Author: Benito Vergara

At the Gates of Loyang

A game by Uwe Rosenberg

BGG listing.

Growing vegetables and selling vegetables were two quite different things, and his parents had never let him forget it. As a boy, he not only helped his father with the harvest—an easier process, in his opinion—but had also accompanied his mother at their makeshift vegetable stand at the Luoyang gates, watching her receive the largesse, or ire, of their patrons. “And you gave that casual customer my leeks?” the regular customers would grumble, and his mother would murmur an apology and pay them two coins for their trouble.

Nonetheless he knew his family was still making the smallest of profits and assiduously saving the money, in accordance to what Confucius had said: “When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.” But Confucius was long gone, and so were his parents, and the work of growing and selling vegetables was now solely his responsibility.

I never thought I’d be so enamored of a game about vegetables, but this game is just superb. Beat-your-own-score engine builders are slowly chipping away at my preference for narrative games.

In the game In the Gates of Loyang you are a farmer trying to advance up the path of prosperity by growing and selling vegetables. (I can’t imagine this is historically accurate—though you have at your disposal an awful lot of untilled land—but I digress.) You also have a particularly finicky set of customers who actually demand money from you if you can’t satisfy their demands, so you commit to a customer very carefully. Some form of polyculture farming is key.

Agricola

A game by Uwe Rosenberg

Lookout Games.

BGG listing.

She looked out the window of her stone house at the fields bathed in the soft amber glow of sunset, and at her children coming home with their arms full of sheaves of wheat, and with smiles on their ruddy cheeks, and her husband not far behind, his stride tired but confident, leading a cow back from pasture. Her heart was full.

But there was just one thing, one trifle of a thing that bothered her about this otherwise wonderful and patient man with whom she had chosen to spend the rest of her life, and she told herself that in the morning, she would finally take him aside, and point out how the cow in her living room simply took up too much space.

What a delightful game this is. I must confess that a big reason for that delight must be Agricola’s evocation of some long-buried childhood memory of playing with little sheep and little cows and little pigs and little wooden fences.

My delight comes also from the satisfaction at the end of the game of looking at my farm and my animals and my house and see what I had created. The fact that I call it “my” farm and “my” animals says a lot; I’m looking at my shelf of board games right now and can’t think of a game where I use the same possessive pronouns. (My mechs? My investigators? My mage knight? It’s just not the same.)

Bloc by Bloc: The Insurrection Game

A game by R.D. Lee and T.L. Simons

Out of Order Games.

BGG listing.

The day is about to break, but the barricades hold fast against the enemy.

We are bruised and bloody and weeping, but we stay strong.

We feel it in our bones, and hear it singing in our blood: the city will soon be ours.

We shout in one voice, our hearts about to burst.

We raise our fists and touch our rags to the flame.

I imagine your mileage may vary depending on your political persuasion, but Bloc by Bloc is such a thrill. It’s a board game that simulates the mechanics of urban protest uprisings, while raising this instructive question in the player’s head: what does a Bankrupt Junior College have in common with a Polluted Slum? Or a Smartphone Factory with an Immigrant Detention Center? Bloc by Bloc heightens the connections between them by treating these ostensibly different zones, marked by demographic disparities, as analogous sites of capitalist repression and anti-statist resistance.

Your objective in Bloc by Bloc is to occupy and liberate a number of different city districts while building barricades, looting markets, and fending off the riot police—all before the tenth night, when the military is called in.

The crucial lesson here for the players—and perhaps true for radical social movements as a whole—is the necessity for cooperation and solidarity between seemingly different factions uniting against a common enemy.¹ In the game, this common foe is the police, who act as the armed representatives of the capitalist state. There’s almost no way to liberate a zone on one’s own without the assistance of another faction. One faction builds the barricades; another brings the Molotovs.

I’m cheating a bit here. My 6th favorite solo board game of 2020 is Vengeance; see a longer session report and review.

Orchard

A game by Mark Tuck

Side Room Games.

BGG listing.

And so you take a breath, your mind still, even in the center of the whirl of reds and yellows and purples, and the harvest begins.

I was really surprised to see this game show up so high on my list, but I think I know why. No other game in my collection puts me in such a state of relaxed, but focused, hypnosis. For me, playing Orchard most closely approximates the experience of pure flow.

I draw a card, I look for patterns in the cards on the table, I lay the card down. This is the game.