile gives me pause. Those are games I love…can I really walk away?

The Malaysia Boardgame Show is happening 18-19 April 2026 in Kuala Lumpur! Cili Padi Games and I will be there. Come play with me! More information on Instagram and Linktree. There is an open-to-public area and a ticketed area for activities. Tickets for the latter here. Early bird prices ending this week. Buy now! 

It’s Women’s Day! A great opportunity to look pair a book and a game on the American women’s suffrage struggle: The Woman’s Hour (Elaine Weiss) and Votes for Women (Tory Brown, Fort Circle).

Check out my previous Book & Game posts here:

Eastern Front: Russia’s War and No Retreat! The Russian Front

Reformation Era: Four Princes and Here I Stand

The Second Hundred Years’ War: The Rise of the Great Powers 1648—1815 and Imperial Struggle

Prussia in the Seven Years’ War: Frederick the Great. A Military Life and Friedrich

The Book & Game

The Woman’s Hour was published in 2018 by Viking Press. It focuses on the campaigns for and against Tennessee to ratify the 19^th Amendment which enshrined women’s suffrage in the US constitution – as the 36^th, and decisive, state to do so.

Votes for Women was published in 2022. It is Tory Brown’s first published board game. The card-driven game can be played in a solo or cooperative mode with the player(s) representing the American suffrage movement from 1848 to 1920 against an automated opposition, or with two to four players facing off against each other (half of them for, the other against women’s suffrage). In either case, the suffrage players must win 36 states (either by shoring them up decisively during the game, or in the final vote on ratification of the federal amendment) to win.

Connections & Conclusions

At first look, book and game seem to have very different scopes. After all, Votes for Women sets in with the Seneca Falls Convention (at which women’s suffrage was first voiced as a political demand in the United States) in 1848 and covers the following 72 years, whereas The Woman’s Hour begins with the arrival of activists Carrie Chapman Catt, Sue White, and Josephine Pearson at the Nashville station in the sweltering summer of 1920. Yet as the narrative progresses, background stories are woven into the tapestry – on the context of the 1920 presidential election, suffragists’ previous efforts to gain voting rights for women in the states and to lobby for a federal amendment, the women’s suffrage movement’s relationship with abolitionism, and all the way back to Seneca Falls (and a little bit of Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies”). If you have played Votes for Women, you will recognize many of the people and events on the cards from the early and middle periods of the game when reading The Woman’s Hour.

What unites book and game is their focus on procedural politics. Historical change does not simply happen, nor is momentarily decided upon. Instead, it is brought into effect by the “strong, slow drilling into hardwood boards with passion as well as sound judgment” (Max Weber). The drills used come in both cases from the toolbox of political activism:

The Woman’s Hour details how suffragists (suffs) and anti-suffragists (antis) lobbied the Tennessee lawmakers, how they organized in associations and clubs to channel their activists’ time, funds, and energy, and, of course, how they campaigned for public opinion to win the hearts and minds of the American people with newspaper articles, public speeches, great processions, and all kinds of civil disobedience.

Votes for Women makes these the three actions from which the players choose on a given turn: Lobbying (for and against the 19^th Amendment in Congress), organizing (to gain the crucial buttons which are the currency for some powerful in-game effects and die re-rolls), and campaigning (which spreads influence cubes and thus eventually decides if enough states come out in favor of ratification of the 19^th Amendment or not).

As we’ve mentioned civil disobedience already: The women’s suffrage movement was no monolithic bloc. One of the great dividing lines was that of styles: The more conventional part of the movement, organized in the late 19^th and early 20^th century in the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) led by Carrie Chapman Catt, paid close attention to appear as respectable as possible (knowing full well that their demand for equal suffrage was enough of a provocation to the male public opinion of the time). Others adopted a more radical style, inspired by the British suffragettes: The Women’s Party, led by Alice Paul (and represented in Tennessee by Sue White) referred to the president as “Kaiser Wilson” in reference to the German war enemy, burned him in effigy, and (successfully) provoked the police into arresting activists over minor infractions. The dainty young women and respectable matrons who served some prison time then embodied the injustice of depriving women of their vote.

The Woman’s Hour details these fractions within the movement, as NAWSA and the Women’s Party led entirely separate campaigns for Tennessee’s ratification of the 19^th Amendment. While infighting was avoided, the reader is left to wonder if the movement could have been more effective if not for these parallel structures – or if the split between a more moderate and a more radical wing was able to compel a broader spectrum of audiences by working in parallel.

