Back to the history and board games of New York City! Last time, we’ve looked at the city’s humble beginnings all the way to the destruction wrought on the city by the Revolutionary War. Today, we’ll cover the first century of New York City as a city in the United States – how it established its primacy in the country, how it was at the same time very attractive and a horrible place to live in, and how it took shape as a modern metropolis. As always, board games will guide us.

American Capital

When Britain had recognized American independence in 1783, the young country gave itself a constitution – the Articles of Confederation. The United States were organized on strictly confederative principles. New York City became the capital. The advocates of broad independence for the states and minimal federal government, however, lost ground over the next few years as the United States struggled to deal with the post-war challenges, chiefly the states’ tremendous debt. Thus, over ferocious public debate, a new constitution was adopted in 1787, and according to it, a strong chief magistrate elected – George Washington, the first president, who was inaugurated in 1789 at City Hall, New York.

One of the fiercest proponents of a strong federal government was New Yorker Alexander Hamilton who became the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. In this role, Hamilton advocated for further government centralization, especially in regards to financial and economic affairs, based on his experience in the commercial hub New York. Hamilton succeeded in having the federal government take over the remaining states’ debts, but his opponents – chiefly rural southerners – demanded a price: The federal capital would move away from New York. Philadelphia would fill the role temporarily, before a new capital to be constructed in a southern swamp would be ready – the future Washington, D.C.

Even though New York City ceased to be America’s capital, it was still the prime center of American capital. In 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was founded. Its location – Wall Street – is synonymous with finance until today. The city’s booming harbor also attracted more and more commerce. By 1804, New York City had overtaken Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States at around 70,000 inhabitants. As growth did not slow down, the city’s leadership embarked on a scheme which must have seemed megalomaniac at the time: In 1811, they adopted a development plan which laid a regular grid of avenues and perpendicular streets over Manhattan Island, encompassing areas large enough to house a million people at the contemporary population density. That was the blueprint for modern New York City.

New York’s growth, however, was not pre-ordained. It relied chiefly on the city’s status the nation’s premier port. Yet as the United States grew westward, New York lay farther and farther away from many of the new towns and states. Goods could only flow to or from the Great Lakes or the Great Plains by arduous land journeys – or down the Mississippi. New Orleans, located at the mouth of the great stream, seemed poised to take over New York’s role as America’s port. That’s when the governor of New York state, DeWitt Clinton, proposed an ambitious engineering scheme: Nature might not have connected New York City with the great inland waterways of America. But men could. The 350-mile Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie and thus allowed uninterrupted ship transport from New York all the way to the western frontier states.

Packet Row (Åse Berg/Henrik Berg, White Goblin Games) is set in the bustling port of New York in the 1840s. Players need to find the right combination of trade goods (so, supply), contracts (demand), and ships to grow rich as merchants. Money alone will not be enough for victory: The game embodies the ethos of the magnates of the 19th century, which held that wealth came with responsibility for the community. Thus, the money earned in Packet Row needs to be spent on projects which benefit the city (say, the university) for victory points.

When the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, 89% of New Yorkers had been born in the United States. By 1860 that number had fallen to less than half. Let’s take a look at this great social and political transformation.

Immigration, Death, and Politics

New York’s status as America’s port made it incredibly attractive for immigrants: Its booming trade hungered for willing workers, and even if immigrants had different dreams – say, farming on the wide prairie – they would probably arrive by ship in New York. In the mid-19^th century, an astounding 70% of all European immigrants to the United States entered the country through New York. The absolute numbers are even more breath-taking: In the decade after the Great Famine, a million Irish alone arrived in New York, along with German, English, and Scottish immigrants.

Despite this massive population influx, New York City had only around 800,000 inhabitants by 1860. That was partly because many immigrants moved on further inland, but also because of the astonishing mortality: For example, during the year 1856, 4% of all adults and 20% of all children in New York City died. The cramped living quarters in which most immigrants found themselves and the inadequate medical infrastructure made New York a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of epidemics, while the high cost of living forced the immigrants into long working hours at often dangerous jobs.

Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the immigrants turned to anyone who promised them a helping a hand. And as they were so many (and usually gained citizenship after two years of residence), courting them became a viable electoral strategy. Fernando Wood became the first New York mayor whose election had been largely achieved by his success with Irish-American and German-American voters. His recipe for success – mobilizing various immigrant communities – would be copied for decades by his successors in Tammany Hall, the local Democratic Party’s political machine which traded patronage for votes.

Tammany Hall (Doug Eckhart, Pandasaurus) is centered on this political strategy: The basic move which players take is to select one immigrant token (Irish, German, English, or – inspired by the later 19^th century – Italian) and place it in one of the wards of New York. That gives the player both some influence with the respective immigrant community and some potential strength on the ground in that ward, come the next election. Whichever player wins most wards in an election round becomes mayor of New York and thus gets to dole out City Hall jobs to their allies.

Tammany’s success in the 1850s was based on organizing various disparate communities. The Civil War brought ruptures to this alliance: Mayor Wood called for New York City to secede from the Union and become a “free city” in order to maintain trade relations with the treasonous southern states. The majority of Tammany Democrats, however, were staunchly in favor of the Union, but less enthusiastic about the cause of abolitionism. Thus, many of the German immigrants (often veterans of the 1848/49 revolution) abandoned the party in favor of the Republicans, and the German-Irish voting bloc split (although it would remain firmly united in its opposition to the temperance movement).

The split caused a Republican-led fusion ticket to win the mayoral election of 1862. It would be a short break from Tammany rule, as the new mayor faced growing racial tensions: On July 13 1863, protests against the continued draft erupted in violence. For the next three days, a mob (mostly consisting of Irish-Americans from the Lower Manhattan slums) rampaged through the city, targeting Black neighborhoods. The Draft Riots would only be put down once regiments returning from Gettysburg reached the city. Many Black New Yorkers left the city afterward, so that they amounted to barely over one percent of New York City’s population in 1865.

Tammany rule was restored in the 1864 mayoral election… not that it mattered much who exactly the mayor was, as long as he was a loyal follower of the Tammany machine. The unbridled access to power allowed the Tammany leader William “Boss” Tweed to become one of the richest men in New York – and public money also lined the pockets of many public servants and private contractors (especially in the construction business). The most outrageous example of this corruption was the construction of the County Courthouse. Tweed himself bought a quarry to supply the marble for the project at egregious prices, and the subcontractors had a field day, too, billing amounts like $360,000 for one carpenter’s month of labor or $7,500 per individual thermometer. The Courthouse’s final cost ran up to $13 million – almost twice the price of the contemporary Alaska Purchase!

Tweed, however had cranked the levers one too many times. Even New York Democrats (at least those set aside by him) distanced themselves from him. A court found Tweed guilty of embezzlement and sentenced him to a year in prison. He escaped and made his way to Spain, but was discovered and extradited to the United States, where he would die in prison. Tammany would rule New York politics for almost another century due to the machine’s continued ability to organize new immigrants (Italians and Eastern European Jews in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries), but the worst excesses of its corruption ended with Boss Tweed. Indeed, for a 20^th century New Yorker, it would be almost impossible to imagine how political office could be mostly sought to enrich a few powerful individuals and their willing helpers.

The Dawn of the Modern Age

New York City in the mid-19^th century was squalor and corruption, but it was also the place where the innovations of the modern metropolis first took shape. The explosive population growth and the crowded living conditions were countered with a massive park development – Central Park, until today New York’s finest place to breathe fresh air and surround yourself with the peace of grass and trees. Construction lasted from 1857 to 1876.

New technology also sprung from New York – literally and figuratively. When Thomas Edison looked for the first city in which to broadly distribute electricity, New York was the obvious choice. And the transformational impact of the railroad on America would not have been possible without the finance hub New York raising and directing the capital for the investments. So, all of you 18XX gamers, you can thank New York!

Finally, in 1886, New York City received its most iconic landmark: The people of France gifted the United States a large statue, symbolizing liberty, the chief value of the American Revolution. Once the Americans had succeeded at funding the pedestal for the statue – encouraged by campaigns of the New York newspapers – the Statue of Liberty was proudly displayed in New York harbor, welcoming newcomers and promising them a free life. In the words of Emma Lazarus, whose poem adorns the a plaque inside the pedestal of the statue:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The Statue of Liberty is such an icon that it got its own promo card in 7 Wonders: Duel (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production) – even though your definition of antiquity must be very wide to include the Statue of Liberty. But nothing is impossible in board games!

In the years after the Statue of Liberty was erected, New York shape-shifted… upwards. The age of the skyscraper began, and nowhere more so than in Manhattan. But that’s a story for next time!

Games Referenced

Packet Row (Åse Berg/Henrik Berg, White Goblin Games)

Tammany Hall (Doug Eckhart, Pandasaurus)

For the People (Mark Herman, GMT Games)

Tesla vs. Edison: War of Currents (Dirk Knemeyer, Artana)

1846: The Race for the Midwest (Thomas Lehmann, GMT Games)

7 Wonders Duel: Statue of Liberty Promo Card (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production)

7 Wonders: Duel (Antoine Bauza/Bruno Cathala, Repos Production)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.

Back to our board game assisted biography of Fabius Cunctator! In the first part, we’ve seen where Fabius came from, how his career was already illustrious before Hannibal’s invasion, and how he was then called to Rome’s highest emergency office – the dictatorship. Today, we’re covering the turning point of the war against Hannibal, Fabius’s later campaigns, and his final years – as always, with board games.

If you want to read more posts of this kind, I strongly recommend you subscribe to the blog – all new posts in your inbox right when they go live!

“The Man, Who by His Delaying Restored the State to Us”

After Fabius had laid down the dictatorship, the consuls returned to the traditional method of Roman warfare: Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro were ready to offer battle to Hannibal once more. Hannibal’s third major battle in Italy ended for the Romans even worse than the clashes at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene: At Cannae, the Roman center advanced, their wings gave way, and the entire army was caught in the double envelopment. Rome lost 50,000 soldiers in a single day, including consul Paullus.

The catastrophe at Cannae made Fabius the obvious choice to lead Rome. While he did not take any formal office immediately, his authority, encouragement, and – once more – attention to religious rites calmed the Romans and rekindled their belief in victory.

Fabius was now at the height of his political, military, and religious authority – and he used them. The Romans elected Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Lucius Postumius Albinus as consuls for 215. When the latter was killed in action before he could assume the office, the college of augurs (of which Fabius was a member) vetoed the by-election of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, citing religious reasons against having two plebeians as consuls. Instead, the patrician Fabius was chosen to be consul alongside Marcellus. Fabius would be co-opted into the second important priesthood, the college of pontifices, expanding his religious authority even further.

The two consuls of 215 were both seasoned commanders – just what Rome needed in such dire times. At least Fabius would have thought so. When the elections for the consuls of the year 214 were almost completed, Fabius as the presiding magistrate annulled the elections, claiming that the chosen candidates were no match for Hannibal. The elections were held again, and this time, Fabius and Marcellus were returned for another year (contrary to the Roman prohibition of consecutive terms in office).

In any case, Fabius and Marcellus worked well together. They contained Hannibal in 215 in southern Italy, allowing him no more successes in peeling off Roman allies. In 214, Marcellus went on the offensive in Sicily, while Fabius continued to shadow Hannibal’s army and punish Rome’s unfaithful allies. Their division of labor had them soon known as “the sword [Marcellus] and shield [Fabius] of Rome”. When their terms ended in 213, both of them were confirmed as pro-consular commanders.

As Hannibal’s forces dwindled away, his attempt to destroy the Roman alliance system was failing. Even those cities which had joined him were slowly retaken by the Romans. Marcellus conquered Syracuse, the biggest city on Sicily, in 212. Fabius went for a prize of similar importance, besieging Capua, the biggest Italian city after Rome. Hannibal knew he could not defeat Fabius with his shrunken army. Instead, he tried to save his last major ally by marching on Rome, hoping to lure Fabius away from Capua.

Fabius, however, was as phlegmatic as ever and called Hannibal’s bluff by continuing to siege Capua. Rome held, Capua fell. Hannibal’s war was all but lost. The edge of the Carthaginian invasion had been blunted by Fabius’s patience and tenacity, until Rome’s almost-inexhaustible supplies of soldiers allowed it to take the initiative. Fabius’s contemporary, the poet Ennius described him as the “man, who by his delaying restored the state to us”.

The Last Campaigns

Hannibal had lost, but Rome had not yet won. The cities who had broken faith with Rome in Italy had to be re-taken. Rome still had need of Fabius. He was elected consul once more for 209, and also named princeps senatus (“first of the Senate”), an honorary title which by tradition would have been bestowed on the most senior senator who had served as censor.

Bedecked with these honors, Fabius set out against Tarentum, the last major city in Italy which still supported Hannibal, while other Roman generals kept Hannibal busy. Fabius secretly negotiated with the leaders of the city. They broke with Hannibal and opened the city gates to the Roman army – but Fabius had them slaughtered to veil that he had gained the city by treason.

Tarentum was plundered. Fabius had a colossal statue of Hercules brought to Rome and placed it next to a statue of himself on the capitol, emphasizing his connection to the divine ancestor which he claimed.

Eclipsed

Hannibal was still in Italy, but Rome was firmly on the offensive. The young Publius Cornelius Scipio invaded Spain and expelled the Carthaginians and proposed to invade the Carthaginians’ African seat of power. While Fabius still argued for a defensive strategy which would contain Hannibal, his word did not count for as much as it used to: He may have been the nominally most influential senator, but his strategy had outlived itself. It had been necessary lest Rome suffer defeat, but it could not deliver the ultimate victory.

Scipio found support in the senate and sailed to Africa. Hannibal was promptly recalled by the Carthaginians and made his way back to Africa as well. Scipio met Hannibal at Zama and defeated him in a bloody battle of attrition. Carthage sued for peace soon after. Fabius did not live to see it. He had died a few weeks before the battle of Zama.

