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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

(www.polygon.com)
334 points musha68k | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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karaterobot ◴[20 Oct 24 17:17 UTC] No.41896910[source]▶
> 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.

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gweinberg ◴[20 Oct 24 17:36 UTC] No.41897048[source]▶
I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.
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vundercind ◴[20 Oct 24 17:54 UTC] No.41897164[source]▶
Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.
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jhbadger ◴[20 Oct 24 19:14 UTC] No.41897769{3}[source]▶
"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

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pessimizer ◴[20 Oct 24 20:21 UTC] No.41898202{4}[source]▶
Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.

The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.

It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.

edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.

It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.

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wileydragonfly ◴[20 Oct 24 22:14 UTC] No.41898930{5}[source]▶
I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.
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Chathamization ◴[21 Oct 24 04:07 UTC] No.41900604{6}[source]▶
It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.
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WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 14:51 UTC] No.41904826{7}[source]▶
It also depends on the rules you are playing. Monopoly is a game that most people learn not from the rules but from family and a lot of families have very different house rules.

The in the box rules state that every property must go to auction on first landing if the player refuses their option to buy it at face value. There's a lot of strategy possible in auctions, but a lot of house rules don't like the auctions and either avoid them entirely or make them much rarer than the in-box rules state they should be. (In part because early and often auctions increase the cutthroat feeling earlier in the game, whereas a lot of house rules are about pushing the cutthroat stuff off later into end game.)

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1. Chathamization ◴[21 Oct 24 16:47 UTC] No.41905950{8}[source]▶
True. You also need a group that knows what they're doing and is trying to be cutthroat. Then the whole table is trying to trade for color sets and dissuade others from trading for color sets, which often leads to this absurd mass negotiation where people are just throwing away massive amounts of money and property in order to not be shut out. Sometimes you end up bribing another player just to keep them from undercutting a deal, or you work with that player and cut out the original person you both were haggling with, at which point they're trying to bribe another player to intervene.

As long as you're using the correct rules and everyone is playing the game fast, they know what they're doing, and they're competitive, the game can be quite fun. It's also a lot less time intensive than many other board games where lots of people are negotiating.