Votes for Women depicts the multifaceted character of the women’s suffrage movement by splitting the suffragist player into campaigner figures and influence of cubes of two colors (yellow/gold, the traditional color of the American women’s suffrage movement, and purple, a color which Alice Paul had coopted from the British suffrage movement). As several Opposition event cards target the highest concentration of one or the other color, the Suffragist player is well-advised to aim for an even spread of colors in the individual states.

Votes for Women also tackles another split in the women’s suffrage movement which is outside the scope of The Woman’s Hour – that on strategy. After the initial push for women’s suffrage as a part of a great campaign for equal suffrage regardless of sex and race had failed in the aftermath of the Civil War, the suffragists disagreed on how to proceed: Some pushed for a federal amendment to the Constitution (like the 15^th Amendment had codified the voting rights of black men), others wanted to win voting rights in the individual states first. While the struggle for women’s voting rights was eventually won with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in Tennessee, the voting rights advances in the individual states had laid the groundwork: Wyoming had established women’s suffrage as early as 1869, Montana sent Jeannette Rankin as the first woman to Capitol Hill, and by 1917, women in 19 states – mostly in the West and Midwest – had won the right to vote (sometimes only in a limited fashion, like voting in local elections).

Votes for Women’s stance is that it needs both – after all, the game is lost for the suffragist player if their lobbying fails to get the federal amendment through Congress, but to win, they need the strength amassed in dozens of local campaigns to have the amendment ratified in enough states. The game, however, makes a statement about timing: While it is possible for the suffragist to have Congress pass the 19^th Amendment in the mid-game already, that is a decidedly risky strategy which gives the Opposition a lot of opportunity to snatch individual states and rack up the necessary 13 rejections which mean the failure of the amendment. The ideal move for the suffragist is to build up the strength in the states as much as possible before pushing Congress into action as late as possible. While that is not without its risks (Opposition can still try to throw wrenches in the wheels of congressional action), it spreads them more evenly between federal and local action.

As mentioned above, equal suffrage spread from the American West and Midwest. It had a much harder time in the Northeast and in southern states – like Tennessee. The southern states were not only more conservative in general, suffragists also faced specific obstacles there: Many southern whites remained committed to the cause of white supremacy after the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Enfranchising women would give the right to vote to black as well as white women, and in the mind of the white supremacists, white women would be much less likely to actually exercise it (be it because they, as “proper” women, would rely on their men to represent them, or because they would not go to a polling station where they might meet with Black Americans). Others, while generally in favor of women’s suffrage, resented the method: After the Civil War, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments had enshrined certain rights (including male voting) for Black Americans in the Constitution. Federal amendments were thus unpopular with many southern whites.

As The Woman’s Hour details, this provided for a lot of traction for the anti movement in Tennessee. Activists like Nina Pinckard and Josephine Pearson railed against carpet-bagging outsiders swooping down from the North to meddle with Tennessee’s affairs, warned of impending “negro domination”, and appealed to the chivalry of southern men to rescue their women from being thrown into the dirty cesspit of politics. That they themselves were knee-deep in that cesspit – after all, they were political activists! – bothered them as much as modern-day “tradwives” are bothered by the fact that their plea for women to be submissive to and dependent on their men is at odds with their often successful social media enterprises.

Inherent contradictions aside, the antis’ arguments needed to be countered by the suffs. Many of the white suffragists were willing to make rhetorical or substantial compromises: One of NAWSA’s most-cited statistics in the Tennessee campaign was that the number of white women in the south exceeded that of black men and women combined. Enfranchising women, so the more-or-less subtle subtext, would thus not threaten white supremacy – it might even strengthen it. In the end, the tacit agreement was like that found after the Reconstruction amendments designed to protect Black Americans’ rights in the South: The women’s suffrage amendment made its way into the constitution. Yet voting rights were overseen by the individual states, and federal institutions looked the other way about the blatant disenfranchisement of black voters in the South until the Voting Rights Act almost half a century later.