Games Referenced

Commands & Colors: Ancients (Richard Borg, GMT Games)

Sword of Rome (Wray Ferrell, GMT Games)

Hannibal & Hamilcar (Jaro Andrusziewicz/Mark Simonitch, Phalanx)

Further Reading

Plutarch’s biography of Fabius (which prizes unity of character over historical accuracy) can be found in an English translation here.

Polybius’s Histories which deal with the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean including the Second Punic War are online in an English translation here.

Fabius has found remarkably little attention by modern biographers. If you read German, I recommend this short, but insightful piece on him: Beck, Hans: Quintus Fabius Maximus. Musterkarriere ohne Zögern [Quintus Fabius Maximus. Model Career without Delaying], in: Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim/Stein-Hölkeskamp, Elke: Von Romulus zu Augustus. Große Gestalten der römischen Republik [From Romulus to Augustus. Great Characters of the Roman Republic], Beck, Munich 2000.

We’ve been assessing the merits of political leaders in (more or less) democratic countries on this blog for a few years now. Today, we’re returning to German chancellors… but not the way you know it. After a few chancellors from the Federal Republic of Germany (founded in 1949), we’re assessing for the first time a chancellor from the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first attempt at parliamentary government – Hermann Müller. And which game could be more appropriate for him than Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The chancellors will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as chancellor.

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A chancellor can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the chancellor is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the chancellor increase German influence in the world and the security of Germans at home? Did the chancellor wield German power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected?

Domestic policy: Did the chancellor increase the liberty of Germans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the chancellor promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the chancellor facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Germans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the chancellor’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the chancellor have an idea of what Germany and Europe (the latter counting for more in times of German influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the chancellor’s policies steer Germany (and, if applicable, Europe) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the chancellor succeed in seeing their policy through from inception to completion? How well did the chancellor manage the support from parliament, society, the administration, the media?

Integrity: Did the chancellor understand the office as a means to benefit themselves, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the chancellor respect the boundaries of the office?

Note: If you have read my UK prime minister or US president ratings, you will remember that I rated them on the global impacts of their vision as well. As the rating system is only really applicable to democratic leaders and no democratic German leader ever had the chance to conduct a truly global policy, I only assess their vision on national and European grounds.

Müller’s Early Life

Hermann Müller was born in Mannheim (in the southwest of Germany) on May 18, 1876. His father ran a small sparkling wine company, but died when Hermann was still a teenager. Thus, instead of taking over the company or going to university, the young Hermann Müller trained to become a clerk. He soon became involved with the socialist movement and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1893. After some years working for social democratic newspapers, he was elected to the leadership board of the SPD in 1906. Müller was often charged with liaisons to other socialist parties in Europe – including a doomed trip to Paris in July 1914, trying to negotiate a joint refusal of French and German socialists to support their respective countries’ impending war with each other.

Müller was elected to Imperial Germany’s parliament in a by-election in 1916. Soon after, the German Social Democrats split between the Majority Social Democrats (MSPD, including Müller) who supported the war effort, and the Independent Social Democrats (USPD), who did not. When the war was lost in November 1918 and the monarchy swept away by revolutionary soldiers and workers, the MSPD soon took control of the revolution and steered a moderate course towards parliamentary democracy.

The New Republic

The revolution of 1918/1919 transformed the (M)SPD from the pariah party of Imperial Germany to the most important pillar of the new republic. As the Social Democrats were no longer barred from the positions of power, they needed scores of cadres to fill them. The general upswing also brought a promotion for Müller, who was elected co-chairman of the MSPD in 1919. Government came with its own challenges: The lost war, the ongoing Allied naval blockade, and the weak position of the new government made it imperative to conclude a peace treaty with the Allied powers. The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, with which the Allies presented Germany, seemed unacceptable to most Germans – including many Social Democrats. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann resigned rather than take responsibility for the treaty. He was succeeded by Gustav Bauer (also SPD) whose new administration Müller joined as foreign minister in June 1919. In this role, it fell to him to sign the treaty. From there, Müller sketched the outlines of a new foreign policy – one in which Germany would cooperate with the Allies, use its economic and cultural rather than its military strength to influence world events, and thus overturn the harsh provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Bauer administration resigned after the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup of March 1920. Müller took over the chancellorship as a caretaker – elections were scheduled for June 1920. He was unable to tackle most of the many challenges which beset Germany (chiefly the agreement with the Allies on the details of the German reparations, the tensions over the German-Polish border, and the threat of right-wing terrorism and insurgency (as in the Kahr coup in Bavaria)). The only crisis which was dispelled during his time in office was the dissolution of the Red Ruhr Army, a left-wing militia which had formed in opposition to the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup and, after its failure, had continued their struggle for a council republic on the Ruhr. Their uprising was put down by army and Freikorps units and over a thousand workers (with more or less connection to the uprising) summarily executed.

The first one and a half years of democratic government in Germany had proven a disappointment for many voters, including those who generally were in favor of the new republic. The three government parties (the SPD, the Catholic Center (Zentrum), and the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP)) all suffered heavy losses in the 1920 election. The SPD was particularly hard hit, as its handling of the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup and the Ruhr Uprising disenchanted many left-leaning workers. Both the USPD and the pro-business, conservative-liberal German People’s Party (DVP) gained a lot of votes.

With the majority for the government coalition lost, Müller attempted to broaden the government by including the USPD. Due to his handling of the aftermath of the Kapp-Lüttwitz coup, he was brusquely rebuffed. As he did not see potential to cooperate with the DVP, he led the SPD into opposition.

Opposition and Return to Government

Müller’s own inclination was to return to government responsibility, but he prioritized first the reunification of the SPD with the USPD (concluded in 1922) and then the prevention of another rupture. However, the SPD supported the bourgeois minority government (Zentrum, DDP, and DVP) in matters of foreign policy, which was conducted by the guidelines which Müller had laid out as foreign minister and chancellor in 1919 and 1920.

The reparations issue, however, remained unresolved. As tensions over it with the Allies heated up, France occupied the Ruhr again, to which the government responded with encouraging the population of the Ruhr to cease cooperation with the occupiers. This “passive resistance” relied on the national government funding the livelihood of millions of people and thus fueled inflation. As these interconnected crises escalated, it became clear that the government did not have the parliamentary and public support to deal with them. Government needed to rest on a broad basis. The first “Grand Coalition”, led by DVP chancellor Gustav Stresemann and including SPD, Zentrum, DDP, and DVP was inaugurated in August 1923. Four Social Democrats became ministers. Hermann Müller, however, was none of them as he was deemed indispensable to maintain control of the fractious SPD parliamentary group (whose vote to join the government had been on the narrowest of margins).

While the Stresemann government successfully ended both the passive resistance (and French occupation) and the inflation crisis, the way there was rocky. It included challenges from both the left wing in Saxony and Thuringia (which were put down by the armed forces once the Communist Party entered a parliamentary government) and the right wing (a nationalist power grab in Bavaria was left unanswered as the loyalty of the army to the republic seemed suspect; an attempt to radicalize Bavaria even further led by a young demagogue named Adolf Hitler collapsed when it met resistance by the nationalist authorities). This uneven treatment convinced the SPD to leave government after only three months. Stresemann, thus without a majority, soon was toppled as chancellor, but remained foreign minister.

The SPD, despite being the largest party in parliament (and being confirmed in this status in 1924), would spend the next five years in opposition. Attempts to form another Grand Coalition failed in 1924 and 1925 (because the DVP preferred to cooperate with the nationalist DNVP and the new, monarchist, president Paul von Hindenburg), and in 1926, because Müller’s SPD engaged in the fool’s quest of pursuing a plebiscite to expropriate the former princes – the plebiscite failed to meet the quorum as expected, but it set the SPD on a path of confrontation with the bourgeois parties which ruled out any cooperation with them.

That did not mean that cooperation was impossible: The SPD continued to back the cooperative-revisionist foreign policy of the government, and also supported budget compromises. Thus, the party agreed to a budget for the year 1928 which included a first payment for new armored cruisers to modernize the navy. It then campaigned for the March 1928 elections on the slogan “Meals for Children instead of the Armored Cruiser”. The electorate returned the SPD with its best showing since 1919. Müller was able to form a government (once more including Zentrum, DDP, and DVP) and was elected chancellor for the second time.

The Second Chancellorship

The contradiction between parliamentary action and campaign promises immediately backfired for Müller. The budget for the new fiscal year was due, and as agreed, included funds for the naval modernization. Müller belatedly realized that the decision had been made already, that the SPD had agreed to it, and that his government partners would expect the SPD to stick to its previous course. While Müller and the SPD ministers voted in favor of the budget in cabinet, the SPD parliamentary group revolted against the budget and forced them to vote against it in parliament. It did the rebels no good, as they could not find another majority for an alternative budget, but the revolt was a catastrophe for Müller’s authority.

The economic situation was similarly unpromising: When the trade unions of the Ruhr heavy industry proposed a pay raise by 15 pennies per hour, the employers responded by pre-emptively handing hundreds of thousands of workers their notice. Unions and employers then agreed on mediation, but when the employers did not like the result, they backtracked and disputed the legality of the process. Thus, 240,000 iron workers were laid off. Müller had a second mediator make a new proposal, which was suitably employer-friendly (with pay raises ranging from one to six pennies per hour). The employers contentedly saw that playing hardball paid off. Their confrontational stance would increase with the growing unemployment after the 1929 stock market crash.

For the time being, Müller enjoyed the greatest success of his tenure: He negotiated a new reparations agreement (without Stresemann, who died in October 1929), the Young Plan (named after Owen D. Young, who represented the American side). The negotiations were a great step forward for Germany (as the reparations were much reduced and payment put on a realistic basis), but a mixed blessing for Müller: On the one hand, the agreement was very unpopular (as it stipulated German payments for the next 58 years) and thus maligned by the right wing (which campaigned against it on the slogan “Enslaved for three generations). On the other, the combination of the undoubted necessity of the negotiations and their unpopularity meant that the moderate right-wing parties held off their assault on Müller for the moment, as they wanted him to take the blame.

It was only a short reprieve. By January 1930, the Young Plan negotiations were concluded. The same month, the DVP, not being held back by the pro-government Stresemann anymore, had secretly decided to break the coalition if the SPD did not agree to radical pro-business reforms. The party had received encouragement from president Hindenburg, who also intimated to Zentrum leader Heinrich Brüning that he would support a Brüning-led bourgeois minority cabinet with presidential executive orders.

The showdown came in March 1930 over the reform of unemployment insurance. Müller had negotiated a compromise with Paul Moldenhauer (DVP), the minister of finance. However, the DVP parliamentary group refused to accept the compromise. Müller then tasked Brüning to work out another proposal which would be acceptable to all parties in government. Brüning’s suggestion – which would have postponed the issue by another year without solving it – found agreement in the DVP, Zentrum, and DDP parliamentary groups, but, despite Müller’s urging, not that of the SPD. The second Müller administration thus ended on March 27, 1930.

Müller had hoped that president Hindenburg would support an SPD-led minority government with executive orders. Instead, Hindenburg turned to Brüning whose chancellorship began the slide into government not backed by parliamentary majorities. The SPD, however, supported Brüning on key issues of economic and foreign policy lest the president find excuses to turn even more authoritarian. It was to no avail: Hindenburg and his camarilla got tired of Brüning in 1932 and replaced him in turn with Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher who enjoyed even less parliamentary support, before it seemed like a smart move to them to ally their nationalist elites to the popular movement of the Nazis in January 1933, ending German democracy altogether. Müller did not live to see his democratic republic destroyed: He had never been of strong health, had campaigned and governed against the advice of his doctors who counselled rest, and died on March 20, 1931.

The Rating

Foreign policy

Müller developed Weimar’s foreign policy in his first term in government (as foreign minister and chancellor), which aimed at proving to the Allies by faithful cooperation that Germany was willing to do its part in reconciliation (but had economic limits in what it could do) and would thus be re-admitted on an equal footing to the international community, which would allow the country to revise key portions of the Treaty of Versailles. While the theory was sound, its application ran into practical problems – for Müller as well as the other chancellors and foreign ministers of the Weimar Republic: French revisionism of the Treaty (France felt short-changed in the matters of annexations and would have liked to incorporate the entire left bank of the Rhine as under Napoleon), and the constant charges from the German right that international cooperation under the Treaty of Versailles was akin to betrayal of the nation.

Domestic policy

Müller never gave much attention to the existing inequities during his two terms as chancellor. That he was aware of them is proven by his record as foreign minister, in which he massively overworked the diplomatic service (which had been almost exclusively staffed by nobles heretofore), opening it for applicants from all backgrounds. Similar reforms of the judiciary or the military, two other institutions still personally and mentally clinging to Imperial Germany, did not make it to Müller’s chancellor agenda, even though the atrocities committed on the Ruhr in 1920 while the army could not be used to deal with the Bavarian regime at all showed the necessity of these institutional changes.

Economic policy

Müller’s handling of economic policy was incremental and cooperative – a bad fit to deal with his counterparts in business and the government (DVP) who wanted radical changes through confrontation. Müller’s stance may have been the more reasonable. But Müller lost.

Vision

Müller’s vision of a Germany based on constructive parliamentary debate and government compromise, cooperating with other countries on an equal footing, is compelling. However, Müller was not always successful in advancing these goals, as he prioritized party unity over compromise with others at times.

Pragmatism

Müller failed to see most of his policy initiatives through. He kept neither his coalition nor his own parliamentary group in check. However, Müller prevented another rupture of his party, and as a skilled electoral campaigner, achieved the first place for the SPD in every national election with him at the helm of the party.

Integrity

Müller was fair and even-handed in his conduct as a chancellor. As a Social Democrat, he considered the workers his natural constituency, but was always willing to include the interests of other groups in the compromises he forged. His only fault was to hope for the a-parliamentary executive order minority government which, in the end, was given not to him, but Brüning.

Overall

Hermann Müller’s chancellorship is traditionally considered a failure based on the collapse of the Weimar Republic soon after. Yet the Republic did not end with his tenure, and it was destroyed not by his actions, but by those of others. Müller’s most enduring contribution was the invention of the Weimar formula of foreign policy, his biggest weakness his inability to impose authority on his friends, partners, rivals, and foes. He failed because he was a middling chancellor in a hostile world.

