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Alfred Wallace: He’s down! He’s down!
As I’m sure many of you have noticed, Boardgame Geek is currently down. From what I understand, there’s a corncob stuck inside the server and the ISP’s night watchman freaked out about it. It’s complicated. Anyway, each of us has been dealing with the news in our own way. Some of us continue on like before. Some of us have suddenly become more productive at work. Others have recently rediscovered their families. A few of us have decided to cope by going into a dark room, curling up in the fetal position, and sobbing quietly while chewing on an old towel.
There’s really not a bad way to go.
What a lot of people are doing is hitting the BGG Emergency Broadcast System group for updates, chat, werewolf/villager killing, etc. Even GROGnads (grogNADS? It’s like “yacht,� it always looks wrong no matter which way you spell it) has made an appearance, despite the lack of colored text. Even with the mighty BGG resting quietly in an air-conditioned server room, there’s still plenty of good internet game-reading to be had. I gather most of you have discovered Boardgame News; there are also many excellent blogs and such out there; here are some award-winners. I’d recommend my own, but recently game content has been replaced by Civil War pot-blogging, which is perhaps less than totally edifying.
It made me wonder about how gamers managed without BGG—indeed, without the internet. Obviously it was possible, but over time it becomes like wearing a watch—as soon as you forget to wear your watch, you become almost paralyzed. At least that’s what happens with me. I recently looked at my BGG profile, and it said I was only a member since 2002—I couldn’t believe that was possible; I’ve only been on for four years?
Obviously, one of the biggest changes wrought by instantaneous communication is that it has become vastly easier to argue about seek clarifications for rules. This has something of a dark side, but overall it’s terrific. If you look at old Avalon Hill games, near the back of every rulebook is a little box that explains what to do if you had questions about the rules—and old AH rulebooks were famously opaque, oftentimes. If you wanted, you could always mail in a question to Baltimore, but that always seemed like a hassle. The instructions were something like:
1. Before submitting your question, please make sure that you are reading the correct rulebook—not a rulebook for another game, last week’s Time Magazine, or the back of a cereal box.
2. Please phrase all questions so that they may be answered with a Yes or No. “I do not understand rule 11.2.1.14 at all,� while perhaps perfectly accurate, will receive an automatic “No� response. Please write out all possible interpretations of a rule. Jacques Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena may be helpful for this step.
3. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope along with your questions and a crisp twenty dollar bill to ensure a timely response.
The other option was to subscribe to The GENERAL (as it was always called), which is where you found errata, clarifications, extended examples, and the like. Basically you were paying for errata, if you really think about it. If I can be really cynical for a moment, if you’re Avalon Hill (and evil), you figure there had to be a profit-maximizing level of errata and obtuse rules, where people kept buying games and General subscriptions. (And, yes, I know The General served many other functions--variants, strategy tips, all kinds of stuff. Lord knows I have more than a few kicking around. In fact, there are three university libraries that carry The General in their stacks--Bowling Green State U. in Kentucky, the U. of Maryland, and (who knows why) the U. of Wyoming. I’m sure they get cited all the time. Actually, didn’t I read somewhere that BGSU has some kind of game collection?)
Game reviews were also harder to come by, naturally. There weren’t a zillion people writing them, never mind putting them all in the same place. If you were into wargames, SPI, Avalon Hill, et al had house organs that would occasionally review other companies’ games—and, for a while, SPI’s Strategy & Tactics actually had a column by Sid Sackson reviewing non-wargames. That’s pretty neat, if you think about it. I dug up a copy from May/June 1974 (the Tank! issue), where he gave brief reviews of four games. I have heard of none of them. The first is yet another attempt at three-player chess. (It’s name: “Three Player Chess.") The next sounds interesting, actually—“Naval Gameâ€? by Allan Calhamer (the designer of Diplomacy). Obviously coming up with snappy names was his forte. It sounds like a very abstract naval battle game, played with cards. Cost: $1.
Next up: “5-5,� some kind of odd Backgammon variant. It sounds weird, and slow, and kind of complicated. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t really understand Backgammon. The last is “Alien Space,� a Lou Zocchi joint about (wait for it) space combat. Game assembly requires several six-foot-long pieces of string, and appears to be designed for play on the floor of a large room.
In another sign of the times, all the games other than the three-player-chess game were only available directly from the designer—none of this namby-pamby retail stuff.
I love looking at old game reviews. Here’s a clip from a (very positive) review, from 1997, of Settlers of Catan from The Strategist, the newsletter of the Strategy Gaming Society (i.e., wargamers):
“…In every game I have played to date, there are two distinct phases. In the first phase, the die rolls seem to be predominantly one set of four or five numbers; in the second phase, part way through the game, there is a shift in the numbers which are rolled.�
I’m not sure what that means. I’m telling you: Euros hit many of us wargamers like a thunderclap.
The point of this discursive discourse is to thank Aldie for all his good work with BGG, extracting produce from the hardware, and putting up with our guff. There are, what—fifteen thousand users? Even if forty percent of them are sock puppets or New Users who ask us to identify a childhood game and disappear into the void*, that’s still an awful lot of us who love BGG, have BGG in our electronic blood…and can’t wait for the chance to start our routines over again, sharing information like never before.
Posted by Alfred Wallace on Aug 11, 2006 at 03:00 AM in Columnists, Alfred Wallace / 1609
Comments:
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I remember Alien Space! In fact I still have a copy of the game… It was basically a miniatures game that used large cardboard squares to represent the spacecraft. It pre-dated Star Fleet Battles, as I recall, but the idea was similar, a game to recreate Star Trek like combat. Probably the only miniatures game I ever enjoyed playing. Posted by Kim Beattie on Aug 11, 2006 at 07:27 AM | #
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Are you saying that Avalon Hill were actually deconstructivists, attempting to discover the non-rules, being open to the “other” that is “out there” but hindered by Western cultural texts? Posted by Jeff Allers on Aug 11, 2006 at 04:33 PM | #
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Indeed. As I read once in The General, Il n’y a pas hors de boîte. What’s the point of asking what the designer “meant” when perhaps the designer himself did not know? (Coming next week: “Great Literary Critics Play Caylus Together.” Wacky hijinks ensue when Jacques Derrida, IA Richards, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Greenblatt get together for their weekly Game Night.) PS: BGG lives! Yay! Posted by Alfred Wallace on Aug 11, 2006 at 06:12 PM | #
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Alfred,
Posted by Charlie Davis on Aug 14, 2006 at 08:59 PM | #
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That’s right! That also explains why I couldn’t find it from a brief search of the BGSU site...Thanks! Posted by Alfred Wallace on Aug 15, 2006 at 01:06 PM | #
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