Reveilled posted:

To maybe put this more succinctly, I don't think you can make a game that adequately critiques colonialism while simultaneously having the player be the colonialist.

Triskelli posted:

It may fail the definition of “Adequate” but John Company and An Infamous Traffic (by the designer of Root) make their satire/critique a little more obvious by talking a step backwards into colonialist societies. You’re not the invisible hand of Capital trying to do A Colonialism the best to get the most points: you’re a family patriarch trying to use the revenue from the colonies to throw opulent weddings & own the fanciest hats.





E: John Company in particular argues that the East India Trading Company becoming a military operation lead to a death spiral for the Company, but people vigorously kept it going because looting the princes of India made for colossal individual profit.

Triskelli posted:

It may fail the definition of “Adequate” but John Company and An Infamous Traffic (by the designer of Root) make their satire/critique a little more obvious by talking a step backwards into colonialist societies. You’re not the invisible hand of Capital trying to do A Colonialism the best to get the most points: you’re a family patriarch trying to use the revenue from the colonies to throw opulent weddings & own the fanciest hats.





E: John Company in particular argues that the East India Trading Company becoming a military operation lead to a death spiral for the Company, but people vigorously kept it going because looting the princes of India made for colossal individual profit.

Archonex posted:

Yeah, plenty of games adequately critique things from the perspective of the person doing harm.

I mean, Monopoly was originally invented as a critique of unrestrained capitalism. Which is why it's so infuriating to play for everyone but the one person that gets lucky and gets the most spaces first.

It's just that people are dumb, companies want money, and between those two groups the actual message can be subverted along the way. And that's if the message was clear in the first place.


Edit: A good example of this is actually Monopoly in another way, actually.

When the game was stolen for mass production from it's original creator for the purposes of profiting off of it, part of the rules were left out. Specifically, that if one player pulls ahead (At this point in a likely unfair way, since barring cheating it's all luck of the dice whether you passively get rich off of everyone else by getting lucky enough to claim enough spaces early on or are constantly sucked dry of your money under the unrestrained capitalist system of rules.) of the rest the other three can by majority vote switch from capitalism to what by modern standards would probably be a form of Georgist socialism. Which (to quote another website) switches from the capitalist rules to a more socialist game and rule set where public services are nationalized, the only tax levied is on the unimproved value of land, and everyone is rewarded when wealth is created.

Curiously, the thieves that stole the property originally left that part of the rules out of the game. And then Parker Bros basically screwed the original creator over with a pittance of money and no royalties on a massively popular game, violated their deal to get access to the license by altering it immediately to keep those rules removed, did everything to cover up the story of what they had done for like 50-70 years, and generally just proved themselves to be horrible people who should have never been permitted a position of any great power.

All of which ironically lends an entirely different subtext to their version that speaks more to corruption and greed than anything else.

Reveilled posted:

I'll give both of them a look, I haven't played either, thanks!

I'd argue that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, actually--the original game's option to socialise the economy means that, in the end, you're not playing (or at least, not only playing) as the people doing harm. Because if the conceit of the Landlord's Game is that you're all playing as Landlords, on what planet do Landlords vote to implement Georgist Socialism? As soon as the players do that, they're effectively taking the role of the common worker, the victims of the oppression you played in the game's first phase. The critique here works because the players are put in the shoes of the oppressed, and act to change the status quo. And when you strip that out...you have Parker Bros' ripoff Monopoly, where everyone is now explicitly playing only as the landlords. And nobody plays Monopoly and comes out the other end with a hatred of landlords or a newfound respect for socialism, the only critique Monopoly offers is a critique of the bastard who suggested you play it in the first place.

Archonex posted:

I mean, originally you are the ones doing harm according to the first ruleset you have to play with. That's literally why monopoly is such a tedious ragefest for many people, since the unrestrained capitalist ruleset is designed to be extremely unfair and biased to the point of frustration and tediousness.

I'd argue that it shows why unrestrained capitalism doesn't work by showing you what happens to people that would support the system under initial circumstances. No one starts out as a landlord. They get the opportunity to become one through luck and move up in the world for a period of time before the nature of the system starts depriving them of more and more opportunities (and eventually even stealing the achievements you've made away as things get more unbalanced depending on the edition) as power gets consolidated into the hands of one player.

It's just that in the original rules the game goes from that situation to highlighting a failing of this fundamentally biased system to show how consolidating power under a system of unrestrained capitalism can potentially lead to it's own downfall into something else. Since if all the people (Who it should be noted are usually rapidly not becoming landlords at all, and later on are potentially more in line with being tenants as the advantages of the lead player exponentially increase over time.) actually find the courage to stand up and say "gently caress this. We're not playing by these hosed up rules any more." then the unrestrained capitalist's/lead players massive and unfair lead due to an inherent bias in the rules ends up demolished by throwing out those rules in favor of rules that gives benefits to everyone regardless of their position in the hierarchy of winners and losers.

