Learning to Board Game in the Anthropocene

I started modern board gaming early last year. This was thanks to Shut Up & Sit Down. I don’t remember how I came across their Youtube channel, but I got addicted to it. Then thanks to my partner, we started gaming. We began with Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu and now we’re in Euroland (Nusfjord is the current game of choice). 

A recent FB post by a friend pointed out how the BGG list (Board Game Geek – the austere and functional web site bible of modern board gaming) of games about climate change embodied a liberal vision of technological fixes. This goes into a full accelerationist direction with Futuropia, a Freidman and Friese game about managing the transition from full automation (a left accelerationist slogan) into a society of leisure.

Martian Chronicles

This got me thinking about other imaginations of the future, particularly climate change, in board games. I mentioned Terraforming Mars (2016) (our favourite game – a card tableau/engine builder about, yes, the title…). This is a game really about the slow pace of such fixes, it is played over generations, usually 9-12, and set in the 2400s. In a nice touch, the rulebook has the three players as Kim, Stanley and Robinson, a nod to its roots in the Marxist sicfi of Kim Stanley Robinson. Unfortunately it does not have a communist revolution expansion, and it’s politics are largely some satirical jibes at the corporations you play and the chance to play Tharsis Republic, the nearest to communists you can get in the game.

There are obviously a series of recent games about nature that seem to be reflections on climate change and ecological system: from Photosynthesis, growing trees, to Haven, in which the ‘city’ battles ‘nature’. Also, there have been debates about the use of plastic, cardboard and wood in games, and transport costs (most games seem to be made in China). Obviously, also board games are a kind of reaction against the digital and a turn to the tactile and physical. While you do see climate denialism in posts (games about climate change or comments on them are ‘politics’), my feeling is the community is much like the Internet as a whole, with vociferous deniers against broad acceptance.

Then I read this piece by Stephanie Wakefield on infrastructure in the Anthropocene. She identifies a modern liberal vision of infrastructure, one of progress and modernist solutions, that has fractured into a vision of resilience, building and managing catastrophic change, and ‘dwelling in the ruins’, a vision of living with catastrophe. These I think can be mapped on to games.

Resilience

Much of modern board gaming, in its Euro form, is, as the game reviewer Radho has noted, basically about being a middle manager. Against our current preoccupation with ‘heroic entrepreneurs’ (Bezos, Thiel, Dyson, etc), in board games you are often just managing, against the game and against other players. You are often running something, so not fully middle manager, but you exist in a tight and constrained space. In terms of climate change, it might be that Blackout: Hong Kong (2018), by Alexander Pfister, is the game of crisis management. A blackout occurs in Hong Kong, the state fails, and you step in to sort things out (although you don’t get the power back on).

Certainly, as Radho has also pointed out this game could be seen as a libertarian fantasy, as you and your ‘workers’ try to deal with a blackout in which the state has failed (this could be given a left spin, but probably that would be a spin). I haven’t played this game yet, but want to. It does seem to be considered ‘themeless’, which is a shame. Obviously not directly about climate change, this does seem to be a game about urban crisis as resulting in a failure in infrastructure and how to cope with that.

‘Dwelling in the Ruins’

Dwelling in the ruins would seem to fit the post-apocalyptic world of gaming, which preoccupies board gaming as much as it does all other forms of modern culture. An apocalyptic vision of disaster and salvage, obviously inspired by Mad Max and its reboots, is fairly common. One game, which I have played, does stand out, and that is Kero. Kero, as in Kerosene, is another post-apocalyptic case of resource gathering. Kero has really nice graphics and is a real time game in which the timer, a fuel lorry, is your supply of kerosene (i.e. sand). I actually find real time games too stressful (see also Galaxy Trucker). But, this is also a game that really embodies limited resources and gives the post-apocalyptic landscape a management rather than warfare dimension (also maybe the stress should be the point of a climate change game...). As it is a French game it is also interesting in the context of the fuel tax and the movement of the gilets Jaunes…

Ruins and resilience

If resilience models can underestimate the catastrophe of climate change, still relying on modernist technological fixes, then ruins models can glory in despair and fetishise catastrophe. If there really hasn’t been a truly successful climate change novel I’ve found, perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora comes close, then it might not be a surprise that I don’t have a solution game here. [1] What I would say is that board games do pose interesting questions of management. There is no doubt that many of these games are ‘capitalist’, in the specific and broad sense (‘trading in the Mediterranean) – this would be another post. Yet, in the mode of reflection on crisis and the management of crisis they also very directly speak to our moment.

Notes

[1] Weirdly, there is a generation ship game, Gen 7, unfortunately it does not seem to be that good...