1. Abraham Lincoln 28/30
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30
3. Friedrich Ebert 25/30
4. Winston Churchill 25/30
5. Robert Walpole 24/30
6. Willy Brandt 23/30
7. Konrad Adenauer 22/30
8. Harry S. Truman 21/30
9. John F. Kennedy 17/30
10. Hermann Müller 17/30
11. Ludwig Erhard 12/30
12. Paul von Hindenburg 10/30

How would you rate Müller? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

For short overview essays on all German chancellors from Bismarck on, see Sternburg, Wilhelm von: Die deutschen Kanzler. Von Bismarck bis Merkel [The German Chancellors. From Bismarck to Merkel], Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2006 (in German).

The only full-length biography of Müller is Reichel, Peter: Der tragische Kanzler [The Tragic Chancellor], dtv, Munich 2018 (in German). Unfortunately, the book suffers from the author’s misguided attempt to assign blame for the end of the republic on the SPD for an alleged lack of willingness to compromise, which runs through the entire book.

A revisionist, but insightful short treatment of Müller is Behring, Rainer: Hermann Müller (1876—1931) und die Chancen der Weimarer Republik [Hermann Müller (1876—1931] and the Chances of the Weimar Republic], in: Brandt, Peter/Lehnert, Detlef: Sozialdemokratische Regierungschefs in Deutschland und Österreich. 1918—1983, Dietz, Bonn 2017 (in German).

For the broader context, see: Herbert, Ulrich: A History of Twentieth-Century Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019.

Everything seems to get ever bigger. Cars. Phones. Board game boxes. And the cities whose history and board games we explore are no exception: We started with Venice, moved on to Amsterdam, and today, we’re starting with New York. I say starting, because unlike the previous two cities, there is no way to do the vast number of board games set in New York’s history justice in a single post. Thus, this will be a mini-series with (tentatively) three instalments.

If somebody asked you what New York is, you’d probably start by saying it’s a city in the United States. Today, we’re looking at it before it was that – first, when the area which is today New York was settled by Native Americans, then, when the first Europeans founded an outpost there, and finally, when this little settlement received the name it bears until today.

The First Settlers

Names are given by people. “New York” was what the English called the settlement they took over in 1664, but the place had been inhabited by thousands of years before. While that is thus technically not the history of New York, we’ll take a short look at it.

We don’t know very much about the first humans to live in what would become New York: The indigenous people did not keep written records. Archaeology is hard to do in a place which is almost entirely covered in buildings and streets today. And the oral tradition of the Indians was largely destroyed when the westward expansion of the European colonists pushed them out of their native homes, broke up their communities, and finally confined them to reservations.

Five hundred years ago, several thousand Lenape Indians inhabited an island they called Mannahatta (“island of many hills”). They lived off slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, and fishing. I am not aware of any board game which depicts their lives before the arrival of the first Europeans, but I think it would be a nice change of perspective while still retaining the familiar geography which draws many board gamers (of course, especially those from New York and its surroundings) to games about the city.

In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer employed by the king of France, sailed into what would be called New York Bay. There, he met a group of Lenape in their canoes. He called the area New Angoulême to honor the French royal house of Valois-Angoulême. For the next century, European fur traders would occasionally visit the Lenape, but not attempt to build a permanent presence.

Nieuw Amsterdam

Only in the 1620s did the Dutch, by then the premier commercial and maritime country of Europe, decide to colonize parts of North America. They resolved that this colony should include Mannahatta to take advantage of the rich beaver population whose pelts were much sought after in Europe, and put the merchant Peter Minuit in charge of the operation.

Minuit arrived on May 4, 1626. He met with some of the Lenape, and, according to his written report to Europe, purchased the southern tip of Mannahatta from them for trade goods worth 60 guilders. Even though nobody knows any details beyond Minuit’s own account, the deal is the founding story of New York. One thing that stands out about it is that it was a business transaction. Unlike other cities in North America, New York was not founded by a royal agent or religious refugees, but in the spirit and through the means of commerce (which has since remained the supreme political order and religious faith of New York). In that sense, Minuit’s purchase is either a very smart business move – after all, a large tract of land in such a prime position was surely worth more than the trade goods he handed over – or the hostile act of an unscrupulous merchant taking advantage of the less business-savvy (both actions hallmarks of New York’s commercial culture until today). Beyond the foundational myth, the transaction mostly shows different ways of thinking about land – the Lenape only accepted the right to temporarily co-use it, whereas the Europeans subscribed to the tenet of permanent, exclusive ownership.

While the Dutch colonized the whole mid-Atlantic coast of what is today the US, their settlement on Mannahatta was meant to be its center – as evidenced by its name of Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam), after the Dutch capital. Nieuw Amsterdam grew into a trading hub based on its deep natural harbor, the best on the Atlantic coast. The fur trade was soon complemented by Dutch farms which extended ever further north on Mannahatta, which triggered conflicts with the Lenape. This period is represented in New Amsterdam (Jeffrey D. Allers, White Goblin Games), which casts its players in the shoes of Dutch traders who will gather resources and expand New Amsterdam (at the expense of the Lenape).

Nieuw Amsterdam already contained the seeds of some characteristic New York traits: Its demographics diversified (Africans lived in Nieuw Amsterdam in 1626 already, an Italian followed a few years after); and the municipal council established in 1653, the first of its kind in America, was the start of the great democratic tradition of the city.

The English Colony

The Dutch colony did not last long. When the commercial and maritime rivalry with England flared up again, an English fleet seized Manhattan in 1664. To honor the heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, they renamed the city New York. The Dutch briefly recaptured the city in the next Anglo-Dutch war, but had to cede it permanently in 1674.

New York’s fine deep-water harbor was as valuable to English as it had been to Dutch traders, and the city continued to grow larger and more prosperous. When the British parliament imposed taxes on the American colonies from the 1760s on, the merchants of New York found themselves in a bind: On the one hand, like all entrepreneurs, they resented being parted from money. On the other, a rupture between Britain and its American colonies would cut off trade entirely – much worse than having to pay a moderate due. New York became thus both a hotbed of anti-British activism and one of the places in the American colonies which least wanted a war with the British motherland.

Fierier heads than those of the New Yorkers prevailed. War between Britain and the colonies erupted in 1775. Once George Washington had expelled the British from Boston in the first major action of the war, he moved his headquarters to New York. The city was thus the biggest possible prize for the British smarting from their first defeat. If they could beat the colonials there soundly, force Washington to surrender with his army, they could still quash the rebellion quickly… or so they thought. The amphibious campaign against New York would become the biggest operation of the entire War of Independence. While the British defeated Washington’s army and took the city, the wily colonial commander extricated most of his forces and lived to fight another day. The city of New York, however, would remain under British occupation for the rest of the war.

The British occupation cut New York off from its sister colonies. Many New Yorkers fled to towns which were under control of the American rebels. The loyalists left the town when Britain recognized American independence. In 1783, New York’s population had fallen by 60% compared to the pre-war number of 30,000. From then on, however, the city would know nothing but spectacular growth for over a century… but that’s a story for next time.

Games Referenced

New Amsterdam (Jeffrey D. Allers, White Goblin Games)

Liberty or Death (Harold Buchanan, GMT Games)

Further Reading

For a concise introduction, especially focused on local politics, see Lankevich, George J.: New York City. A Short History, New York University Press, New York City, NY/London 1998.

If you want a treatment which is both more in-depth and more journalistic (and lavishly illustrated) and don’t mind its history practically ending around 1970, see the book version of the 17-hour PBS documentary from 1999: Burns, Ric/Sanders, James/Ades, Lisa: New York. An Illustrated History, Knopf, New York City, NY 2001.

We have done quite a few board game assisted biographies on this blog. Today, we are going farther back in time than ever to cover the life & games of the Roman statesman whose life is half shrouded in myth: Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. You might know him as Fabius Cunctator – Fabius the Delayer. Without further delay, we’ll get right into the first part of his life – his origins, early career, and, when he was already one of the pre-eminent Roman statesmen of his time, the defining event of his life: The war against Hannibal in which he took on an extraordinary office. Let’s go!

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The Aristocrat: Origins

You may have wondered about Fabius’s long name above. This is a good opportunity to look at Roman naming customs, which tell us a little about Fabius, and a lot about the Romans. Quintus was his given name (the Romans used only around 20 given names for boys, and the five most common names (Quintus being one of them) already made up more than three quarters). Fabius was his family name, marking him as a member of the gens Fabia. The three remaining names were various kinds of nicknames – Maximus (“the greatest”) was a name he had inherited from an ancestor, Verrucosus (“the warty one”) he had received himself for a wart on his upper lip, and Cunctator (“the Delayer”) he earned for… well, we’ll get to that.

The Romans were big on family, and so the second name would have been the most important one to them. We’ll thus stick to calling our protagonist Fabius. He might have been even prouder of his family than the average Roman, as his was the patrician gens Fabia, one of Rome’s great aristocratic families. From his birth around 280-275 BCE on, Fabius was thus destined for a political and military career.

We do not know much about his early life. Fabius’s ancient biographers assert that he was deliberate to the point of slowness, but this seems like projecting his later fame of “delaying” back to his youth to maintain unity of character. In any case, Fabius was anything but slow in his career.

Young Roman nobles were expected to gain some military experience. Fabius could do so in the First Punic War, a protracted struggle (264-241 BCE) with Carthage over the control of Sicily and Sardinia. Rome won, mostly due to the almost bottomless manpower from which it could recruit – in addition to the city itself, Rome had founded many colonies all over Italy, and was allied to almost every other city on the Italian mainland. Fabius’s insights into generalship and Rome’s system of alliances would come in handy later.

Cursus Honorum: The Early Career

Well-born Roman men with ambitions could not but go into politics. The Republic offered several elected offices for which they competed. Usually, these were taken one after another in a fixed sequence (the cursus honorum (“course of honors”)), but the rules were not as fixed in Fabius’s 3^rd century BCE as they would become later. Thus, Fabius was elected to the lowest office (the quaestorship, responsible for financial administration) twice (first in 237), but, after climbing the second rung on the ladder (the aedilate), he skipped the third (the praetorship) altogether. Instead, he ran the highest office (the consulate) only four years after his quaestorship. The people of Rome elected him consul for the year 233. Fabius had fulfilled all ambitions which a regular Roman noble could have.

Yet Fabius was not content to be just any Roman noble. While his domestic pursuits were unremarkable – he unsuccessfully opposed a law introduced by the tribune of the plebs Gaius Flaminius which distributed lands in northern Italy to military colonists – he defeated the Ligurians during his consulate and was awarded a triumph for it. That was an extraordinary honor, rarely bestowed. Given that his victory was won against a rather minor enemy, that spoke of Fabius’s political clout.

Fabius left his consulate as one of the first men in Rome. He consolidated his political power even further, attaining the censorship (an office elected only every five years and correspondingly rare, even amongst former consuls) in 230 BCE, and, in contradiction to traditions prohibiting the repetition of high offices, became consul again in 228. Then, he used his good contacts to the Greek world to ensure that Romans could, for the first time, participate in the Isthmian Games. Two consulates and a censorship would ensure Fabius’s political primacy for the rest of his life.

Ten years after the end of his second consulate, Hannibal invaded Italy.

Invasion: Hannibal in Italy

Carthaginian-Roman relations had remained difficult after the end of the First Punic War. With Rome in control of the islands, the Carthaginians had diverted their energy to Spain. Their leading family, the Barcids, had carved out a large and prosperous colonial empire there. To avoid conflict with Rome, the two empires agreed on a division of spheres of influence. When the Carthaginians clashed with the city of Saguntum, it applied to Rome for help. The Romans resolved to aid Saguntum, even though the city lay in Carthage’s sphere of influence. Some of the ancient authors report that Fabius led a senate faction which favored negotiations over war with Carthage, others – like the generally reliable Polybius – oppose this interpretation. In any case, the hawks prevailed and war was declared on Carthage. The Romans sent an army to Spain, but the Barcid commander Hannibal seized the initiative by skirting the Roman force and crossing the Alps into Italy. Hannibal defeated a Roman army under Publius Cornelius Scipio (the father of Scipio Africanus) at the Trebia river and allied himself with the Gallic tribes in upper Italy. Fabius counseled that Rome avoid engagement with Hannibal and instead rest on its superior strength to wear him out.

In the second year of the war, the two Roman consuls (one of them Gaius Flaminius, Fabius’s opponent from his first consulate) each awaited the Carthaginian army in defensive positions on either side of the Apennine mountains, ready to support each other. Yet Hannibal snuck through the mountains, got into Flaminius’s back, and annihilated his army in a surprise attack on the shores of Lake Trasimene.

One of Rome’s consuls was dead, the other cut off from the city by Hannibal’s army. The Romans resorted to this leadership crisis with an emergency measure: There was one office whose holder did not have to consult with a colleague – the dictator. Now was the time for such a man.

Dictator: Fabius vs. Hannibal

Traditionally, a dictator would be appointed by the two consuls. Yet one of them was dead and the other cut off from Rome. The remaining senators took matters into their own hands and had the popular assembly elect Fabius dictator. Having an additional experienced general in a crisis offers some advantages, as the Roman player in Hannibal & Hamilcar (Jaro Andruszkiewicz/Mark Simonitch, Phalanx) can attest: The Dictator event places an additional general (whose requirement of a strategy/battle rating of 3-3 makes it likely that it will be Fabius, as there is only one other general of this kind in the game) in Rome, and, as the advantages of unified command are lost in a game which has unified command (the player) anyway, also gives three combat units as a boon.

Another perspective on the office is found in The Republic of Rome (Richard Berthold/Don Greenwood/Robert Haines, Avalon Hill): As all players represent individual Roman factions, putting a dictator in charge can save the Republic from all too many military challenges – but it also runs the risk of making the dictator too powerful to be contained in the political competition of the republic.