If you don't do this you are repeatedly taxed by the landlord controlling most of the board, start losing properties as they essentially become a monolithic giant (Or as some might say, a monopoly.), and eventually lose the game. Contrast this with the georgist/socialist ruleset that gives benefits to everyone by taking away the unfair advantages of the guy that ruthlessly exploited (or more likely lucked into) the advantages of unrestrained capitalism.


Or to put it in a more TL;DR way: First time players are going to start up the original monopoly, get part way through, and have an "Am I the baddies?" moment when they realize the rules are fundamentally rigged to ensure that they can never succeed and can only be exploited into bankruptcy.

At which point everyone not winning will either vote to dump the unrestrained capitalist system in favor of the Georgist one or lose horribly as they are ruthlessly (and indeed, in a way passively, as the rules mean that no matter how nice the winning player is they ultimately can't even stop themselves from draining the other players money without the greater population forcibly taking action to stop them) exploited into bankruptcy. Which is absolutely a political underpinning to the game given the economic context behind it, even if some won't agree with it.

Seeing as how the company and the person who stole it basically exploited a number of loopholes to gain wealth and even straight up stole the game in the first place it also acts as a wonderful commentary on the people that publish and originally stole Monopoly as well.

Reveilled posted:

But again, that supports the point I'm making. There's two games here, The Landlord's Game, which was the original, and Monopoly, which was the Parker Bros ripoff. In Monopoly, you play only as the unrestrained capitalists until one person wins. In The Landlord's Game, you may start out playing as the capitalists, but there are specific mechanics which allow and indeed encourage you as players to transition instead to playing as the working class. And of these two, only the one where you play as the working class is an adequate critique of landlordism, because it's the only one which supports play as the oppressed. The other one is just a poo poo game.

I dunno, I guess my argument wasn't as clear as I thought it was because it's being taken as technically wrong because you do actually play as the landlords at the start of The Landlord's Game. But I thought my overarching point was fairly clear, that a better approach to critiquing these systems probably comes from playing as the oppressed group in these systems, and in that sense The Landlord's Game and Monopoly basically form a minimal pair exactly illustrating that: take a game which is a critique of landlordism and remove the very the thing I'm saying we need more of (games which have you play as the victims of the system being critiqued), and you ruin its meaning and ability to critique the system.

Archonex posted:

Monopoly is literally a bastardized version of the Landlord's game. That's why I keep referring to the original ruleset. Monopoly is like half of the total original product. As part of the overall chat about Monopoly I was referring to the original Landlord's Game rules in my prior posts and why it has multiple intended and unintended politics, along with how Monopoly ended up being stolen to create an extra layer of (hosed up) implied politics behind it.

I'm probably not being clear either. Since my opinion was that the Landlord's Game technically does show you as one of the oppressed. It just tricks the ever loving gently caress out of you by making you think early on you were going to be one of the wealthy and important people that end up loving you over later on.

To try and sum my thoughts up: The Landlord's Game/original rules starts you out as an unwitting oppressor, thinking that you're one of the ones that are going to hit it big (IE: The whole "embarrassed millionaire" thing.) and then part way through the game you realize that you were tricked into becoming the oppressed by trying to compete in this system. Since under the initial system of unrestrained capitalism the only probable outcome is that you are bled dry by degrees into bankruptcy. As it becomes apparent that what little you achieved before the initial stages of a formation of a monopoly is slowly but surely taken away from you as you are forcibly regressed more into being a tenant (paying money with less and less money as income as time goes on) under this system than the landlord as you initially assumed you were going to be.

At which point you can for whatever reason decide to meekly bow your head at this state of affairs alongside the other players or make a decision as a collective majority to throw these rules out for something that benefits everyone.

To a certain extent, this is even true of the oppressor, since the initial player with a sizable lead over all the others cannot even stop ruining the fun of other player's via this incredibly rage inducing system even if they wanted too. Which has a meta-narrative of it's own. It's a system that fucks over anyone remotely decent or empathic in multiple ways from multiple angles.

fr0id posted:

This is why the board game Oath is secretly the best historical war game.

Reveilled posted:

But again, that supports the point I'm making. There's two games here, The Landlord's Game, which was the original, and Monopoly, which was the Parker Bros ripoff. In Monopoly, you play only as the unrestrained capitalists until one person wins. In The Landlord's Game, you may start out playing as the capitalists, but there are specific mechanics which allow and indeed encourage you as players to transition instead to playing as the working class. And of these two, only the one where you play as the working class is an adequate critique of landlordism, because it's the only one which supports play as the oppressed. The other one is just a poo poo game.