Neither The Woman’s Hour nor Votes for Women shies away from this uncomfortable part of the women’s suffrage movement: The protagonists of the movement are not portrayed as infallible saints in the book. While they held wildly progressive views for their time on women’s suffrage, their stances on issues of race and class were often more in keeping with those of their contemporaries. They also made tactical mistakes, like Carrie Chapman Catt railing against outsiders trying to influence Tennessee – a charge that was immediately turned against her, a Northerner herself, and restricted her visibility for the remainder of the campaign. And most of them were willing to make compromises for the cause of women’s suffrage – sometimes with themselves (Carrie Chapman Catt supported the US effort in World War I against her pacifist convictions lest the women’s suffrage movement be branded unpatriotic), and sometimes at the expense of others. In short, they were human.

Would the 19^th Amendment have passed in Tennessee if the suffragists had been less willing to assuage the fears of southern whites about “black domination”? – Probably not – maybe another state could have become the decisive 36^th then, but all likely options had been exhausted before.  Did the Black Americans in the South, men and women, suffer from the continued disenfranchisement after 1920? – Undoubtedly.

Suffragist players in Votes for Women face the same strategic and ethical question (of course, with infinitely lower stakes): One of the most powerful cards in the game is The Southern Strategy which places an immense amount of suffragist influence in the South (representing the union between suffragists and white supremacists). It does open the suffragist for some counter-plays from the opposition, though. Savvy suffragist players might hold the card from turn to turn to play it as late as possible, as an uncounterable stratagem in the final struggle for women’s suffrage. Victories won that way have an odd aftertaste, I assure you.

Since Votes for Women has been released, it’s been in the top 5 of games I have played most often. And while I rarely re-read books, especially non-fiction (because there are always intriguing new books to read), I have come back to The Woman’s Hour and have now both read the physical book and listened to the (excellent) audiobook production. Besides all their worthy exploration and analysis of history, that speaks to both the game and the book being excellently crafted, incredibly engaging pinnacles of their respective medium.

by Julia Thiemann

It all started, as so many great ideas do, while walking our dog in the park during the summer of 2018. We were chatting about game mechanics (because, obviously, that’s what normal people talk about on dog walks) and stumbled upon a concept: a set collection system where tiles could serve multiple purposes. Instead of needing specific pieces for a set, players could use a mix-and-match approach. And what theme fits better than paleontology? After all, scientists have been creatively(!) assembling dinosaur bones for centuries. Case in point: Elasmosaurus, which had 71 cervical vertebrae - more than any other known animal - confused paleontologist Edward Cope so much that he placed the skull on the dinosaur’s tail. Whoops.

Back to the game: We began designing fossils composed of 1, 2, 4, or 6 tiles, spread across three excavation site variants. We also categorized fossils into three types: terrestrial, aquatic, and botanical. Interestingly, despite all the iterations and big changes, these core elements remained unchanged throughout development.

The next step was deciding where players would exhibit their fossils. The obvious answer? A museum. This led us to a grid-based display system where rows and columns were linked to fossil types. At first, matching a fossil to the correct row or column provided a placement bonus, but we
later switched this to an income system - because: who doesn’t love a good engine-building mechanic?

Looking back, it’s fascinating how the initial prototype felt both very different and surprisingly similar to the final version. The main actions were already there but instead of a shared action board, players had individual action slots on their boards. Excavations originally involved hiring paleontologists, which sounded fun until it became clear they were causing chaos. It was never clear where they were digging, and players had little incentive to hire more than one or two. So, we did what game designers must sometimes do with their darlings: we mercilessly cut them. In a chat with designer Mandela Fernandez-Graydon, we had a eureka moment: linking worker placement directly to excavation. Now, where you place your workers determines where you dig next. Bonus: Other players' workers unintentionally help you, increasing the number of tiles you can draw. Cooperation through competition!

Fast forward to September 2021. We were confident we had nailed the mechanics and were ready to focus on production. However, one playtest changed everything. A comment that stuck with us was: "Where are the visitors?" Museums need visitors, yet our design focused solely on management and exhibition. Thus, our editor Rico pushed us to introduce visitors, which in turn created interesting new mechanics. Players now gain visitors whenever they complete a fossil, because, in real life, unveiling a new fossil would surely attract a crowd!

This change also allowed for more refined balancing: instead of directly awarding victory points, players now receive visitors, which later convert into points at a 2:1 ratio. It also led to our personal favourite: a visitor queue. Instead of a dull counter, players physically extend a queue track, making it clear just how popular their museum is. After these major changes in 2021, both we and our editor quickly realized that everything had fallen into place. It finally felt like the complete game, allowing us to shift focus to final touches and production management.

