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    Avidly Reads Board Games
    Avidly Reads Board Games
    Avidly Reads Board Games
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    Avidly Reads Board Games

    By Eric Thurm

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “How we should think about board games, and what do they do to us as we play them?”

    Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

    Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9781479810437
    Avidly Reads Board Games

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    • 5/5
      Avidly Reads Board Games by Eric Thurm was an absolute pleasant surprise, the writing, the manner in which games are covered, spoke to me from start to finish.The Avidly Reads series seems like it will offer writers a similar opportunity as a few other series currently being published. The chosen topic serves as the focal point but the approach is largely up to the writer, perhaps more personal and memoirish, perhaps more straightforward historical and sociological, but almost always some hybrid of several approaches. I approached this book with a certain skepticism, I mean, really, board games?From the beginning we learn just how these games can both form community (even within close family members) and serve as a therapeutic tool. Now that we know there will be a deeply personal element to this book, we get the history of games in general largely through the example of a few games in particular. This is a short book, an exhaustive history would have been impossible. This history also parallels Thurms personal history, so we see examples, which many of us can relate to, of how board games are far more than just "play and entertainment."If you have a history with board games, especially if that history extends beyond the games of childhood into the role playing games (I was mostly D&D, Risk, and a bunch of Avalon-Hill games, but always tried others), you will have many personal memories arise while reading this. Especially if you're of a certain age (old) like me.I highly recommend this to readers who are or were big board game players, as well as those interested in what games do in and say about society and culture.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.

    Book preview

    Avidly Reads Board Games - Eric Thurm

    Avidly Reads Board Games

    Avidly Reads

    General Editors: Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood

    The Avidly Reads series presents brief books about how culture makes us feel. We invite readers and writers to indulge feelings—and to tell their stories—in the idiom that distinguishes the best conversations about culture.

    Avidly Reads Theory

    Jordan Alexander Stein

    Avidly Reads Making Out

    Kathryn Bond Stockton

    Avidly Reads Board Games

    Eric Thurm

    Avidly Reads Board Games

    Eric D. Thurm

    NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

    New York

    NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

    New York

    www.nyupress.org

    © 2019 by New York University

    All rights reserved

    References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Thurm, Eric, author.

    Title: Avidly reads board games / Eric Thurm.

    Other titles: Board games

    Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Series: Avidly reads | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2019006919| ISBN 9781479856343 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479826957 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    Subjects: LCSH: Board games—Social aspects.

    Classification: LCC GV1312 .T58 2018 | DDC 794—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006919

    New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

    Also available as an ebook

    To Sammy — time to uphold your end of our deal

    Contents

    1. Enter the Magic Circle

    2. Playing Along with Complicity

    3. Monopoly and Its Children

    4. Can Friendship Be Stronger than War Games?

    5. Legacy Games and the End of the Campaign

    6. Game Night

    Gameography

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    1

    Enter the Magic Circle

    On a stale Florida day at the end of March, my family languished in a hospital waiting room, staring intensely at nothing in particular. We’d waited in the haze of the hospital’s lobby for several hours before being led up to the dimly lit waiting room. Eventually, we would be taken to my grandfather’s bed. He was in the late stages of pancreatic cancer, and we had come to say good-bye.

    The waiting room was a grim, foreboding space, covered in old magazines and dull, browned tile. The television sandwiched into a corner of the ceiling was set to a Vanderpump Rules marathon, airing all of the drama leading up to a reality TV wedding. We could have chatted about nothing to fill the time, but a pair of women were rooted in chairs, silently perusing their copies of People; as painful as our situation was, we didn’t want to disturb other people in a similarly fragile state. And besides, there’s not much you can say, sitting around waiting for death. So my brother, sister, and I did the only thing we could think of: we took a big, red cardboard box out of a tote bag, sidled up to the table at the center of the waiting room, and started setting up a game of Catan.

    The three of us had been playing the game originally known as Settlers of Catan obsessively for over a year by this point, so we had all of the steps down cold, like a pit crew mechanically getting their car ready for a race. We fit together the skeleton of the board—six pieces of coast that create the outline of the island of Catan, filled in by hexagons representing the island’s various resources. We knew the cost of building roads, settlements, and cities—the elements of your civilization. We knew the uses and abuses of each of the game’s development cards. We even knew the particular circumstances under which it makes sense to trade resources: when one of us wanted to swap a lumber card for an ore, we would simply point or gesture without needing to speak. Save for the intermittent rolling of dice and the incidental wooden plunk of a road or settlement, there was no sound.