Fabius, for one, was all taken up by the current crisis when he was named dictator. He identified the crisis as not only military, but also psychological: The catastrophe at Lake Trasimene had shaken the Romans’ confidence that they would eventually win through their own courage, the help of their allies, and the benevolence of the gods. Fabius began at the latter end. As the highest public official, he was also responsible for attending to religious rites, and he made sure to give them immaculate attention. His ostentatious piety included vowing large public sacrifices to the gods in the coming season, and personally, he promised to build a temple to Venus Erycina, a goddess associated with the gens Fabia.

The religious aspect of Roman life is rarely well understood by modern, secularized, audiences. Board games also don’t get it right very often. The Republic of Rome includes priesthoods which can be conferred on characters (the historical Fabius was a member of the priesthood colleges of both the augurs and the pontifices), but the in-game effect is abstract – it just increases their voting power. Only the pontifex maximus (Rome’s highest priest, literally the “greatest bridge-builder”) has an additional function, as he can veto political proposals (on the grounds that the omens are not favorable). Omens are also the only way in which religion features in Hannibal & Hamilcar: The Good Omen event allows the player to manipulate a die roll.

The two games thus present two differing interpretations: Republic of Rome’s priests are – much like any other Roman aristocrat, from whose ranks they are recruited – concerned with the political advancement of their faction and will use their religious powers as an other tool in this political competition. Hannibal & Hamilcar’s recipient of “good omens” seems to be in fact blessed by the gods (as the omens can manipulate the impact of crossing a difficult mountain pass or the likelihood that a Carthaginian fleet carries reinforcements over the Mediterranean Sea). Neither the former opportunism nor the latter true belief captures the social and cultural importance of ancient religion (without subscribing to the particular Roman form of polytheism) fully, pointing to a certain blind spot in board games.

Fabius’s religious restoration has found less attention among modern readers than his military response to the crisis at hand. In short, after the defeats at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, Fabius refused to meet Hannibal in a pitched battle. Instead, his army shadowed Hannibal’s, hoping to chip away at his supplies. Such a gradualist, but tenacious approach continues to be referred to as a “Fabian strategy” until today.

Despite Rome’s bad experiences with field battles against Hannibal, the strategy was unpopular. Romans were used to fighting – and winning – battles. Refusing them smacked of defeatism, if not straight-up cowardice. Fabius’s nickname Cunctator (“the Delayer”) stems from the early days of his dictatorship, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

The strategy was also initially not successful. Closely observing Hannibal’s army from unattackable positions did nothing to the counter the desolation the Carthaginians visited on the lands of Rome’s allies whose loyalty to Rome now faded. And the one time when Fabius had Hannibal cornered at the plains of Ager Falernus (in September 217 BCE), the Romans were duped: Hannibal feigned a nocturnal attack on the pass by tying wooden torches to the horns of 2,000 oxen, lightly guarded by some of his troops. which resembled an advancing army at night. The Romans, led by Fabius’s second-in-command Marcus Minucius Rufus, engaged in a confused melee in the dark (against Fabius’s explicit command) while Hannibal slipped away by another route with his main force.

Fabius’s reputation reached its nadir after the battle of Ager Falernus. Minucius Rufus was among the Dictator’s many critics. Fabius’s tenuous political position is evidenced by the senate practically appointing Minucius Rufus his co-dictator with an independent command of part of the army – but both parts were to operate in conjunction. Minucius Rufus eschewed Fabius’s careful positioning of the army on the hills to avoid battle and moved into the plains at Geronium to engage Hannibal. He got his wish… but not the way he wanted: Hannibal’s small force at Geronium turned out to be bait, and the reinforcements which Hannibal had hidden nearby started mauling Minucius Rufus’s army. Fabius swept down from the hills with his army. Now Hannibal was under attack from both sides and retreated. While Minucius Rufus’s army had suffered outsized casualties, the battle had not turned into a third disaster.

With Minucius Rufus taken down a few notches – he had to come to Fabius’s camp after the battle and hail him as his second father for the gift of his life – the challenge to Fabius’s authority was met. Yet Fabius was still not popular, and after his six-month term as dictator expired, he returned to private life.

You know who didn’t return to private life? – Hannibal, that’s who. And thus we’ll have a second post on Fabius’s life!

Games Referenced

Hannibal & Hamilcar (Jaro Andrusziewicz/Mark Simonitch, Phalanx)

Commands & Colors: Ancients (Richard Borg, GMT Games)

The Republic of Rome (Richard Berthold/Don Greenwood/Robert Haines, Avalon Hill)

Further Reading

Plutarch’s biography of Fabius (which prizes unity of character over historical accuracy) can be found in an English translation here.

Polybius’s Histories which deal with the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean including the Second Punic War are online in an English translation here.

Fabius has found remarkably little attention by modern biographers. If you read German, I recommend this short, but insightful piece on him: Beck, Hans: Quintus Fabius Maximus. Musterkarriere ohne Zögern [Quintus Fabius Maximus. Model Career without Delaying], in: Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim/Stein-Hölkeskamp, Elke: Von Romulus zu Augustus. Große Gestalten der römischen Republik [From Romulus to Augustus. Great Characters of the Roman Republic], Beck, Munich 2000.

This is a board game blog. Board games are a medium which can help us understand – for example, they can provide a uniquely active perspective on history. Yet which other medium can provide a fresh perspective on board games? – This is where novels come in handy. Today, we’re going to look at The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño), a study in obsession as well as gaming and history.

Spain in the 1980s. Udo Berger, a young German, has just arrived in a small seaside town for a vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg. Yet Udo’s mind is not on the beach. He has just won the national championship at the wargame The Third Reich (clearly based on Rise and Decline of the Third Reich (Don Greenwood/John Prados, Avalon Hill)) and plans to use his vacation to write an article on his new strategy for the Axis. Ingeborg, however, has more traditional vacation activities in mind, and so they spend some of their swimming, tanning, and partying, through which they befriend another German couple, some locals, and the enigmatic paddleboat renter who is only known as El Quemado (The Burned One) for the burn marks which cover his body. When the vacation comes to an end, Udo remains in Spain, supposedly to help in the case of an acquaintance lost at sea windsurfing… yet the real reason is the game of Third Reich which he plays against El Quemado.

Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño wrote the novel in 1989. Since he turned his hand-written first draft into a typoscript (and later typed the first 20% into his first computer), it is assumed that he wanted to eventually publish it, but he didn’t do so before his death in 2003. When the novel was found among his papers, it was posthumously published in 2010. In addition to the original Spanish (El Tercer Reich), the book has been widely translated. I read the German translation.

Warning: Spoilers for the plot of The Third Reich ahead – but frankly, this is not a book you read for plot, you read it for the vibes.

Obsession: Conquest, Validation, Control

Udo Berger is wargame-obsessed, but the book is not a study of how an outsider has outsider fixations. On the one hand, Berger’s obsession with conquest and domination sets him by no means apart from his peers – just that they usually direct their respective urges to amorous exploits. On the other, our protagonist does not only want to conquer in the game either. In addition to his girlfriend, he also pursues the hotel manager Frau Else (who has been his crush when he was vacationing in Spain as a teen), and the underage chambermaid Clarita. And maybe most of all, Berger is fixated on being respected by his wargame peers, which he can only imagine obtaining by finding strategies (and publishing articles about them) which will obliterate all conventional wisdoms about the game.

As Berger is acutely aware of his lack of linguistic sophistication, he decides to practice by writing a diary during his vacation (which is what we read in the novel). The development of this diary reflects the changes in the writer: Originally, his daily entries are very structured (one per day, headlined by the date), and mostly concerned with banal reports on what he did, what he ate, and what he has in mind for the game/article). As Berger is drawn more and more into his duel with El Quemado, the diary gets more confused: He jumps from one level of narration to another within the same paragraph, extensive passages are solely dedicated to what’s happening in the game (down to which counters are placed on which individual hex numbers on the board), and the chapters are not only named after the dates, but also entitled “With El Lobo and El Cordero [his Spanish acquaintances]”, “Spring 1942” or “My Favorite Generals”.

Berger’s inability to focus also dooms his conquests (ludic and erotic): He sets out to prove that opening a second front early is not a liability, but an asset, and enthusiastically reports early in the game to a friend at home that it’s “Blitzkrieg on all fronts”. Yet as he conducts an amphibious assault of Britain at the same time as he invades the Soviet Union, his forces are overstretched and his Axis collapses before the historical date. And broadcasting his erotic attention over Ingeborg, Frau Else, and Clarita, does not further his relationship with either of them.

As things slide out of his grip, his attitude to control changes: Initially, Berger is fixated on the superior strategy. He notes down the exact moves – which corps need to occupy which hex in which turn to win. This chess-like approach collapses after the turning point of the game: Once El Quemado begins his counter-attack, Berger mentions for the first times that there are die rolls in the game (and how they favor his opponent) – not unlike many board gamers I have seen.

Gaming and History

Besides the main theme of obsession, the novel also offers many glimpses on gaming, history, and the relation between the two.

Berger arrives in Spain with his life compartmentalized between the gaming and the “normal” part – his girlfriend and the office job. This compartmentalization is already eroding with his plan to write the strategy article (which immediately chafes against the confines of a conventional vacation – the hotel employees are bewildered by his request for a large table to be set up in his room, and Ingeborg demands he come to the beach) and fully collapses over the course of the book, when he even unilaterally extends his vacation to play the game (and gets fired for it).

The shadow of history hangs over Berger. Our protagonist does not only play games about World War II, he also reads “patriotic” literature of the era, knows about the lives and deeds of the German generals (especially those of the SS), and the only of his wargamer friends for whom he has a certain reverence is a veteran of World War II. Despite this clear fascination for the history of Nazi Germany, Berger twice disavows being a Nazi himself (having been asked by El Quemado and Clarita). Once he even calls himself an “opponent of the Nazis”, but does not expound on it. His personal politics do not factor into the novel – Berger, having been born around 1960 in democratic, liberal, prosperous post-war Germany enjoys the luxury of only engaging with history at his leisure. He thus remains at the surface of it…

…unlike his gaming opponent. El Quemado comes from South America, and it is rumored among his Spanish acquaintances that the scars he bears are the result of torture (by one of the many right-wing regimes which took power in the 1970s). History has thus seeped into his body and gives him the strength to withstand the ludic assault of the experienced player Berger.

Bolaño himself was arrested after the 1973 coup in Chile and, to his own wonder, was released after eight days without having been tortured (he ascribed it to two of the detectives having attended school with him). He then emigrated to Spain where he worked odd jobs in the tourism industry like El Quemado.

Another allusion to Chile is made in a much-misunderstood scene: On September 11, everyone is out at the beach to celebrate the Catalan national holiday. Yet when a plane flies overhead, an eerie sense of dread overcomes the spectators. Many reviewers see this as a revision which Bolaño must have made after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (or, as an odd coincidence) – but I think the likeliest reason for the scene is that the coup in Chile began on September 11, 1973 with the rebelling air force bombarding the presidential palace in Santiago.

Verdict

Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich starts with the innocent concept of a beach vacation. As it grows darker, the novel develops a hypnotic pull. The author’s own deep knowledge of wargames allows him to paint a vivid picture of the game itself – and of the hold it can have over its players.

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.

Two weeks ago, we’ve looked at the first period of Soviet liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev from the 1950s on. While these reforms ended the era of Stalinist totalitarianism, they petered out when Khrushchev lost interest in them and was eventually overthrown and replaced by the more conservative Leonid Brezhnev. It would take another generation until a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would undertake another broad reform program. These reforms – like last time, in the realms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy – are the subject of this article. Of course, you’ll also find a few board games in it!

Freer Press, Freer Elections

The Soviet Union’s political landscape had ossified under Brezhnev. This stagnation (or, if you want to phrase it more positively, hyperstability) also ruled out any experiments after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, and so the Politburo selected his loyal lieutenant Yuri Andropov. Unfortunately, Andropov was already 68 and severely ill then. He died in 1984, to be succeeded by another Brezhnevite stalwart, Konstantin Chernenko, who was similarly afflicted and even older (72 at his accession). Chernenko died in 1985. The rapid succession of aging Soviet leaders is poignantly captured in the contemporary joke: Margaret Thatcher calls Ronald Reagan: “It’s a pity you didn’t come to the funeral of the Soviet general secretary. Marvelous. A great spectacle. I’m totally going again next year.”

Another quasi-contemporary (1986) satirical take on the Soviet gerontocracy is Kremlin (Urs Hostettler, Fata Morgana): Players support the various Politburo members in the hopes of advancing those they have influence with to the top jobs, but many a hopeful candidate will die of stress and old age before realizing their ambitions.

After Chernenko’s death, even the most conservative Politburo members saw the need for a different tack: They elected Mikhail Gorbachev as their new leader in 1985, a real baby at age 54. Gorbachev’s reformist leanings were well-known, but he proceeded cautiously in his first year. As with Khrushchev, the big programmatic changes were first announced at a Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s first slogan for his reforms was glasnost (openness). That included sweeping changes to Soviet citizens’ freedom of expression: Gorbachev encouraged the Soviet press to scrutinize politics instead of simply parroting the party line. Dissidents were released from prison. Even non-state-sponsored demonstrations were allowed – a powerful tool to express malcontent with the government. Of course, these reforms undermined the power base of the Communist Party – but Gorbachev hoped that he could steer the ship of state in the new environment and might even benefit from a freer populace.

Even more radical were Gorbachev’s institutional reforms, usually referred to as perestroika (restructuring): The Communist Party’s monopoly on power was cut off by establishing the Congress of People’s Deputies as an independent parliament, and while the first elections in 1989 were not fully free, it was the first time that Soviet citizens could select from several candidates in a contested election. Gorbachev himself chose to base his power no longer on his role as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and instead was elected President of the Soviet Union by the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1990.

This nascent democratization drive – eventually rather envisioned than enacted – makes for the most powerful card in the last phase (1985—1991) of the Cold-War-in-a-nutshell which is Twilight Squabble (David J. Mortimer, AEG): It’s a bit of speculation on the internal and external legitimacy and attractiveness a more democratic Soviet Union could have enjoyed.