We specifically requested a female illustrator and fell in love with April Borchelt’s art style. We were thrilled when she accepted the job. Her fossil illustrations are stunning, and she provided several cover drafts before settling on the final version - a dynamic, eye-catching piece that immediately draws players into the game.

Rico had an early idea to include standees for completed large fossils. Not only do they look fantastic on the table, but they also serve as clear visual indicators of scoring potential. Alongside April, Dennis Lohausen worked on the icons and standee designs, while Gaston handled everything else: boards, rulebook, characters, and more.

Simultaneously, we collaborated with the Natural History Museum of Berlin for scientific accuracy. Despite extensive research, we made numerous mistakes when placing species in the correct time periods or scaling fossil sizes accurately. Dr. Luthardt, Dr. Schwarz, and Dr. Neumann were instrumental in refining these details and contributed fascinating fun facts found in the final rulebook. Dr. Luthardt, in particular, provided invaluable insights into paleo-botany - a field we found unexpectedly captivating. Check out the story behind Wollemia in the game!

Final fun fact: Our dog Jordie is in the game! Look out for the tiny brown puppy with one ear up, one ear down. He’s been with us when we first had the idea and through all the highs and lows, so naturally, he earned his spot.

Looking back, we couldn’t be happier with the journey and where it led us. Fossilium turned into a beautifully crafted, accessible strategy game with high replayability and rich thematic depth. Our fabulous editors Chantal and Rico made sure that even the smallest detail – balancing, icons, rulebook, material, etc. – is addressed with meticulous care. The artwork, components, and table presence are stunning. And, of course, there are dinosaurs. What more could a board game designer wish for? (Okay, maybe a pet dinosaur. But until then, this will do.)

(I wrote this before seeing Fred’s comment in the prior post, but was tired and wanted to look at it before posting).

I’ve been slowly unlocking ascensions (I think there are 10 so far). I’ve unlocked up to the Asc 3 for all characters. This means there are still some things I haven’t unlocked.

TL;DR — It’s $25. Ridiculously cheap if you like deckbuilding games. There is a co-operative mode! If you liked the StS board game, this is the real thing. (All players would have to buy a copy, I think, which is still cheaper than buying the board game)

Some actual notes:

• Graphics — I liked the rough quality of the first edition, but the new one looks great. Animations are amazingly fluid. (Looking at you, Seapunk).
• I do wish they hadn’t arbitrarily changed icons/names for some potions/cards but it’s a minor nit.
• Overall I like the improvements to gameplay:
  • The new characters are interesting at first glance, although I have some concerns that one my be somewhat railroaded. (That was the comment discussion mentioned above)
  • There are now many more “boss relics” (which happen at the opening of the next act now).
  • There seem to be more potions and artifacts, which will again make things more variable between games.
  • The combinatorics (not small for the first game) are through the roof, because of … spoiler-y new things.
• I have not tried multiplayer, but I’d be open for it. I suspect it isn’t balanced well.
• I have laughed out loud several times at jokes in the game, but I did that for the first few hundred hours of StS, too.
• For the most part I easily clear the ‘old’ characters (which I am used to) and one of the new characters, but another new character I lost 6 times before getting my third wins (at 0,1 and 2). (I did like having the Run History in the first edition; it was detailed, and maybe its just hidden in some menu I haven’t seen, or a TBD feature. Update — Found it.)
• I also like what is missing — cards (and artifacts) that were ‘easy wins.’
  • Also missing is Watcher, which I’m not actually great at; but was a rather tedious character to play. She is not missed. I often just rotated the other three characters and skipped her.
• The minions and bosses continue to find new “bombs” (in game design terms) — Several are hard counters to certain strategies. Despite having only a handful of “regular’ monsters/elites/bosses, the mix seems quite good.

SO …. I think the deckbuilding has gotten more complex (not to mention the pathing and other strategy concerns), which is a good thing. I hope to try co-op.

Update — I’ve decided to buy an “Air Mouse” so I can at least stand up while playing. I’ll see if it’s any good.

Surf was up. We had already checked out Mavericks, Praia do Norte and Mullaghmore Head. All that was left was to ride the big breakers at Pipeline. We couldn't wait to show off our best tricks and compete with each other to score the most admiration. It was time to swim out and get on the next Big Wave by Daniel Kenel from Little Dog Games with art by Justin Santora.