    No games are good for waiting to say your final good-bye to a dying relative, but all things considered, Catan isn’t a bad one. You can play without talking, if you need to—in theory, a game could play out entirely in silence, letting the dice and each player’s individual choices guide the outcome. This also means Catan isn’t overly competitive, unless you want it to be. The players can largely ignore each other if they so choose, instead focusing on their own strategies, whether that’s building up cities and settlements or pursuing the floating Longest Road and Largest Army cards. More than anything, the Catan system is accommodating, which might partially explain why it’s one of the most popular board games in the world, with more than eighteen million copies sold since its publication in 1995.

    Catan’s flexibility is part of why it’s a sort of ambassador for Eurogames, a popular genre of board game built on the principle that, broadly speaking, games should be more about creating a shared experience of play than about the singular pursuit of victory that characterizes the classics of the American dining room table. Players in Eurogames are rarely eliminated before the end of a game the way they are in Monopoly; there’s more strategy required to win than in the functionally random Candyland; and players are encouraged to focus more on trading and accumulating resources rather than crushing their opponents as in Battleship or Stratego.

    Well-designed Eurogames, and Catan in particular, are perfect cushions for your time: complex enough that they can command the bulk of your attention, preventing you from thinking about other, less pleasant things, but not so complicated that they cause a mental short circuit. They’re bearable in painful situations—this particular game of Catan functioned much the same way the People magazines did for the other women in the waiting room.

    This quality also means that these games are very fun to play while drunk: my first game of Catan was with a few members of my college fraternity, who insisted that I would, in fact, have a good time trying to build across this abstracted, fictional island. It helped that I was not exactly sober at the time.

    In getting me to hunch over the board, laid out on a dirty glass table in front of a busted pleather couch, my friends were overcoming considerable internal resistance. My first encounter with Catan was about two years earlier, when a pair of high school students thinking of applying to my college decided to play Catan on their overnight visit to campus. For some reason, they had chosen to play this weird-sounding game instead of joining me at a party in another fraternity’s basement where everyone had to pay for drinks and put in a concerted effort to rip their shoes off the permanently sticky basement floor while weaving through an equally permanent haze of cigarette smoke. As an eighteen-year-old prospective philosophy major who had already planned out a senior thesis about the intersection of neo-Kantian and neo-Aristotelian ethics, it seems safe to say I was on pretty solid footing when I mocked the two teens for being nerds.

    They were right to blow off the party. I don’t remember much of that night in the basement, but, faded as I was, I still remember my first game of Catan. Or, at least, I remember how it made me feel: my initial confusion, followed by the slow sensation of starting to understand how to speak a new language, followed by the sort of pleasant frustration that comes with getting your ass kicked in an exciting new game, followed by a commitment to playing again and again until I won. When I learned about the Longest Road, a mechanic in which the player with the longest contiguous set of roads nets two victory points, I seized on it as somehow crucial to success and feverishly spent my first six or seven games trying to acquire it, to the detriment of literally every other part of the game. (It took me a while to realize an important fact that might be useful for new players: Longest Road is a tactic for fools. It can easily be disrupted or stolen by someone else, while the resource production of cities can be reinvested in development cards while making it easier to do everything else. Trust me.)

    I lost that first game very badly but discovered that a fire had been lit somewhere in the lower-left part of my skull, and not just by the frat house’s accordion gravity bong. I simply could not stop playing Catan, I told myself, at least not until I’d won a game. I stumbled around in the dark both literally and figuratively for several games, slowly trying to grasp how the rules fit together. Eventually everything started to snap into place—in a flash, the small wooden buildings that initially seemed like chunky versions of Monopoly houses and hotels became settlements and cities, habitation that I had carved out from the raw materials of the island and that I could then use to produce sheep, wheat, ore, lumber, and brick, which I needed to build even more settlements and cities and, after some time, to win the game. When I moved the robber piece, I wasn’t just taking a card from one of the other players; I was cutting off an entire area of the island, where their villagers would otherwise be hard at work. My goal of ten, abstracted victory points was a clear horizon, but charting a straightforward course there was anything but easy. After a few weeks of failed attempts, I finally won a game. (To the best of my recollection, by not pursuing Longest Road.) I was hooked.

    In the seemingly endless stretch of Catan games I played over the next two years, I would insist on everything being just right: a dim room, lit by a lantern my roommates had bought online (also while drunk); music that wasn’t necessarily Howard Shore’s score for the Lord of the Rings movies but that wasn’t not Howard Shore’s score for the Lord of the Rings movies; a shaky, single-game story that expanded to contain all of the quirks of resource distribution and building. (Did you build a settlement in the middle of my road, cutting off my path to build more? Think of the children!) One of the people in the fraternity moved out of the house, leaving behind a copy of the official Settlers of Catan novel, which he was then too embarrassed to claim. I promptly stole it and made a habit of reading a paragraph out loud in the middle of every game of Catan I played without knowing anything else about the plot or setting. The book, which I gathered was about a bunch of characters with names like Candamir and Osmond complaining about traveling up and

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