Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who wrote Cat’s Cradle?

As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. That's especially true if those people are introspective, creative types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like it is to the author of the article.

I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.

Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.

"The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game