The post Big Wave (Saturday Review) appeared first on Tabletop Games Blog.

Also, Genius Games takes over Elf Creek Games and makes like Santa

Continue reading on Board Game Beat LLC | W. Eric Martin

This is a card from my upcoming game Malaysian Holidays, which celebrates all our Malaysian national holidays and state holidays. This year Nuzul Al-Quran falls on a Saturday. Don't mind the THU on the card. In the game it is a Thursday card. And that 2 in the corner means there are two such cards in the game. Malaysian Holidays is coming soon this year from Specky Studio. Watch this space! 

From Faraway, the card game Symbiosis resembles Castle Combo

Continue reading on Board Game Beat LLC | W. Eric Martin

The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

That’s the most oft-quoted line from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, probably because it’s such an apt summation from an author who, let’s face it, preferred discursive barrel-rolls to punchy thesis statements. Liberty and discipline are the topics of Dan Bullock’s latest board game, a term I’m employing loosely but not unfavorably. The game in question is called Penitent, it’s about constructing and managing a prison in the early 19th century in the United States, and it’s either the second or fifth of Bullock’s provocations on the issue of justice, depending on how liberally we stretch the concept.

Back in 2021, Noralie Lubbers and Dávid Turczi revealed a collaborative board game project called Prison Architect, an adaptation of the 2015 Introversion Software video game about building and managing a private maximum-security prison. As the adaptation pursued funding on Kickstarter, the outcry from segments of the board gaming community was severe. Turczi apologized, noting that he and the rest of the game’s creators had been operating under the best of intentions, but also stating that he had come to believe that the topic was a bad fit for board games.

I never played Prison Architect, either the board or video game versions. Like many board game controversies, the announcement, pushback, and project cancellation passed at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed. From a distance, though, it struck me as overly gamey, too cute, to effectively communicate the nuances of such a loaded topic.

Penitent is anything but cute. It certainly isn’t gamey, at least not in the usual sense. But nuanced? It’s got nuance to the ceiling.

Your objective, as I stated earlier, is to construct and run a prison. Penitent is set in the early 19th century, a period of profound carceral transformation. Within the span of three decades, global society’s understanding of imprisonment and punishment would develop radically. Public punishment would go from the norm to unthinkable, at least in the sense that had reigned unquestioned since the Medieval period. Sanity would become a topic of public discussion, with reformers like Dorothea Dix founding no fewer than thirty-two hospitals across the U.S. and Europe for those suffering from mental ailments. Questions about racial, class, and gender justice were discussed openly in periodicals and congressional hearings. Bullock touches on every one of these issues and more, sometimes with a heavier or lighter touch, all within the span of perhaps an hour.

To regulate the game’s perspective, Bullock limits his examination to two systems of prison reform. The first is the Pennsylvania System, sometimes also called the “separate” or “silent” system for its strict solitary confinement of inmates and emphasis on moral reflection. The second is the Auburn System that evolved from it, which housed inmates separately but allowed them to work, eat, and exercise side by side, albeit often, still, in maddening silence. These reform projects existed side by side, often competing for attention and funding. Many of their fingerprints can still be found scattered throughout the penal system of the United States today.

As a game, Penitent is divided into two distinct halves. Right away, this bifurcation is troublesome.

In the first half, you draw a prison on a sheet of graph paper. The rules describe the necessary dimensions and chambers: cells enough for twelve prisoners, divided into at least two separate wings; exercise yards and workhouses to provide for your prisoners’ fitness and labor; kitchens, armories, laundries, and a warden’s office, their dimensions negotiable to such a degree that the rules effectively tell you to eyeball them; perhaps a chapel to see to the spiritual needs and moral rectitude of the incarcerated; cisterns and ventilation and observation posts, each of which you are told is essential, but for precisely what you do not yet know.

One of my pet peeves comes when a game’s setup instructs the player to make a game-altering decision without fully understanding its ramifications. Usually this means selecting one of two scoring cards, picking a faction you have yet to see in action, or selecting a bonus whose import remains obscure. In Penitent, it means sketching an entire prison.

Not only that. You’re also invited to select the policies that will dominate both the day-to-day operations of your penitentiary and its from-the-cornerstones construction. Will your prison operate under the unitary command of a single warden or the divided responsibilities of business operator and disciplinary keeper? Will punishments be meted out via the whip or the more “humane” method of dousing by freezing water? Will your inmates exist in unending silence, or only silence most of the time? These questions and more are posed directly, often without any guidance as to their significance.