Détente, Arms Control, and Sinatra

Speaking of external legitimacy and attractiveness: Gorbachev’s policies (and he himself) would prove immensely popular in the West… after he had weathered the initial suspicion. Gorbachev began to advocate for a return to détente soon after he assumed office, but US president Ronald Reagan assumed this to be a Soviet ploy. Only after Gorbachev had met Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavík summit did the president believe Gorbachev’s intentions to be genuine.

In the following years, the two of them agreed on far-reaching mutual disarmament, most notably the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Gorbachev’s immutable advocacy for arms reduction is reflected in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 (Richard Sivel/Peer Sylvester, Histogame) as his event card cannot be used for the arms race.

Besides the lofty realms of nuclear arms reduction, Gorbachev also had more grounded problems to deal with: The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up the failing pro-Soviet government there and had been embroiled since then in a costly and futile counter-insurgency. As the Soviet military could not present Gorbachev with a convincing roadmap on how to win the war, he decided to pull the Soviet forces out in 1988. By that time, the unsuccessful war had undermined the Soviet government’s legitimacy which had rested on its status as a military superpower, exacerbated by the new avenues of political expression open to disaffected citizens – the mothers of Soviet soldiers who fought (or had died) in Afghanistan were among the first to form associations, to pressure the government, and to protest.

In that sense, it is surprising that the withdrawal from Afghanistan can still net the Communist player points in 1989 (Jason Matthews/Ted Torgerson, GMT Games) – but the general principle holds true: The later the Soviets withdraw, the more their failure in Afghanistan becomes an asset to the opponents of Communist power.

Finally, Soviet power was the rock on which the Communist governments in Eastern Europe rested. Whenever they had been challenged – most importantly in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – Soviet tanks had quashed the dissent. This limited sovereignty within the Eastern bloc had been the central tenet of Soviet foreign policy, after 1968 named the Brezhnev Doctrine. Gorbachev adopted a new approach: He would not militarily intervene in Eastern Europe anymore. Instead, the countries of the Warsaw Pact were free to “do it their way” – thus humorously called the Sinatra Doctrine.

Disruptive New Impulses for the Economy

Finally, Gorbachev’s reform agenda of perestroika also aimed to transform the Soviet economy. All Soviet leaders had engaged in some kind of economic reforms, so Gorbachev’s activity did not seem very surprising… until observers inside and outside of the Soviet Union realized how radically it would change the tenets of the Soviet economy, traditionally based on central planning, large state-owned companies, and very limited contacts with the outside world.

First, Gorbachev gave the state-owned companies much more leeway over what to produce and how to set prices. These market incentives were supposed to improve efficiency, but clashed with the existing structures.

Undeterred, Gorbachev went a step further and loosened the restriction on private enterprises. More Soviet citizens could start their own store or workshop and offer goods and services at their own responsibility.

Then, Gorbachev allowed for joint ventures with Western companies (provided the Soviet part owned a majority share), and even let them set up dependencies in the Soviet Union – the famous first McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union opened in January 1990.

The End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev’s daring move to end hostilities with the West was an unqualified success. In late 1989, he and US president George H.W. Bush could merrily declare together that the Cold War was over.

The consequences of Gorbachev’s foreign policy reverberated through the Eastern Bloc: The allied Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe were swept away in 1989.

The Perestroika and Glasnost event in Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 neatly shows the way in which Gorbachev’s reforms put stress on the system: On the one hand, it increases Soviet dominance and makes socialism more attractive (lower two icons). However, it also increases unrest in East Germany (fist icons).

Within the Soviet Union, the political freedoms granted allowed citizens to demand more freedoms. These centrifugal effects became particularly visible as most of the non-Russian republics soon had nationalist independence movements which began to eat away the Soviet Union from its ethnic fringes. Gorbachev responded by proposing a looser federation between the Soviet Republics.

The political reforms also had negative interaction with the economic reforms: On the one hand, the flurry of changes created new inefficiencies; on the other, the increased freedom of the press highlighted economic problems no matter if they were new or had existed for centuries. As Soviet economic performance thus both objectively worsened and also became more obvious to the average citizen, Gorbachev’s legitimacy eroded.

Hardliners within the Communist Party couped against Gorbachev in August 1991 to prevent the loose federation between the Soviet Republics. A coup might also spell the end for the player in the solo game Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games). It’s a States of Siege game with a twist: Whenever the marker on any of the five paths (four of which refer to various ethno-national groups in the Soviet Union, the fifth represents the Communist Party) reaches the center, the game is not lost immediately, but a coup is staged: If Gorbachev has enough elite support to weather it, he goes on to fight another day.

In history, that was not the case: While the coup failed, it made Gorbachev a lame duck. The supporters of reforms turned away from him and toward his erstwhile ally Boris Yeltsin (who had cut a much more dashing figure during the coup), and away from the Soviet Union and toward their respective ethno-national identities. Gorbachev resigned as president and the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991.

Games Referenced

Kremlin (Urs Hostettler, Fata Morgana)

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Twilight Squabble (David J. Mortimer, AEG)

Wir sind das Volk! – 2+2 (Richard Sivel/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

1989 (Jason Matthews/Ted Torgerson, GMT Games)

Gorbachev: The Fall of Communism (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games)

Further Reading

The most influential work on Gorbachev’s time in office and his policies remains Brown, Archie: The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

For the age of hyperstability before Gorbachev (and the discussion if it was an age of stability or stagnation), see the essays (in German, but with English abstracts) in: Belge, Boris/Deuerlein, Martin (eds.): Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev-Ära, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2014.

On the transformative last third of the 20^th century in Russian history, see Kotkin, Stephen: Armageddon Averted. The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.

On the end of the Cold War, see Dockrill, Saki Ruth: The End of the Cold War Era. The Transformation of the Global Security Order, Hodder, London 2005.

For the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, see Braithwaite, Rodric: Afgantsy. The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979—1989, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011.

The Soviet Union was one of the great dictatorships of the 20^th century. It applied an immense amount of coercion on its own citizens as well as many of its neighboring countries. Yet the almost seventy years between the Soviet Union’s founding from the ashes of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and its fragmentation into 15 nation-states in 1991 are no monolith of unfreedom. There were two distinct periods of liberalization around a generation apart from each other – one that began under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, and one that began under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Let’s look at them, beginning with Khrushchev’s thaw, in terms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy. The post on Gorbachev’s reforms will follow in two weeks. As always, there will be board games along the way.

Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Political Expression

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union curtailed its citizens’ expression dramatically. Historiography has recounted Stalin’s reign of terror in detail, yet the best-known expression of the totalitarian control to which the Soviet Union aspired from the 1930s on is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: Its one-party state does not only control citizens’ access to information (they are being exposed to constant propaganda and expected to keep up with its frequently changing, often contradictory contents), but demands active participation in the daily reconstruction of the system, ranging from institutionalized “two-minute hate” against political enemies to unlimited devotion to the “Big Brother” at the top of the pyramid.

The Soviet equivalent to the “Big Brother,” of course, was Stalin who was exalted in an official cult of personality as a wise and infallible leader, working tirelessly for the security and well-being of the Soviet Union. Whatever went wrong on the Soviet Union’s inexorable march of progress was the fault of an inept underling or a shadowy enemy.

When Stalin died, his lieutenants fought briefly, but viciously over his succession. Nikita Khrushchev emerged victorious. Khrushchev had been as loyal to Stalin as his chief rivals and immediatly used Stalinist methods to depose Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful Minister of Internal Affairs (and thus chief of the domestic security services). Beria was charged with treason, put through a mock trial, and executed.

Khrushchev’s skillful power politics could also swing the other way, though. He prepared a report on Stalin’s crimes which he delivered to a stunned audience at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956. For four hours, Khrushchev detailed Stalin’s party purges, his deportation of whole peoples deemed unloyal, and, most of all, how Stalin had established a cult of personality in which he was almost worshipped like a god.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive did not stop at mere proclamations. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a lessening of censorship: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his Gulag novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

There were limits, however: Criticism of Stalin’s Gulags was one thing, criticism of the October Revolution another. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was not published in the USSR. When Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature for it, he and his family were threatened by agents of the state. Cowed, Pasternak did not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize.

Still, Khrushchev’s pivot represented an important turn in the state’s relationship with violence. While Soviet citizens were still routinely surveilled and subjected to coercion, it was neither with the overwhelming force of Stalinism nor with its unpredictability. The age of escalating purges, in which the accusers of today would be the accused of tomorrow was over.

Peaceful Coexistence and Khrushchev’s Many Other Schemes

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech was meant to remain secret, known only to its direct recipients and the allied Communist governments in Eastern Europe, but a member of the Polish Communist party smuggled a copy abroad via the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. From there, it soon gained wide circulation, and while Khrushchev had intended it to be a domestic power play only (it delegitimized his rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov), he now also reaped benefits abroad: The post-Stalinist Soviet Union was naturally a more attractive ally and role model for both the socialist movements in Europe and the decolonizing and freshly independent nations in Africa and Asia.

This unintended benefit is the focus of the foreign-policy heavy Twilight Struggle‘s De-Stalinization card: The Soviet player may move up to four points of influence around on the globe. That may seem like a zero-sum game – after all, the influence is not added, but only moved. But the Soviet Union typically has a lot of spare influence in Eastern Europe after the first one or two turns, and De-Stalinization is the earliest and best way to gain access to faraway continents, chiefly South America (and, to a lesser degree, Africa).

Even before Khrushchev’s speech was leaked, his approach to foreign policy markedly differed from Stalin’s last years. When the relationship with the Soviet Union’s erstwhile allies had deteriorated after the end of World War II, Stalin had adopted a confrontational stance based on the assumption that the world was split in two hostile camps. Khrushchev, on the other hand, approached the western powers under the new motto of peaceful coexistence. Socialism and capitalism could both inhabit the same world. Of course, Khrushchev as a convinced Communist believed that his system would eventually triumph. Until then, peaceful coexistence would not only foster peace, but also make socialism more attractive, and free up resources for economic development and consumer goods (more on that below).

Khrushchev was always better at initiating things than at seeing them through. Peaceful coexistence gave way to other projects – be that the support of nationalist movements in the global south or a re-newed competition with the West over Central Europe. And while Khrushchev thought that the Soviet Union and the western powers could live next to one another, that tolerance did not extend to heterodox socialist ideas within his own sphere of influence: When the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party announced to withdraw the country from the Warsaw Pact and hold free elections, Khrushchev had the reform movement quashed by Soviet tanks.

Consumer Goods, (Non-)Communal Apartments, …Corn?

The Soviet economy under Stalin had been tuned to increase heavy industrial output to achieve a fast industrialization on the one hand and provide the basis for the country’s military security. This approach was validated by the country’s survival of the Nazi invasion and its eventual military victory in 1945. The proponents of this economic policy which usually went together with ideological mobilization and a confrontational foreign policy were called to adhere to politika. Yet after Stalin’s death, the rival faction of tekhnika gained ground: Its advocates favored a less aggressive foreign policy, less ideological mobilization, and, most of all, more market elements in the economy which would then produce more consumer goods.

Khrushchev positioned himself in the middle: Heavy industry would have priority (the Soviet Union was in a nuclear arms race with the United States whose economy was around three times as large as the Soviet, after all), but more attention would be given to consumer goods than before. Soviet citizens enjoyed a limited amount of prosperity with radios, washing machines, and sometimes even cars. Khrushchev saw this also as an instrument in the systemic competition of the Cold War: Material comfort and personal lifestyles would influence people’s allegiances as much as military strength or ideological treatises.

Khrushchev’s confidence in that regard led him to agree with the United States on mutual national exhibitions which would showcase their respective country to the citizens of the other. The confidence, however, was not quite justified: The Soviet exhibition in New York aroused curiosity, but the American one in Moscow was positively overrun. It also produced one of the iconic pictures of the Cold War with Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon debating the merits of their respective systems surrounded by American household appliances – the “Kitchen Debate.”

Some Soviet citizens might have dreamed of living in America, but their personal lifestyles already became more akin to those of Americans under Khrushchev. Even more important than the new consumer goods were their living conditions: Housing in big Soviet cities had been dominated by kommunalkas – large apartments from pre-revolutionary times which had been split to accommodate several families, each living in a single room and sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the others. These crammed living spaces afforded their inhabitants no privacy whatsoever. Only the elites of Stalin’s Soviet Union had apartments to themselves. Khrushchev started an ambitious housing program based on prefabricated, concrete-paneled apartment buildings which allowed millions of Soviet citizens to move into an apartment just for their own family for the first time.

As with foreign policy, Khrushchev started more economic reform projects than he saw through. The ambitious “Virgin Lands” campaign which aimed at alleviating Soviet food shortages by cultivating vast swathes of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan petered out after a few years. His scheme to introduce an Iowa-style corn belt fared even worse, discrediting both corn and Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev’s Ouster

The economic starts and shifts of Khrushchev’s tenure undermined his position, as did his foreign policy unpredictability ranging from arms control to confronting the United States over Cuba. Most damaging to him, however, were his constant shuffles in the Communist Party. Disaffected cadres who feared they might lose their offices overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. They installed the less fickle Leonid Brezhnev as new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The conservative Brezhnev would tone down some of Khrushchev’s domestic reforms, resulting in a more restricted cultural and literary climate, but stuck with Khrushchev’s economic reforms and conducted foreign policy along the lines of détente with the West.

In the end, Khrushchev himself was one of the beneficiaries of the liberalization he had pushed: Unlike the victims of the purges of the 1930s (or even Beria), he was not subjected to a mock trial and executed. Instead, he officially resigned for health reasons and was allowed to live out his days at a comfortable dacha in the countryside.

Games Referenced

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Wir sind das Volk: 2+2 (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

Days of Ire (Katalin Nimmerfroh/Dávid Turczi/Mihály Vincze, Cloud Island)

Further Reading

The authoritative biography remains Taubman, William: Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, Norton, New York City, NY 2004.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

On the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and its impact on Soviet and western foreign policy, see Békés, Csaba: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics, (Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 16), Washington, D.C. 1996.

On the politika/tekhnika split, see Priestland, David: Cold War Mobilization and Domestic Politics: the Soviet Union, in: Leffler, Melvyn P./Westad, Odd Arne (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume I. Origins, 5^th edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, pp. 442-463.