I dunno, I guess my argument wasn't as clear as I thought it was because it's being taken as technically wrong because you do actually play as the landlords at the start of The Landlord's Game. But I thought my overarching point was fairly clear, that a better approach to critiquing these systems probably comes from playing as the oppressed group in these systems, and in that sense The Landlord's Game and Monopoly basically form a minimal pair exactly illustrating that: take a game which is a critique of landlordism and remove the very the thing I'm saying we need more of (games which have you play as the victims of the system being critiqued), and it stops being perceivable as a critique of the system and instead becomes the game everyone has in their house and devotes exactly zero critical thought to.

Triskelli posted:

The State is overthrown, long live the State

fr0id posted:

Yes, but everyone playing REMEMBERS the loving state. That is key. There is a history to Oath that is lacking in other games.

For folks who don’t know. Oath is a board game of conquest and empire. Importantly, the person who wins a game gets to dictate the beginning state of the next game. So the echoes of their victory and any resentments build over it. THIS is actual history. People get to remember betrayals and victories and humiliations. These things stick in a way that they don’t with other games. The victors decisions of the last game are always there to remind you.

Relevant Tangent posted:

Let's talk about when WW decided to write about the Gothic-Punk streets you were going to encounter in their games. Let's talk about Destiny's Price:

The year is 1995 and WW has released their first (and only shockingly enough) Black Dog game factory book for their Mage line. As you can guess from "Ripple and cum" up there, this is a journey.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Let me guess, this book isn't about how your vampire can get involved in the crack epidemic.

fr0id posted:

Yes, but everyone playing REMEMBERS the loving state. That is key. There is a history to Oath that is lacking in other games.

For folks who don’t know. Oath is a board game of conquest and empire. Importantly, the person who wins a game gets to dictate the beginning state of the next game. So the echoes of their victory and any resentments build over it. THIS is actual history. People get to remember betrayals and victories and humiliations. These things stick in a way that they don’t with other games. The victors decisions of the last game are always there to remind you.

Archonex posted:

This sounds incredibly entertaining in a "This game is liable to create a tabletop gaming blood feud amongst my friends." sort of way and it makes me wish interesting board games were more of a thing amongst my social circle.

Triskelli posted:

MonsieurChoc posted:

One of the designers is a "Nixon was right to bomb Cambodgia" Republican. Kenneth Hite.

Funnily enough he was in charge of Fall of Delta Green, the 60s version, and it does not shy away from the horrors perpretated by America.

TheCenturion posted:

Go play Diplomacy. Hide the kitchen knives first.

Triskelli posted:

Didn’t mean to so thoroughly kill this thread. Did want to share Space Biff’s latest article about “Greenwashing”, his term for replacing real historical agents with Lovecraft aliens.

https://spacebiff.com/2021/08/12/greenwashing-history/#more-20510

90s Cringe Rock posted:

I'd just assumed it was a generic zombie game. Wow.

Archonex posted:

For every Inner Council getting air striked to oblivion in a hilariously abrupt way (thereby signaling it's ultimate insignificance despite the fascist leanings and all the atrocities it committed to get ahead) there is a Mithras. Who is depicted as going down with soldiers and I think even APC's swarming him like ants if he gets his original power back in V5.

Angry Salami posted:

Man, that "AuZtralia" game just sounds repulsive. I don't know if it's worse if I take it as endorsing 'terra nullus' doctrine and directly erasing indigenous peoples from Australian history, or if I take it as using hideous Lovecraftian monsters as a stand-in for them.

EDIT: Ooh, just did some googling, looks like Old One settlements are illustrated as Mesoamerican style temples. So just straight up "All indigenous peoples are monsters and also interchangeable". Nice.

citybeatnik posted:

Voormas was a Euthanatos, a hodge podge of Hellenistic death cults and "what if Temple of Doom, but the Thuggees have actual powers".

But you are spot on with both the Tremere being huge flaming assholes and the Tzimisce being a cancerous poison. Their original clanbook went way too all in on "yeah no these guys totally chummied up to the Nazis" plus whatever weird poo poo they had with Myca/Sascha Vykos. Sexual violence, whether implied or otherwise, was always turned up to 11 when they were involved.

Plus the various ethnic genocides. But at least pre-V5 they weren't orchestrated by vampires but rather taken advantage of.

citybeatnik posted:

Compare that to Deadlands, which has a whole host of problems of its own but at least there direct action and helping a community has a legit benefit to the world as a whole.

Cole Wehre posted:

As both a designer and a player, I dislike cards. Perhaps that’s too strongly put. Really, I don’t mind them, but when I sit down to play a game that makes an extensive use of cards—especially multiple decks—I begin with more suspicion than faith in the design. I think this tendency came from the role that chess and classic war games played in molding me as a gamer and a designer. Card decks were something I toyed with during my brief stint into Ameritrash games in high school and college. As soon as I found Martin Wallace (especially Age of Steam and Struggle of Empires), I thought I was done.