This absence is frustrating. Systemic clarity is one of the great strengths of board games. Since a game’s rules can’t be computed, but must instead be held in the player’s head, this is a medium that excels at compressing complex ideas into their most digestible format. Penitent is the opposite case. Going in unprepared is a fraught proposition, but it’s also inevitable. Before you even set pencil to paper, you’re asked to make sweeping decisions, told that those decisions will have radical outcomes, but not told what any of those outcomes will be.

And those decisions matter. Oh, how they matter. The game’s second half is effectively an extended series of consequences. One by one, you draw event cards that put your prison, and by extension the bodies and lives housed within, through the wringer. Without enough cisterns, an outbreak of tuberculosis tears through the population. Housed multiple inmates to a cell, madness and brawls break out. A state inspector comes by for a looksie and comes away horrified. The locals in the nearby town go all NIMBY, complaining about how the prison’s barrel-hooping cuts into their home-grown business enterprises.

At times, these events present flashpoints. In the case of those business complaints, you might tell the locals to shut their yaps and keep your inmates hooping barrels as long as the margins are healthy. Or you could choose to divest the output of your workhouses, importing silkworms and training your laborers in spinning. Depending on which response you select, the event might present different outcomes. Sometimes it will shuffle back into the deck, threatening to come due at some future date. Maybe it will flip to its reverse side, growing more dire thanks to your inattention. At best, perhaps it’s thrown out of the game entirely. Consequences might come due. Or they might not. You can never know.

This uncertainty is at the heart of Penitent, for better and for worse.

For one thing, there’s Bullock’s entire approach to rules. In Penitent, it isn’t uncommon for the game to ask the player to use their own judgement. Is a horse thief a violent criminal or non-violent? How about a store robber? The bonneted abortionist on the board’s second row is surely a woman who ought to be housed separate from male offenders, but what about that effeminate-faced burglar on the bottom row? And what precisely is meant by “line of sight”? At least once per in-game year, an event will raise an issue that requires the player to settle a dispute that might go either way.

Bullock’s previous self-published title, The Gods Will Have Blood, asked similar questions about the uncomfortable distinction between justice and retribution. In that game, the player was asked to render judgement on accused royalists and collaborators, feeding some to madame guillotine and setting others free. Even more than that game, Penitent requires the players to make decisions on emotive and instinctual grounds rather than adhering to strict rules. The effect is often jarring.

But this absence of clarity is precisely what makes Penitent a worthwhile investigation. Something like Prison Architect may have proven a better game about moving cards and balancing a budget, but Penitent is the keenest possible study of the carceral experiment. Going into a session, one is provided only theory. The proper severity of punishments. Whether prison wings should contain washbasins. The nature of worship services. The physical dimensions of each cell. The placement of the institution’s watchmen. All that theory, all untested. So much theory you could choke on it.

Unlike the choice between two objective cards in some boilerplate eurogame, however, this tabula rasa is deliberate. It entrusts you with the drafting pencil of the reformers who crafted the modern prison system. You have no better idea of the outcome of one system over the other because you, like them, probably know very little about the distinctions between the Pennsylvania System and the Auburn System. Pop quiz: Which system proved more enduring? Which features are still present in modern penitentiaries? Here’s an easy one: which correctional facility is still in operation today that was built explicitly as an experiment in keeping prisoners in maximum isolation? It’s okay if you don’t know. For the most part, neither did the people who built them.

Not that this absolves those wardens and reformers of the role they played. If Penitent has anything close to protagonists, they are the prisoners themselves. Bullock has always imbued his work with a deep humanism, whether he’s asking us to consider the policies behind North Korean isolationism, revolution in Iran, or, sure, David Bowie’s artistic schizophrenia. As in some of his previous outings, Bullock puts the faces of the imprisoned on display. They quickly become cluttered with tokens: their injuries and illnesses, their fraying sanity from enforced isolation, their degree of penitence, the trades they’ve learned during their incarceration. All the while, their faces peer up from the board in daguerreotype. These are people who lived. They had dreams and aspirations. They suffered setbacks and failures. Now they are in your hands.