The Soviet Union was one of the great dictatorships of the 20^th century. It applied an immense amount of coercion on its own citizens as well as many of its neighboring countries. Yet the almost seventy years between the Soviet Union’s founding from the ashes of the Russian Civil War in 1922 and its fragmentation into 15 nation-states in 1991 are no monolith of unfreedom. There were two distinct periods of liberalization around a generation apart from each other – one that began under First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, and one that began under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. Let’s look at them, beginning with Khrushchev’s thaw, in terms of domestic, foreign, and economic policy. The post on Gorbachev’s reforms will follow in two weeks. As always, there will be board games along the way.

Freedom of Thought, Speech, and Political Expression

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union curtailed its citizens’ expression dramatically. Historiography has recounted Stalin’s reign of terror in detail, yet the best-known expression of the totalitarian control to which the Soviet Union aspired from the 1930s on is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: Its one-party state does not only control citizens’ access to information (they are being exposed to constant propaganda and expected to keep up with its frequently changing, often contradictory contents), but demands active participation in the daily reconstruction of the system, ranging from institutionalized “two-minute hate” against political enemies to unlimited devotion to the “Big Brother” at the top of the pyramid.

The Soviet equivalent to the “Big Brother,” of course, was Stalin who was exalted in an official cult of personality as a wise and infallible leader, working tirelessly for the security and well-being of the Soviet Union. Whatever went wrong on the Soviet Union’s inexorable march of progress was the fault of an inept underling or a shadowy enemy.

When Stalin died, his lieutenants fought briefly, but viciously over his succession. Nikita Khrushchev emerged victorious. Khrushchev had been as loyal to Stalin as his chief rivals and immediatly used Stalinist methods to depose Lavrentiy Beria, the powerful Minister of Internal Affairs (and thus chief of the domestic security services). Beria was charged with treason, put through a mock trial, and executed.

Khrushchev’s skillful power politics could also swing the other way, though. He prepared a report on Stalin’s crimes which he delivered to a stunned audience at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956. For four hours, Khrushchev detailed Stalin’s party purges, his deportation of whole peoples deemed unloyal, and, most of all, how Stalin had established a cult of personality in which he was almost worshipped like a god.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive did not stop at mere proclamations. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a lessening of censorship: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his Gulag novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

There were limits, however: Criticism of Stalin’s Gulags was one thing, criticism of the October Revolution another. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was not published in the USSR. When Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature for it, he and his family were threatened by agents of the state. Cowed, Pasternak did not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize.

Still, Khrushchev’s pivot represented an important turn in the state’s relationship with violence. While Soviet citizens were still routinely surveilled and subjected to coercion, it was neither with the overwhelming force of Stalinism nor with its unpredictability. The age of escalating purges, in which the accusers of today would be the accused of tomorrow was over.

Peaceful Coexistence and Khrushchev’s Many Other Schemes

Khrushchev’s 1956 speech was meant to remain secret, known only to its direct recipients and the allied Communist governments in Eastern Europe, but a member of the Polish Communist party smuggled a copy abroad via the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. From there, it soon gained wide circulation, and while Khrushchev had intended it to be a domestic power play only (it delegitimized his rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov), he now also reaped benefits abroad: The post-Stalinist Soviet Union was naturally a more attractive ally and role model for both the socialist movements in Europe and the decolonizing and freshly independent nations in Africa and Asia.

This unintended benefit is the focus of the foreign-policy heavy Twilight Struggle‘s De-Stalinization card: The Soviet player may move up to four points of influence around on the globe. That may seem like a zero-sum game – after all, the influence is not added, but only moved. But the Soviet Union typically has a lot of spare influence in Eastern Europe after the first one or two turns, and De-Stalinization is the earliest and best way to gain access to faraway continents, chiefly South America (and, to a lesser degree, Africa).

Even before Khrushchev’s speech was leaked, his approach to foreign policy markedly differed from Stalin’s last years. When the relationship with the Soviet Union’s erstwhile allies had deteriorated after the end of World War II, Stalin had adopted a confrontational stance based on the assumption that the world was split in two hostile camps. Khrushchev, on the other hand, approached the western powers under the new motto of peaceful coexistence. Socialism and capitalism could both inhabit the same world. Of course, Khrushchev as a convinced Communist believed that his system would eventually triumph. Until then, peaceful coexistence would not only foster peace, but also make socialism more attractive, and free up resources for economic development and consumer goods (more on that below).

Khrushchev was always better at initiating things than at seeing them through. Peaceful coexistence gave way to other projects – be that the support of nationalist movements in the global south or a re-newed competition with the West over Central Europe. And while Khrushchev thought that the Soviet Union and the western powers could live next to one another, that tolerance did not extend to heterodox socialist ideas within his own sphere of influence: When the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party announced to withdraw the country from the Warsaw Pact and hold free elections, Khrushchev had the reform movement quashed by Soviet tanks.

Consumer Goods, (Non-)Communal Apartments, …Corn?

The Soviet economy under Stalin had been tuned to increase heavy industrial output to achieve a fast industrialization on the one hand and provide the basis for the country’s military security. This approach was validated by the country’s survival of the Nazi invasion and its eventual military victory in 1945. The proponents of this economic policy which usually went together with ideological mobilization and a confrontational foreign policy were called to adhere to politika. Yet after Stalin’s death, the rival faction of tekhnika gained ground: Its advocates favored a less aggressive foreign policy, less ideological mobilization, and, most of all, more market elements in the economy which would then produce more consumer goods.

Khrushchev positioned himself in the middle: Heavy industry would have priority (the Soviet Union was in a nuclear arms race with the United States whose economy was around three times as large as the Soviet, after all), but more attention would be given to consumer goods than before. Soviet citizens enjoyed a limited amount of prosperity with radios, washing machines, and sometimes even cars. Khrushchev saw this also as an instrument in the systemic competition of the Cold War: Material comfort and personal lifestyles would influence people’s allegiances as much as military strength or ideological treatises.

Khrushchev’s confidence in that regard led him to agree with the United States on mutual national exhibitions which would showcase their respective country to the citizens of the other. The confidence, however, was not quite justified: The Soviet exhibition in New York aroused curiosity, but the American one in Moscow was positively overrun. It also produced one of the iconic pictures of the Cold War with Nikita Khrushchev and US Vice President Richard Nixon debating the merits of their respective systems surrounded by American household appliances – the “Kitchen Debate.”

Some Soviet citizens might have dreamed of living in America, but their personal lifestyles already became more akin to those of Americans under Khrushchev. Even more important than the new consumer goods were their living conditions: Housing in big Soviet cities had been dominated by kommunalkas – large apartments from pre-revolutionary times which had been split to accommodate several families, each living in a single room and sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the others. These crammed living spaces afforded their inhabitants no privacy whatsoever. Only the elites of Stalin’s Soviet Union had apartments to themselves. Khrushchev started an ambitious housing program based on prefabricated, concrete-paneled apartment buildings which allowed millions of Soviet citizens to move into an apartment just for their own family for the first time.

As with foreign policy, Khrushchev started more economic reform projects than he saw through. The ambitious “Virgin Lands” campaign which aimed at alleviating Soviet food shortages by cultivating vast swathes of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan petered out after a few years. His scheme to introduce an Iowa-style corn belt fared even worse, discrediting both corn and Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev’s Ouster

The economic starts and shifts of Khrushchev’s tenure undermined his position, as did his foreign policy unpredictability ranging from arms control to confronting the United States over Cuba. Most damaging to him, however, were his constant shuffles in the Communist Party. Disaffected cadres who feared they might lose their offices overthrew Khrushchev in October 1964. They installed the less fickle Leonid Brezhnev as new First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (an office soon to be re-named to General Secretary, like under Stalin). The conservative Brezhnev would tone down some of Khrushchev’s domestic reforms, resulting in a more restricted cultural and literary climate, but stuck with Khrushchev’s economic reforms and conducted foreign policy along the lines of détente with the West.

In the end, Khrushchev himself was one of the beneficiaries of the liberalization he had pushed: Unlike the victims of the purges of the 1930s (or even Beria), he was not subjected to a mock trial and executed. Instead, he officially resigned for health reasons and was allowed to live out his days at a comfortable dacha in the countryside.

Games Referenced

Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games)

Wir sind das Volk: 2+2 (Richard Sivél/Peer Sylvester, Histogame)

Days of Ire (Katalin Nimmerfroh/Dávid Turczi/Mihály Vincze, Cloud Island)

Further Reading

The authoritative biography remains Taubman, William: Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, Norton, New York City, NY 2004.

A magisterial mosaic of Soviet social, economic, and cultural life is Schlögel, Karl: The Soviet Century. Archaeology of a Lost World, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2023.

On the suppression of the Hungarian revolution and its impact on Soviet and western foreign policy, see Békés, Csaba: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution and World Politics, (Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 16), Washington, D.C. 1996.

On the politika/tekhnika split, see Priestland, David: Cold War Mobilization and Domestic Politics: the Soviet Union, in: Leffler, Melvyn P./Westad, Odd Arne (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume I. Origins, 5^th edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, pp. 442-463.

You love board games. You probably also like music. Let’s combine the two into an immersive playlist for Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games). Have it gently play in the background during your next session of Imperial Struggle for the full period immersion!

First things first: Here’s the playlist!

Before we dive into the content of the playlist, some general observations:

• Of course, there was no music recording in age of Imperial Struggle, so all the songs in the playlist have been recorded in the 20^th or 21^st century.
• The playlist is only 1:45 hours long, so you might need to listen to it several times during your game… unless France stomps over Britain in the first turns.
• The playlist is thematically sorted. That helps you find similar songs, but makes for somewhat monotonous listening (until you come to the next group of songs). I therefore recommend you turn shuffle on.

Now, what awaits you in the playlist?

#1-3: Religious (classical) music

Imperial Struggle begins after the age of the great confessional wars in Europe, but religion still played an important role in people’s lives, from the lowliest peasants all the way up to kings. Their week culminated in a Sunday service and their year was interspersed with religious events. Composers wrote pieces specifically for a religious holiday (like Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” from which #2 is taken), or were dedicated to comprehensive religious teaching (like Händel’s “Messiah”, premiering on Easter 1742 in Dublin, from which #3 is taken).

#4-12: Secular (classical) music

The Baroque saw music as universal. Religious and secular followed the same conventions, and thus the same composers wrote pieces for the church and for worldly courts, like Baroque grandmaster Johann Sebastian Bach (Toccata and Fugue in D minor, #4 and Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, #6) or Georg Friedrich Händel (Sarabande from Suite No. 11, #5). The classical (in the narrower sense) music from the mid-18^th century on left this universal view behind. Composers now focused on either one or the other, with most of them following the more fashionable and more lucrative secular path.

Some composed for a court whose lavish entertainments always required music (like the 1773 wedding of the French prince Charles Philippe, the later king Charles X, for which François Francœur arranged the music from which #9 is taken – thus the title Symphonie du Festin Royal (Symphony of the Royal Feast)). Others became freelance musicians (like Mozart, who could (for some years) live of the proceeds of his concerts and operas, #10-12).

#13-16: Folk songs

Not everyone went to a church where the latest compositions were played on Sundays, and of course most people were far removed from attending any court festivities, let alone royal weddings. But people made and listened to music. The easiest, most affordable way to do so was to sing. The 18^th century is rich with folk songs, some originally written at the time (like Frère Jacques (“Brother James”), #15 or “Ye Jacobites by Name”, #16), others older, but first put down to paper at the time (Au Claire De La Lune (“By the Light of the Moon”, #13, and Over the Hills, and Far Away (#14)).

#17-23: Patriotic songs

We’ve heard in #16 already how political events seeped into popular songs. Others were written specifically to rouse patriotic feeling, an emotion which came into its own in the 18^th century: “Rule, Britannia” (#17) expressed confidence and pride in the Royal Navy to protect British freedoms, “The British Grenadiers” (#18) praised the courage of their counterpart by land.

That these songs could be re-interpreted and turned against their original intent shows “Free America” (#19), written in 1770, which uses the same tune as “The British Grenadiers”, but its lyrics extol America’s freedom (which turned out to be freedom from Britain).

Finally, national anthems also came first into existence in the 18^th century: Brits sang “God Save the King/Queen” (#22 – I took the liberty of choosing a not-quite-traditional version). France only got its first anthem (La Marseillaise, #23) with the French Revolution which bookends Imperial Struggle… at least until Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews get around to do a Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars expansion!

Thanks to Jason for suggesting songs #5, #14, and #21!

If you like immersive playlists, I’ve done one for Weimar: The Fight for Democracy (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx)!

If you want to dive a bit deeper into the times of Imperial Struggle, here’s a book recommendation.

And if you’re looking for strategic direction in Imperial Struggle, I’ve also got you covered.

What’s your favorite song from this playlist? Let me know in the comments!

You love board games. You probably also like music. Let’s combine the two into an immersive playlist for Imperial Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games). Have it gently play in the background during your next session of Imperial Struggle for the full period immersion!

First things first: Here’s the playlist!

Before we dive into the content of the playlist, some general observations:

• Of course, there was no music recording in age of Imperial Struggle, so all the songs in the playlist have been recorded in the 20^th or 21^st century.
• The playlist is only 1:45 hours long, so you might need to listen to it several times during your game… unless France stomps over Britain in the first turns.
• The playlist is thematically sorted. That helps you find similar songs, but makes for somewhat monotonous listening (until you come to the next group of songs). I therefore recommend you turn shuffle on.

Now, what awaits you in the playlist?

#1-3: Religious (classical) music

Imperial Struggle begins after the age of the great confessional wars in Europe, but religion still played an important role in people’s lives, from the lowliest peasants all the way up to kings. Their week culminated in a Sunday service and their year was interspersed with religious events. Composers wrote pieces specifically for a religious holiday (like Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” from which #2 is taken), or were dedicated to comprehensive religious teaching (like Händel’s “Messiah”, premiering on Easter 1742 in Dublin, from which #3 is taken).

