Table Of ContentPlaying Oppression
Playing Oppression
The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Colonial Fantasies 1
2 Establishing Mindsets: Politics and Ideology in Early Board Games 21
3 World as Empire 39
4 Trading Excuses 67
5 Winners and Losers: Western Board Games in the Postwar Era 91
6 Explorers and Exploiters 113
7 Representations of the Other 125
8 Urgency and Hope: A Countercolonial Revolution 145
Glossary 169
Notes 173
Bibliography 195
Ludography 209
Index 217
Acknowledgments
Every community owes its existence and vitality to all the people from around the
world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that
led to this moment. Some were brought here or removed against their will, some were
drawn to leave their distant homes in the hope of a better life, and some have lived
on this land for more generations than can be counted. We first wish to acknowledge
Indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of the land, and the enduring and con-
tinuing relationship that exists between them and their traditional territories. This
book was written in part at Dartmouth College, which is situated on the ancestral and
unceded lands of the Abenaki people. This book was also written at the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology on the traditional unceded territory of the Wampanoag
Nation. This acknowledgment reminds us of the significance of place, the continued
existence of Indigenous peoples, and our commitment to building respectful relation-
ships with the Indigenous peoples who call these lands home today. We acknowledge
the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of these territories, and we honor
and respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples connected to this land on which we
gather, research, and write.
Second, we have a lot of people to thank. A book of this scope and scale required
many collaborators, friends, students, and colleagues who helped us in our mission,
from playing games to digging through archives. Isotta Poggi at the Getty proved an
excellent resource when Mary was a visiting researcher at the Getty Research Institute
as a Museum Scholar in 2017. The seeds of the historical research started there. Julie-
Anne Lambert at the Bodleian Library provided Mary inexhaustible knowledge and
resources. Irving Finkel is, to Mary, a grand inspiration in the lifelong pursuit of game
history. Andrew Topsfield must be thanked for his extensive, detailed work not only
in research but also in singlehandedly salvaging the history of board games, particu-
larly the game of the goose, along with the earlier work of Henry- René d’Allemagne.
viii Acknowledgments
Thanks also go to Beste Grüße at the Stadtarchiv & Historische Museen, Stadtmuseum,
Karlsruhe, for letting Mary play Jungdeutschland’s Schlachtenspiel. A gracious thank you
to Jeff Bowersox, who not only wrote the wonderful book Raising Germans in the Age of
Empire but also granted permission for us to reprint one of his photos used in the book,
taken by Joachim Zeller. Big thanks to Max Seidman, Spring Yu, Jazz Foster, and Suk-
dith Punjasthitkul, her game team extraordinaire at Resonym, who played countless
games as well as used our critiques to improve their own designs; and to her research
laboratory team at Tiltfactor, including a bunch of students taking classes over the years
at Dartmouth and asking good, hard questions. Gratitude goes especially to Danielle
Taylor, who helped organize research trips, tracked image permissions, and provided
a gracious sounding board for wild ideas during these past years. Finishing this book
during a global pandemic, when so many tabletop games were converted to online
play, was both liberating and a huge challenge and, we hope, a once-i n- a- lifetime expe-
rience. In this, Mary would like to thank her partner Joseph Havel for listening to more
game history than he had ever bargained for.
A few hours south from Dartmouth at MIT in Cambridge, Mikael has amassed a
sizable collection of colonialist board games and taken every possible opportunity to
play them for critical analysis together with colleagues, students, visitors, and friends.
We wish to especially thank Jon-P aul Dyson for giving us access to the collections at
the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and Geoff Engelstein for lending us
games from his private collection, but also everyone in the board gaming community
who has sold games to us. When it comes to playing the games, Richard Eberhardt
stands out for his extraordinary efforts, which have earned him the honorary title of
Mikael’s board game husband. Claudia Lo and Kaelan-D oyle Myerscough also deserve
a special mention. They came to the MIT Game Lab because of their deep interest in
video games, only to spend much of their time in the lab playing board games they
had never heard of, and they (almost) never complained. The same can perhaps not be
said for Mikael’s partner T. L. Taylor, who has nevertheless endured a seemingly endless
stream of popular culture expressions of the colonialist mindset to play, watch, and dis-
cuss. Mikael also wants to thank his parents and family for their boundless support and
everyone who participated in countercolonial classes, workshops, events, and design
projects, especially the members of the game- making collective Popsicleta. These activ-
ities provided much-n eeded solace during a sometimes emotionally taxing project.