Very quickly, too, their statuses become statements about the way your institution’s incentives become bent and perhaps broken entirely. Sick inmates are more easily isolated than treated. Prisoners with trades are profitable, encouraging you to keep them under lock and key. Once, when one of my prisoners died before their madness compounded, I caught myself exhaling in relief. How’s that for ludonarrative harmony?

Speaking of which, your own role as this prison’s warden is never far from mind. Victory requires you to care for your inmates to some degree, but they’re a means to an end. That end is your influence, which Penitent is careful to tie to your capacity to actually pay for this stuff. That’s another of the game’s many entangled incentives. No matter how sterling your intentions when the game opens, it soon becomes clear that there isn’t enough funding for everything. On my first attempt, I tried to fashion a more egalitarian prison. (Exactly like most of these reformers, by the way.) When my palatial twelve-by-twelve cells proved too expensive — and my lazy bones proved unwilling to sketch the whole blueprint all over again — I added a notation in the margins: “1/3 size.”

While Bullock refuses to let his wardens and reformers off the hook, he also declines to indict them too harshly. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that modern discipline was pervasive, a co-opting of Enlightenment values that served to regiment and order human bodies, but that this was still gentler and more evenly applied than what came before it, so defined by public torture, disease-ridden dungeons, and irregular justice applied at the whims of sovereign rulers. For all their corrupted incentives, their horrifying theories, their abuses, their tourist-trap viewing holes (no, really), these prisons were still fashioned to be more humane than what came before. They didn’t prove as Whiggish as the, um, Whigs intended, but as a warden you’re still expected to provide some measure of care to your incarcerated bodies, to encourage their rehabilitation, to course-correct when your structure proves insufficient.

Is this an improvement? The answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Most of us would probably agree that we’d rather spend a stint in a cell, even one as cramped as those at Sing Sing, than have our ears sawed off and our cheeks branded with the initials for seditious traitor, only to be clapped in irons anyway. Then again, that latter punishment is arguably what sparked the Age of Revolution. Public punishments were awful, but they were also opportunities for public dissent. One of the functions of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems was the removal of any such possibility. Bodies under punishment would be placed where the public wouldn’t have to consider them; minds under punishment would be wiped through sheer silence and tedium. This, too, is torture. What good are ears when there’s nothing to hear?

This, ultimately, is the real function of Penitent.

Not the examination of Foucault, although there’s always fun to be had in asking an incoming grad student what old baldy actually meant by this or that treatise. Not the examination of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems, with their strict quietude and felt-lined shoes and years of solitary confinement. Not the realization that you’ve grown so callous toward the faces on the table that it’s a relief when one of them dies rather than cutting into your bottom line. Not even the chilling parallels to the under-regulated detention facilities springing up across the United States, the ones that would fail even Penitent’s most basic checks.

Rather, the function is to ask us to think about the bodies under our care. To consider how a person ought to be housed when we as a society have decided we’d rather put some distance between them and us. Should they be punished? Reformed? Left to rot? Helped back to their feet? Penitent doesn’t offer trite answers.

But it does ask the right questions. I’ve spent some time in prisons. Not as an inmate, to be clear. As a volunteer, a few times. As a tourist, once, for a school thing. As a minister, usually to somebody’s irritation. And certain images are burnt into my memory. An inmate standing at the glass, hands clasped and shoulders squared, chin jutted in defiance, putting himself on display as an act of resistance. Another prisoner, crying with relief that we, that anybody, came to visit. The blank, slow gaze of someone in the halfway house, overawed at the bigness of the world outside. My own personal daguerreotypes.

Penitent is quite the thing. I’m hesitant to recommend it. The last time I said that one of Bullock’s games was essential, multiple readers informed me in no unclear terms that it was garbage. So let me be clear: Penitent is not a good game in the sense we usually mean when we say those words. It is awkward and wonky and full of moments that verge on role-play. It is frustrating. It lacks player agency, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this context. It made me draw a bunch of maps on grid paper. The nerve.

But it’s also a shockingly clear examination of some truly challenging subject matter. Sure, it’s educational. More than that, it’s an act of empathy, a witness, a dissection. In all regards, it is something like a surgeon, looking directly at one of our modern world’s hidden hurts, a rupture in the abdomen that we would rather ignore. “This might be infected,” it says, prodding uncomfortably at the reddened tissue.

As for the possibility of sutures… first, we’ve got to take a long hard look at the cut.

 

A complimentary copy of Penitent was provided by the designer.

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