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 feelingsand to tell their storiesin 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

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 gamesSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC GV1312 .T58 2018 | DDC 794dc23

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

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To Sammy time to uphold your end of our deal

On a stale Florida day at the end of March, my family languished in a hospital waiting room, staring intensely at nothing in particular. Wed waited in the haze of the hospitals lobby for several hours before being led up to the dimly lit waiting room. Eventually, we would be taken to my grandfathers 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 didnt want to disturb other people in a similarly fragile state. And besides, theres 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 boardsix pieces of coast that create the outline of the island of Catan, filled in by hexagons representing the islands various resources. We knew the cost of building roads, settlements, and citiesthe elements of your civilization. We knew the uses and abuses of each of the games 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 isnt a bad one. You can play without talking, if you need toin theory, a game could play out entirely in silence, letting the dice and each players individual choices guide the outcome. This also means Catan isnt 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 thats 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 its one of the most popular board games in the world, with more than eighteen million copies sold since its publication in 1995.

Catans flexibility is part of why its 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; theres 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. Theyre bearable in painful situationsthis 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 fraternitys 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 dont 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.)