#4-12: Secular (classical) music

The Baroque saw music as universal. Religious and secular followed the same conventions, and thus the same composers wrote pieces for the church and for worldly courts, like Baroque grandmaster Johann Sebastian Bach (Toccata and Fugue in D minor, #4 and Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, #6) or Georg Friedrich Händel (Sarabande from Suite No. 11, #5). The classical (in the narrower sense) music from the mid-18^th century on left this universal view behind. Composers now focused on either one or the other, with most of them following the more fashionable and more lucrative secular path.

Some composed for a court whose lavish entertainments always required music (like the 1773 wedding of the French prince Charles Philippe, the later king Charles X, for which François Francœur arranged the music from which #9 is taken – thus the title Symphonie du Festin Royal (Symphony of the Royal Feast)). Others became freelance musicians (like Mozart, who could (for some years) live of the proceeds of his concerts and operas, #10-12).

#13-16: Folk songs

Not everyone went to a church where the latest compositions were played on Sundays, and of course most people were far removed from attending any court festivities, let alone royal weddings. But people made and listened to music. The easiest, most affordable way to do so was to sing. The 18^th century is rich with folk songs, some originally written at the time (like Frère Jacques (“Brother James”), #15 or “Ye Jacobites by Name”, #16), others older, but first put down to paper at the time (Au Claire De La Lune (“By the Light of the Moon”, #13, and Over the Hills, and Far Away (#14)).

#17-23: Patriotic songs

We’ve heard in #16 already how political events seeped into popular songs. Others were written specifically to rouse patriotic feeling, an emotion which came into its own in the 18^th century: “Rule, Britannia” (#17) expressed confidence and pride in the Royal Navy to protect British freedoms, “The British Grenadiers” (#18) praised the courage of their counterpart by land.

That these songs could be re-interpreted and turned against their original intent shows “Free America” (#19), written in 1770, which uses the same tune as “The British Grenadiers”, but its lyrics extol America’s freedom (which turned out to be freedom from Britain).

Finally, national anthems also came first into existence in the 18^th century: Brits sang “God Save the King/Queen” (#22 – I took the liberty of choosing a not-quite-traditional version). France only got its first anthem (La Marseillaise, #23) with the French Revolution which bookends Imperial Struggle… at least until Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews get around to do a Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars expansion!

Thanks to Jason for suggesting songs #5, #14, and #21!

If you like immersive playlists, I’ve done one for Weimar: The Fight for Democracy (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx)!

If you want to dive a bit deeper into the times of Imperial Struggle, here’s a book recommendation.

And if you’re looking for strategic direction in Imperial Struggle, I’ve also got you covered.

What’s your favorite song from this playlist? Let me know in the comments!

Happy new year, everybody! I hope it will bring you much joy. I also hope it will bring you board games (which is basically the same thing). The question is, however: Which games? – Here are a few 2026 releases which look most intriguing to me. Long-time readers of this blog will notice that this year’s list is a bit longer than usual – there are just so many fascinating games scheduled for release this year!

As always, don’t take this as a shopping list (neither for you nor for me). Your taste in games and your discretion how many new games you want to chase decide what will end up in your shelf (and, hopefully, on your table)!

After that reminder, on to the games. As all of them are set in human history, they are ordered from most ancient to most recent.

Triumvir (Geoff Engelstein/Mark Herman, GMT Games)

1-3 players, up to 90 minutes

Once the greatest Roman politician-generals outgrew to confines of the republican power-sharing agreement, the Republic was bound to fall. Yet it was not predestined that it would fall to Caesar. In fact, two of his associates/rivals, Pompey and Crassus, might as well have taken the diadem… if they had played their cards better.

Triumvir casts its players as the three mightiest power brokers of the last years of the Roman Republic. They will attempt to parlay their wealth, popularity, and military force into political success (in an adaptation of the negotiation mechanic from Engelstein’s and Herman’s previous cooperation Versailles 1919). Whoever settles the issues in the senate in their favor and deals best with the challenges in the rebellious provinces is poised to become the First Man in Rome…forever.

You can still pre-order Triumvir at the P500 price of $60.00 (regular price: $101.00). Release is expected for March.

Neither King Nor God (Limited Pilot Edition) (Uwe Walentin, Sound of Drums)

4 players, 60-120 minutes

I have a fondness for the early modern period, this time when so many old certainties in Europe were shattered by revolutionary new developments – from the printing press over the discovery of America to the Reformation.

Neither King Nor God focuses on the struggle over military, religious, and commercial supremacy in Western Europe, with the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Kings of England and France as the four protagonists. The players will send their courtiers to the big cities of Europe. These courtiers range from merchants over generals to assassins, each with their own action, forming a neat stack in each city. Once all courtiers are placed, each city’s courtier stack is resolved top to bottom – so, the last courtier placed is the first one to resolve! There are a lot of tactical considerations involved in which courtier you’d like to trigger early or late, and as they are placed face-down, also a good deal of bluffing.

I had the opportunity to play Neither King Nor God at last year’s SPIEL in Essen. Our Holy Roman Emperor attempted to spread Protestantism in Germany and waged war against the Pope for control of Venice, while France and England expanded their commercial networks on the continent and clashed over Normandy. Everyone had a great time!

The limited pilot edition of Neither King Nor God can be ordered for € 69.00 and will be shipping in mid- or late January. Sound of Drums aims to have the full epic edition ready for SPIEL in October 2026.

1848: The Springtime of Nations (Jules Félisaz, GMT Games)

2 players, 150-180 minutes

The European revolutions of 1848/49 are generally considered failures. After all, the ancient régimes had returned to power everywhere but in France, and even there the Second Republic was soon overthrown by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet for months it looked like all of Europe could shed the old order in favor of liberalism, nation-states, and maybe even – gasp! – democracy. And even when the revolutionaries were defeated, they had changed the way the game was played: From then on, politics was conducted in public, with parliaments, parties, and newspapers, and the forces of liberalism and nationalism had to be taken into consideration by even the most conservative of monarchical governments.

Despite the impact of the revolutions, barely any games have covered them. Jules Félisaz’s 1848 seeks to rectify that in an ambitious manner, covering the political, military, intellectual, and social dimensions of the revolutions in all of Europe. Félisaz relies on a mix of tried-and-true CDG mechanics – the “mandatory opponent events” from Twilight Struggle, the spatial layout of societal groups from 1989, and the escalation through decks from Paths of Glory, adding its own twists where appropriate (for example, overlapping scoring regions based on nationality (German, Polish, Italian…) and empire (Russian, Prussian, Austrian).

You can still pre-order 1848 at the P500 price of $46.00 (regular price: $72.00). Release is expected for March.

Peace 1905 (Nathaniel Berkley/S.P. Shaman/Maurice Suckling/Bill Sullivan, Fort Circle Games)

1-3 players, 30-45 minutes

Let us not say there are only wargames on this list. Look, here’s a peace game!

Making peace is generally a complex business, and so it was in the case of the Russo-Japanese War (1904/05): The Japanese, emboldened by their military success on land and sea, demanded a large financial indemnity as well as the cession of Sakhalin. The Russian tsar refused to consider either. Yet with revolution rampant in Russia and the Japanese government close to financial collapse, both sides needed to end the war. Their delegates at the US-mediated peace conference of Portsmouth had to figure out how to balance peace, national interest, and saving face.

In the classic two-player mode, the opponent players represent the delegates of Japan and Russia at Portsmouth who negotiate over Japan’s demands. Their hands of cards represent diplomatic approaches – listening or emphasizing, acquiescing or threatening. More aggressive stances are more likely to carry the day on any given issue, but the more lopsided a round of negotiations is, the more tensions will rise on the side of the loser. If they are pushed too hard, they will resort to war – and the other side will bear the blame for not being ready to compromise.

Other player counts see US president Theodore Roosevelt join as either as a third player or the solo role. In either case, Roosevelt is an “honest broker” whose goal it is to find an equitable resolution to the conflict.

Peace 1905 awaits its Kickstarter campaign in the second quarter of 2026. The game will be released in late 2026.

Hammer and Sickle: Hunger and Utopia in the Russian Civil War, 1918-1921 (Alex Knight, GMT Games)

1-4 players, 120-180 minutes

Hammer and sickle are, of course, the symbols of communism. Yet ideology aside, they speak of the material basis of modern societies – the food that everyone needs to eat, and the industrial production that is required for everything from building houses to waging war.

This economy underlies Hammer and Sickle, a multiplayer treatment of the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution: The industrial cities (mostly in the north and west of the collapsing Russian empire), marked by hammers, produce Firepower – provided that their workers are fed with Food (from the sickle-marked rural provinces in the south). Otherwise, the workers start to rebel.

The result is a delicate balance between Food and Firepower, exacerbated by the factions’ asymmetries: The Bolsheviks, for example, have easy access to a lot of hammers, but might find themselves short of sickles; but the opposite might be true for the White Army operating from the south. In addition to the game’s (loose) two alliances of Revolutionaries (Bolsheviks and Anarchists) and Counter-Revolutionaries (White Army and New Nations), new alignments might develop…

Alex Knight has shown his ability to turn a complex political-military struggle into a compelling board game with the Spanish Civil War in the intriguing Land and Freedom. I’m sure he’ll do the same with Hammer and Sickle.

You can pre-order Hammer and Sickle at the P500 price of $62.00 (regular price: $97.00). Release is expected not before the third quarter of 2026… which might turn into 2027, but I wanted to include the game here anyway because it just seems so fascinating.

Lenin’s Legacy (Matthias Cramer, GMT Games)

1-2 players, 20-40 minutes

Matthias Cramer has got the range. He has designed great epics like Weimar: The Fight for Democracy, but he is also a master of the short form. His Watergate is a knife fight in a phone booth… and Lenin’s Legacy promises to be cut from the same cloth.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the dominant figure of the new Bolshevik government of Russia, but his health started to fail him soon after the October Revolution. Behind the scenes, his lieutenants jockeyed for position to succeed him – and the two likeliest candidates were Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. While they differed in their politics – Trotsky wanted to advance the “world revolution”, Stalin advocated for “socialism in one country” – and their power bases – Trotsky was the creator of the Red Army, Stalin controlled the Communist Party – they had one thing in common: Their drive to take power.

Lenin’s Legacy lets its players fill their shoes and struggle over the army, the party, and the regions and politicians of the Soviet Union in a card-driven game with a twist: Almost all cards are selected from an open market. The players hold only one card each… but they can gamble on playing the opponent’s card (without knowing what it is)!

You can still pre-order Lenin’s Legacy at the P500 price of $37.00 (regular price: $59.00). Release is expected for March.

Night Witches (Liz Davidson/David Thompson, Fort Circle Games)

1-2 players, 30-45 minutes

Many of the games in this post are very zoomed-out, grand strategic affairs. The counters you push move armies, the cards you play shake nations. Yet there is also something very charming about games operating on the micro level, and you get exactly that with Night Witches.

You are on the Eastern Front of World War II, serving in the all-women 588^th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces. You have no more than two biplanes at your command in every mission… and they are old, slow, and vulnerable. Still, your goal is to harass the invading German forces with these low-flying, hard-to-detect, and hard-to-engage craft every night, do damage as much damage as you can (or, at least, wear the enemy out with constant nocturnal attacks), and make it back safe.

You can play each mission separately or in a ten-mission campaign which allows you to carry over upgrades, and either solo or as a two-player cooperative effort.

Night Witches awaits its Kickstarter campaign in the second quarter of 2026. The game will be released in late 2026.

The Berlin Airlift (John Poniske/Terry Simo, Legion Wargames)

1-4 players, 60-480 minutes

This game has been long in the making. I’ve referenced it as ready for pre-order eight years ago, and have been intrigued by its premise since then. The Berlin Airlift was the largest airborne logistics operation ever, and for it to render the Berlin Blockade (on the ground) void, hundreds of planes had to arrive every day in Berlin with fuel, food, spare parts, and medical supplies, notwithstanding the limited infrastructure, the often rough weather, and every so often, Soviet interference.

This immense logistical task fell to the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force, each of which is represented by two “squadrons” (players) in the game. The players strive to contribute the most to the effort with their squadron, but their internal competition sometimes has to take the backseat when a joint effort is required to confront Soviet interference or keep the morale of the Berlin population up.

John Poniske’s original design has been taken on by Terry Simo. The Berlin Airlift is now ready for production. It can still be pre-ordered here at the reduced price of $55.00 (later MSRP estimated $75.00). Publication is expected for the third quarter of 2026.

And which 2026 games look most exciting to you? Let me know in the comments!

Now the year truly comes to a close. Let’s look back at the eighth full year of this blog.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

The overall blog statistics are pretty meaningless – both last year and this year are skewed by WordPress sending my Farewell 2024 – Historical Fiction! post out to a bajillion people (from Dec 26 to Jan 8), which makes it easily the most popular post of each year (providing more than a fourth of my total views this year). If you factor that out, 2025 has been a good year on the blog, but slightly behind the (organic) record of 2023.

The posts doing particularly well have been the usual suspects, that is, the Most Anticipated Historical Board Games post in January, and the evergreen strategy posts for several games published over the last year. It was nice to see that a few of my research-intensive posts in the American Revolution and the Wallenstein series also did well.

Most of my readers come from the United States (also skewed by the Historical Fiction anomaly, but not entirely), as well as other Anglophone (UK, Canada, Australia) or European (Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and France) countries. Especially the Dutch have made a leap up… maybe because of my post on the history of Amsterdam? Welkom, anyway.

New arrivals in the top 10 of the countries from which most views stem are Sweden and Poland in a joint Baltic effort.

If you compare views with population numbers, there are possibly no more loyal readers of this blog than the fine people of Ireland, closely followed by Hong Kong, whose views eclipse those of huge countries like Japan, Brazil, or India. The Irish have been devoted to history, board games, and history in board games for some years now, for which I am grateful. The Hongkongers are new in their excitement for the blog – welcome! If you are from Hong Kong, leave a comment below!

I can only speculate what brought people to this blog (but maybe you can enlighten me with a comment, especially if read this blog, but don’t comment often or ever). Here is, however, what I think was the finest which I published this year – as per usual, with six instead of three entries, and without crowning a winner. Let’s go!

“Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!” (American Revolution, #2)

Most of the history articles on this blog are about what people in the past did – the politicians, merchants, soldiers of times past. Yet I also like to dwell on what they thought, and thus I’m very happy to have written this post on the political philosophy of the American Revolution, its core value of liberty, and the promise and limitation of that idea. It was also an opportunity to engage with the still-compelling documents of the Revolution – Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence.

Tariffs, Onshoring, and the Board Game Industry

It’s been a wild year politically. Almost forgotten by now is the Great Tariff Rollercoaster of April 2025, in which the American federal government announced tariffs on imports from almost all other countries and then engaged in a flurry of raising, lowering, and holding off on them that made everyone’s head spin. By now, the 145% tariff on Chinese goods imported by US buyers is long gone, but at the time it seemed like an existential threat to US board game companies manufacturing their games in China (so, almost all of them), and given that the current US administration will still be in office for another three years, one worth revisiting.

Wallenstein: Rise

This blog often gives me the opportunity to learn about new subjects. Wallenstein was one of them. I approached the post about his life with not more than a general knowledge about his role in the Thirty Years’ War… and then was sucked into a research rabbit hole in which I read over 2,000 pages about the guy. The result is a four-part series and the longest, most detailed board game assisted biography I have ever written about anyone.

Frederick the Great. A Military Life / Friedrich

…and this blog also allows me to re-visit topics and games with which I have engaged for years (and sometimes decades) now. Frederick II of Prussia is such a person, and Friedrich (Richard Sivél, Histogame) such a game. Reflecting on their insights on Frederick’s campaigns, the command and control exercised, and Frederick’s psychology was a delight.

Amsterdam in History and Board Games

Amsterdam is one of the iconic cities of the world. It is a symbol of art, commerce, and progress, and unique in its canal-structured urban layout. Unsurprisingly, these characteristics have also inspired board game designers. I have told Amsterdam’s 750-year history through the lens of the many board games set in Amsterdam – which gives a glimpse into what the city stands for in the popular imagination. As both this and my earlier Venice post were so much fun to write, I should do more city histories!

Immersive Weimar Playlist

One of my brighter new ideas was to link historical board games to period music. Of course, that works particularly well from the 20^th century on – the age of the music record. I started with an immersive playlist for your next game of Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx), full of everything that was hot at the time – from traditional songs to jazz, from movie tunes to workers’ songs. It will surely not remain the only such playlist.

And thus concludes the year 2025 on this blog. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing.

I wish you all an excellent year 2026, full of joy, health, and success!

Games + History = Life.

Here are the three that gave me most life this year!

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Time of Crisis (Wray Ferrell/Brad Johnson, GMT Games)

I love a good ancient game. The Greeks and Romans provide not only ample literary and archaeological sources (which are the basis for any decent scholarship, and consequently, for games which take their history seriously), but also the right touch of drama to go with it. Yet while everyone know about the drama of the Greeks defying the Persian Empire or Rome’s struggle with Hannibal, late antiquity gets short shrift in popular media, games included. Time of Crisis does its part to remedy that, shedding light on the crisis of the third century in the Roman Empire which saw no fewer than 19 emperors in the fifty years the game covers (with several dozen co-emperors, emperors of secessionist empires, and anti-emperors who never gained legitimacy on top).

Time of Crisis is by no means a simulation. However, it does give you an idea of the sheer chaos of civil war, external invasions, social and economic upheaval, and quasi-constant usurpation… and it does so in a very entertaining way, daring you to wreck the Roman Empire in an enjoyable short evening.

Julius Caesar (Grant Dalgliesh/Justin Thompson, Columbia Games)

Did I say I love ancient games? Here’s exhibit B.

Julius Caesar takes two players to the final years of the Roman Republic, when Caesar and Pompey struggled for mastery of Rome. While the rules are the same for both sides, they play very differently: Caesar commands high-quality veterans of his Gallic campaigns, concentrated in Gaul (both transalpine and cisalpine), whereas Pompey’s more numerous, but greener troops are spread out all over the Mediterranean. Caesar will thus have an edge attacking… and attack he must, as the initial score (measured by control of objective cities) is 7-1 in Pompey’s favor.

That does not mean, though, that Pompey is only digging in. Pre-emptive movements to take victory cities and move to more defensible positions are indispensable, and the edge of Caesar’s attacks can often be blunted by spoiling attacks or distractions elsewhere… and should Caesar take the lead, Pompey must take more risks and go on the offensive anyway. Either way, Julius Caesar is always a thrilling experience.

And my favorite historical game of the year was…

Here I Stand (Ed Beach, GMT Games)

Here I Stand is no newcomer to these lists. In fact, it has been on there a record five times already, winning in 2018 and 2020. I guess that means that Here I Stand is doing a few things right… for example:

• Accessibility: Yes, I know. The game has a 48-page rulebook and takes all day. But for all that, as long as you have one person knowing the rules well, newbies can be eased into the game because the first turn is a bit of a “try out the mechanics of your faction” phase and there are several powers whose field of operations (geographical and thematical) is limited in the beginning (the Protestants, England, and the Ottomans). I played a six-player game early this year in which there were three newbies and they competed just fine.
• Diplomacy: A tricky thing in games. Some games only let you do all kinds of non-binding deals (and then people normally don’t do them because the stakes for betrayal are so high). Others only allow very specific, strictly binding things, which also restricts diplomacy a lot. Here I Stand has found the happy middle ground of making some things binding, but not others, and giving most powers something they can trade to any other power (sometimes only a juicy card event played in their favor).
• Ratching Up Tension: It’s no rocket science, but I love the way that Here I Stand makes the game tenser with every round. You need 25 VP to win, and most of them come from the control of “keys” (that is, objective cities) – so, whenever you gain one, another player loses one. Yet there are also other victory points which are permanent (ranging from winning a war over discovering something in the New World to disgracing an opponent debater)… and thus the overall VP count rises and rises, until “The Papacy might score 25 VP this round, let’s hold them back” has given way to “England, the Protestants, and the Ottomans might score 25 VP this round, and the Hapsburgs threaten a military auto-win”. It is exhilarating!
• The Big Picture: Here I Stand has a thousand little pieces (literally and figuratively) – Tyndale, the translator of the English bible, the conquest of the Incas, the corsairs of Algiers. Yet all these little stones form a magnificent mosaic. Playing the game you will realize how things that you never connected in your mind influenced each other – for example, if Tyndale holds his own in the difficult early stages of English Protestantism, that might encourage the Papacy and the Hapsburgs to end the intra-Catholic war with France. The Hapsburgs might then invest more in the New World, and a successful conquest might give them the means to take the offensive in the Mediterranean against the corsairs and fleets under the banner of the Ottoman sultan. I love when a game makes these connections.

And what were the historical board games that you most enjoyed this year? Let me know in the comments!

Games + History = Life.

Here are the three that gave me most life this year!

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Time of Crisis (Wray Ferrell/Brad Johnson, GMT Games)

I love a good ancient game. The Greeks and Romans provide not only ample literary and archaeological sources (which are the basis for any decent scholarship, and consequently, for games which take their history seriously), but also the right touch of drama to go with it. Yet while everyone know about the drama of the Greeks defying the Persian Empire or Rome’s struggle with Hannibal, late antiquity gets short shrift in popular media, games included. Time of Crisis does its part to remedy that, shedding light on the crisis of the third century in the Roman Empire which saw no fewer than 19 emperors in the fifty years the game covers (with several dozen co-emperors, emperors of secessionist empires, and anti-emperors who never gained legitimacy on top).

Time of Crisis is by no means a simulation. However, it does give you an idea of the sheer chaos of civil war, external invasions, social and economic upheaval, and quasi-constant usurpation… and it does so in a very entertaining way, daring you to wreck the Roman Empire in an enjoyable short evening.

Julius Caesar (Grant Dalgliesh/Justin Thompson, Columbia Games)

Did I say I love ancient games? Here’s exhibit B.

Julius Caesar takes two players to the final years of the Roman Republic, when Caesar and Pompey struggled for mastery of Rome. While the rules are the same for both sides, they play very differently: Caesar commands high-quality veterans of his Gallic campaigns, concentrated in Gaul (both transalpine and cisalpine), whereas Pompey’s more numerous, but greener troops are spread out all over the Mediterranean. Caesar will thus have an edge attacking… and attack he must, as the initial score (measured by control of objective cities) is 7-1 in Pompey’s favor.

That does not mean, though, that Pompey is only digging in. Pre-emptive movements to take victory cities and move to more defensible positions are indispensable, and the edge of Caesar’s attacks can often be blunted by spoiling attacks or distractions elsewhere… and should Caesar take the lead, Pompey must take more risks and go on the offensive anyway. Either way, Julius Caesar is always a thrilling experience.

And my favorite historical game of the year was…

Here I Stand (Ed Beach, GMT Games)

Here I Stand is no newcomer to these lists. In fact, it has been on there a record five times already, winning in 2018 and 2020. I guess that means that Here I Stand is doing a few things right… for example:

• Accessibility: Yes, I know. The game has a 48-page rulebook and takes all day. But for all that, as long as you have one person knowing the rules well, newbies can be eased into the game because the first turn is a bit of a “try out the mechanics of your faction” phase and there are several powers whose field of operations (geographical and thematical) is limited in the beginning (the Protestants, England, and the Ottomans). I played a six-player game early this year in which there were three newbies and they competed just fine.
• Diplomacy: A tricky thing in games. Some games only let you do all kinds of non-binding deals (and then people normally don’t do them because the stakes for betrayal are so high). Others only allow very specific, strictly binding things, which also restricts diplomacy a lot. Here I Stand has found the happy middle ground of making some things binding, but not others, and giving most powers something they can trade to any other power (sometimes only a juicy card event played in their favor).
• Ratching Up Tension: It’s no rocket science, but I love the way that Here I Stand makes the game tenser with every round. You need 25 VP to win, and most of them come from the control of “keys” (that is, objective cities) – so, whenever you gain one, another player loses one. Yet there are also other victory points which are permanent (ranging from winning a war over discovering something in the New World to disgracing an opponent debater)… and thus the overall VP count rises and rises, until “The Papacy might score 25 VP this round, let’s hold them back” has given way to “England, the Protestants, and the Ottomans might score 25 VP this round, and the Hapsburgs threaten a military auto-win”. It is exhilarating!
• The Big Picture: Here I Stand has a thousand little pieces (literally and figuratively) – Tyndale, the translator of the English bible, the conquest of the Incas, the corsairs of Algiers. Yet all these little stones form a magnificent mosaic. Playing the game you will realize how things that you never connected in your mind influenced each other – for example, if Tyndale holds his own in the difficult early stages of English Protestantism, that might encourage the Papacy and the Hapsburgs to end the intra-Catholic war with France. The Hapsburgs might then invest more in the New World, and a successful conquest might give them the means to take the offensive in the Mediterranean against the corsairs and fleets under the banner of the Ottoman sultan. I love when a game makes these connections.

And what were the historical board games that you most enjoyed this year? Let me know in the comments!

History is about people. And so, my three favorite historical non-fiction reads were all biographies – but of very different kinds.

You can read all of the Farewell 2025 posts here:

• Farewell 2025 – New-to-Me Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Non-Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Non-Fiction!
• Farewell 2025 – Historical Games!
• Farewell 2025 – Best on the Blog!

Betina Anton: Hiding Mengele

Josef Mengele’s life can be neatly divided in two parts. The first saw him rise to prominence in Nazi Germany for his medical research on “racial hygiene” and his subsequent human experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After 1945, Mengele faded into obscurity, living a simple, but comfortable and unperturbed life in South America. Betina Anton covers both from a multitude of perspectives, including a plethora of interviews with the survivors of Mengele’s cruel experiments as well as those who knew him in Brazil, and even a documentary find of Mengele’s private letters. The book thus adds especially to the under-researched second half of Mengele’s life, giving a full picture of the casual and organized support for Nazis in hiding.

Mengele’s quiet life in South America contrasts starkly (and purposefully) with the continued suffering of his victims and their dependents, as well as with his own much more dramatic life before the end of the war, making you ask yourself how the world could allow such a man to go scot-free.

Geoff Mortimer: Wallenstein. The Enigma of the Thirty Years’ War

I have written a lot about Wallenstein this year. Obviously, that means I have also read a lot about him, and no book better than Geoff Mortimer’s biography. Despite its subheading, the book is concerned with dispelling the Wallenstein myth, created by his opponents after his death and re-interpreted (affirmatively or negatively) by historians for centuries. Instead, Mortimer presents Wallenstein as a not uncommon man of his time whose actions were rooted in his concern for the safety of his estate, and, when it came to choosing sides, his imperial-Catholic loyalty. Wallenstein was thus tied to the emperor, but needed peace to have his fiefs (gained from emperor Ferdinand’s expropriations in Bohemia and Mecklenburg) confirmed for good. When Ferdinand lost trust in Wallenstein, he was turned from a beneficiary to a victim of the same method – murdered and expropriated.

And my favorite historical non-fiction read of 2025 was…

Christopher Duffy: Frederick the Great. A Military Life

Frederick II of Prussia remains of the most fascinating historical personalities to me – as a politician, a writer, and, of course, as a general. Duffy’s biography focuses on this last aspect and does so in admirable depth and clarity. Of course, Frederick’s wars are covered (on a tactical, operational, and strategic level), but also his activities as a military administrator and organizer. It is in these latter fields where Duffy finds most fault with Frederick, whom he credits with having inherited the finest military force in Europe upon his accession and leaving his own successor a mediocre army. While Duffy thus does not shy away from pointing out Frederick’s mistakes and oversights, he also presents him as a very capable commander, whose battle plans were both daring and practical, whose rapid marches allowed him to contend with three great-power foes at the same time, and whose strategic resilience made him last long enough until his enemies’ exhaustion forced them to make peace with him – all of this in smooth, flowing prose, and with 50 detailed maps of all major battles and campaigns.

What were your favorite history books read in 2025? Let me know in the comments!