Of course, there were games that won me over anyway. I adore several CDGs, including the Napoleonic Wars and Twilight Struggle. I also enjoyed Wallace’s experiments with card-games, such as Brass and his various deck-builders. Still, the inclusion of a bunch of decks of cards in a game’s manifest was often enough for me to look elsewhere for something new to play.

I often relate my first encounters with Phil Eklund’s games as a turning point in my own thinking as a player and a designer. But that’s not really true when it comes to cards. Phil’s games are more auction games than card games. Even in Pax Porfiriana, a game with about as capricious card deck as you might find, so much of the disorder of the deck was managed by the market. Again, the game was about valuation and position. You could see the train coming well before it slammed into your best-laid plans.

It should come as no surprise then that, when it come to my own design, I am always hesitant to include cards. In Pamir, they were a generic convention that I wanted to build on. An Infamous Traffic dropped cards altogether. And John Company’s cards aren’t really cards in any real way. With the exception of the thin deck of Evening Post cards, the cards in that game represent a production constraint more than anything else.

That said, when I approached Root, I knew right away that I would need cards. This wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. But, from the start, the game clearly demanded it.

Thematically, I wanted space in Root to attack some of the most insidious tropes about how states should behave in games. I won’t bother to rail against any specific design, because, frankly, almost everyone is doing poorly on this point. The biggest offense, in my opinion, is the erasure of the different peoples that comprised a state. Too often game designers, authors, and even historians (!) give too much credit to the way a state imagined itself and fail to ask if that self-image was somehow wrong. History is always more cosmopolitan than we are taught.

So, it was important, right from the start, that the great woodland of Root be peopled with a variety of creatures and that each player faction not is wholly associated with one group of these nations. To that end, I decided that the creatures of the forest should be divided into four different interest groups: small herbivores, medium herbivores, medium predators, and birds. For ease of communication, each of these groups got a single avatar: a mouse, a bunny, a fox, and a hawk.

Managing all of those peoples and their opinions in the traditional way (with chits and tracks) would be a nightmare. So, I decided to map those creatures on to the game’s deck. The deck of 54 cards would be composed of four suits, one for each of the interest groups. It was also important that the deck be “tilted” so that it could reflect what I saw as the “natural” balance of this particular woodland. Birds of prey have the biggest suit, mice have the smallest.

The cards in a players hand represented the biopower on which their political faction could draw. So managing a hand by choosing which cards to hold and whether to expand hand size or the flow of new cards in and out of a hand because an exercise in Foucaultian biopolitics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopolitics#Foucaults). This mechanical space also provided me with a second core system through which I could easily differentiate the various factions. It allowed me to have the egalitarian Woodland Alliance manage their followers quite differently when compared to the strict (almost caste-like) society of the Eyrie.

I knew early on that I wanted all the players to be interacting with a single deck and that deck should represent the different interests of the woodland creatures. This choice also led to some mechanical concerns. Highly asymmetric games can sometimes feel quite solitary—especially if players share few if any rules and components. I wanted to do everything I could to bind the systems (and the players) together. Forcing the players to use a single deck of cards would answer this problem. At the same time, if the factions were going to be truly different, any resource they shared would have to be generic. This made me nervous. If I was using the deck as a generic noise-maker in the design, then it was hardly worth including in the first place. While the random churn of a deck of cards can make for the occasional bits of excitement, it’s a very poor foundation on which to build a game. So, if I did want a single deck to work in this design, I needed to make the cards multi-function. But, as I’ve slammed right into my word limit for the day, the exact functions of those cards will have to wait until tomorrow.

Biffmotron posted:

On Root-chat, Root is fascinating because it has an explicit political take about how different people come together within a state, as well as how different ideologies compete for the loyalty of people. One of Wehre's developer diaries is worth reposting in full.

This core idea, that cards represent the loyalty of specific peoples, and that different factions with different ideologies play them in various ways makes Root sing. When the Woodland Alliance converts a Mouse supporter card into a Sympathy token, that's a very different arc than the Marquis de Cat using Overwork to take an extra action in a Mouse clearing.

In some ways, it's not the most sophisticated model, since there's no real difference between the suites, except that they constrain actions to matching locations on the board. They're "peoples" without culture, history, or character. But as a framework for creating a story a cute woodland creatures engaged in brutal political war that is also a medium weight boardgame, it's a hell of lot more interesting and coherent than the COIN series.

Comstar posted:

What do the various sides/creatures in Root represent? I know the Cats are the new authoritarian regime(?), the Birds are the old royal regime(?), the alliance are the rebels/terrorists(?), someone is playing a one man Skyrim game and wins if they finish the main quest line (?). Please also include the expansions.

Are all the various sides balanced in that can all win, or are some easier to win than others?