We would also like to thank Kaelan Doyle-M yerscough for reading and giving feed-
back on an early draft of the manuscript, and Laurel Carney for her enthusiasm and
attention to detail in the face of last-m inute editing of a later draft. Our editors at MIT
Press, Doug Sery and Noah Springer, helped shepherd the book along and run our ideas
Acknowledgments ix
through several rounds of peer review. The readers pushed us to augment the text,
and for this we are grateful. Finally, we would like to thank the community members,
reviewers, game designers, publishers, and friends who played games and shared their
opinions with us on blogs, in articles, and in interviews. A community of practice in
the board game space is speaking up for making the board gaming world better, even
when doing so comes at a cost for them personally. It is our hope that this book con-
tributes to that conversation.
1 Colonial Fantasies
Abandon all virtue ye who enter here.
— Giovanni Antonio de Paoli
In Media Europa
It is late October 2019. We are both in Essen, Germany, for the largest board game fair
in the world: Spiel ’19. Mary is there to demo and promote her latest game, Mechan-
ica (2020), and Mikael is showing a prototype to publishers and meeting with indus-
try people. But we have an ulterior motive. Mikael has brought a matryoshka doll of
empty suitcases to bring home all the Western- colonialism- themed games he can find
at the fair. Despite the preparation, it turns out that he must lean on his traveling
companion for extra suitcase space and still does not have room for all the new releases
that fit the criterion of directly referencing Western colonialism both thematically and
mechanically.
We are both, in our separate experiences of the fair, taken aback by the continued
prevalence of games glorifying the atrocious acts committed by Western historical fig-
ures and nations, the whitewashing and erasure taking place in games parading as
representations of history, and the relentless exoticizing, stereotyping, othering, and
dehumanizing of “Native” peoples—a ll without any critical discussion surrounding
these deeply problematic elements or premises.
As board gamers, board game designers, and game studies scholars, we want, and
feel a responsibility, to enact change within the board game community and industry.
As White Americans with European ancestry, we blend right in with the visitors and
exhibitors at the fair, although Mary has faced the inequity of the board game industry
2 Chapter 1
as a woman designer. These challenges in both the production and the play of board
games with respect to gender are embedded in the same— even more encompassing—
narratives related to perspective, play, and power.1
The trip to Germany marked the peak of the collection phase of this project. Since
then, we have studied games in libraries and museums as well as in our research labs,
where we have played hundreds of them. It is 2022 as we are putting the finishing
touches on the manuscript of this book. We are at a cultural moment where it can feel
a little trite to talk about something as seemingly simple and everyday as board games.
That said, the deeper we have immersed ourselves in board game history, the more
we have seen how the past and present are connected. We also sense the intimate ties
between the seemingly trivial and mundane and the movements that change history.
It is with urgency that we wish to share what we have learned, in the hopes of moving
to better, more equitable times. Everything is connected, and this book is our contribu-
tion to what we hope can be a reckoning of colonial pasts, as well as a revitalization of
the potential of board game culture.
The Golden Age of Board Gaming
According to the discourse in the board game hobby community, we are living in a
golden age of board games. With thousands of new games released every year, the
board game space is more energetic than ever (figure 1.1).2 But board games are not just
more plentiful now. Compared to the family games of yore, modern board games are
widely considered to be of higher quality, both in their physical components and in the
play experience they provide.
This development has led to an explosion of websites, YouTube channels, podcasts,
and board game cafés around the world. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and
quickly expanding publishers like Asmodee have boosted a new wave of board game
creators and players in the early twenty-f irst century. With a predicted annual growth
of approximately 13 percent year over year, the global revenue of the board game mar-
ket is expected to reach US$13 billion by 2026.3
Attendance at these conventions increases every year (at least apart from during
pandemics). Toy industry professionals might attend Spielwarenmesse (Nuremberg
International Toy Fair), the oldest (yearly since 1949) and largest international trade
fair for toys. In the United States, Origins and Gen Con attract tens of thousands of
game fans (Gen Con had about seventy thousand unique attendees in 2019).4 The
season culminates in late October with the largest convention in the world dedicated
specifically to board games: Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, held in Essen, Germany. In
Colonial Fantasies 3
Figure 1.1
The number of board games released every year is quickly increasing, and so is the number of
colonialist games.
2019, more than 209,000 attendees played the over eight hundred new games released
there, making the convention the most influential event of its kind.5
Amid all this excitement, we should remember that board games have always been
with us. Ask people around the world, and they have likely played some form of board
or card game. In most cases, it will be a traditional board game like chess or a family
game like Monopoly (1933).6 These games were all created long before today’s board
game renaissance but remain extremely popular and still make up the majority of table-
top gaming.
Board games are often overshadowed by their much younger digital siblings. They
do not carry the cultural cachet of video games, with vast production budgets and
millions of players. They are not courted by billionaire investors, and they do not
attract sensationalist press attention spouting fears about their negative impact on our
youth. Nor do board games receive the same attention from the academic community
as digital games. Game studies has evolved into an established academic field over the
last twenty years, but it is somewhat telling that the largest organization for game stud-
ies scholars, and its eponymous international conference, is called the Digital Games
Research Association (DiGRA).
