Are You Going To Travel?
A love letter to board games
I once took a few months off work for a sabbatical. I was so excited thinking about all the things I would get to experiment with. And yet there was one sure way to immediately deflate my enthusiasm - one question that every single person would ask without fail.
“So are you going to travel?!”
It was an innocent, well-meaning question, delivered with sparkly eyes and eager expressions. I could sense that, in a lot of cases, my answer would fall way short of expectations. With a sheepish smile, I’d confess that the only travel I had booked and planned was to two board game conventions, and the rest of the time I was going to study data analytics. And sketch. And play tennis. And other things not entirely planned.
With the exception of my nerdy friends, other people’s eyes would widen, their brains stutter, and curiosity flood in. “Board game conventions? Like… Monopoly?”
This is one of the most pivotal moments in any conversation I have about board games with people who don’t know modern board games. I am on the lookout for it like a cat posed to jump on the red laser. Most of us will have childhood memories that feature Monopoly, the laughs, the fights, the adrenaline rush from making someone go bankrupt. Side question: is this even healthy?! Anyway, I want you to think of Monopoly as the Neanderthal of board games. Nothing wrong with that, Neanderthals deserve respect, but I want to bring attention to the fact that modern board games have moved well into their Homo Sapiens era.
The design, the mechanisms, the art, the themes, the components… all have evolved beyond your wildest dreams - that is, if you dream about board games… I do. Based on the rough statistic that 99% percent of people I mentioned my sabbatical to asked about travelling, I am prepared to bet that there is at least one thing they dream about with some frequency: travelling.
What if I told you that board games can make you travel?
Places
I stand on the edge of a cliff looking out to the green, overgrown valley below. It stretches as far as the eye can see, untamed by the labours of my ancestors. When the Earth was on the verge of ecological collapse, they retreated below the surface, so that nature could start healing. I check my Boundary Sensor - I still have a couple of charges left. I wonder if the other Rangers at Lone Tree Station will have any tracking tips to help locate Quiet. The feline has been on the prowl for a couple of days, and the locals are uneasy.
According to its simplest definition, travelling is about exploring new places. Places you might not even have known existed. Places like the world of Earthborne Rangers1.
In this cooperative card game, you are in the shoes of the guardians of the Valley - goofy-looking park ranger types whose job is to preserve a newly found equilibrium between humankind and nature, thousands of years into the future. You will encounter new species of flora and fauna, carry around curious equipment and embark on quests to assist clumsy locals. The narrative is woven in through a book of dialogues and vivid descriptions that allow you to interact with the world as you draw and play cards to represent actions, objects, feelings.
Travelling to new places also means travelling to old places, places lost to time and history.
The air is brisk on the open square by Grey Inn’s Road. The creaking of wooden carriages and the sweet and sour aroma of horse shit assault the senses. This is a last resort but still worth a try. We know that the suspect took a carriage on the night of the murder, and maybe we will be lucky enough to find the driver and ask them a few questions.
“The Central Despatcher at the Carriage Stables tells us that hundreds of people take cabs to the Museum every day, and that it would be impossible to remember if any of them looked ‘suspicious’.”
I sigh with disappointment. I can already see Sherlock wiggling his eyebrows in our general direction before illustrating how, obviously, we should have visited the Olympia Theatre and not the Central Carriage Depot. Minus ten points for us. The job market for consulting detectives in Victorian London is ruthless.
In Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective2, you get to inhabit your sleuthing personality and scout nineteenth century London for information to solve mysterious crimes. There is a map. Newspaper pages. An address book. You pick a location to visit, e.g. the scene of the murder, and you are provided a piece of narrative that simulates answers to your enquiries when interviewing people at the location. And then you are left to deliberate with your friends on where you should go next, what the information means and how it relates to what you have heard before. When you think you have solved the mystery, you visit Sherlock, who will mansplain how you missed this and that crucial link.
It’s ok! You get another nine cases to solve. Nine other trips to Victorian London in one box!
People
It is night in the lonesome October as I hop off the train on the East Croydon platform, in the south of London. I follow the familiar route to the speakeasy. As I enter the establishment, the sounds of laughter and gambling roar with the force of one hundred voices mashed together. Jazz and alcohol are fuelling what promises to be a very good night. I am distracted by a waiter approaching… he sure appears to have quite the bulging eye. This is when the unseemly turns eerie, but the jazz continues, except it is now punctuated by some distant… screeching?
I turn to my companions, who nod. Just another night in Arkham. Did I grab the Machete when I left the house? Or is a Magnifying Glass what we’ll need to investigate those highly unsettling traces of oozing substance?
Travelling is about meeting people. My Arkham friends and I met at the Ludoquist, a most fine board game establishment (it is not a speakeasy after all, sorry) in south London while facing Lovecraftian horrors on the odd weekday night!
Arkham Horror LCG3 is one blast of a game, in the sense that it will pretty much blast you into oblivion (all in good fun!). It is a cooperative card game pitting you, the investigators, against a blend of cosmic horror and 1920s pulp fiction villains inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other gothic authors. Each gaming session is one scenario that is part of an overarching campaign, giving you a sense of progression through a larger, epic story. You build your own deck ahead of each scenario, which represents the objects you carry with you, your abilities, the actions you can take, all tailored to the character you decide to inhabit.
It turns out that facing the dark machinations of otherworldly entities truly bonds people together as friends! I will always remember the moments where everything hinged on us pulling the right token out of the bag, and then proceeding to draw the auto-fail4. You are transported in everything but body - you are right there, in that moment. You are with your friends. These are the people we share the journey with, the ones who will travel with us again and again.
I have one such friend whom I regularly land planes with. We make a great… Sky Team. Yes, we land planes! With dice!
In Sky Team5, travelling safely is almost as crucial as being friends, or at least willing to cooperate for the duration of the game (mostly). Players secretly roll their own set of dice, which they then place one at a time, in turn, on the dashboard. The values assigned to the dice will determine whether the plane is going at the right speed, tilted in the right direction, deploying the right landing gear etc. The catch is, you can’t talk about your strategy, so you need to be very alert to what your companion is doing. There was one time when I got distracted by the biscuits sitting on a nearby table, and proceeded to place a die that pretty much crash landed us in Heathrow.
Oops!
Experiences
When we travel, we experience. It is indeed the pursuit of “experiences” that guides many wanderings, even when the travellers themselves don’t exactly know what it is they are seeking.
Everything I have mentioned so far is an experience - be an investigator, a park ranger, a pilot. You can find a board game for any setting and any taste. For me, the best experiences are learning experiences, when I come across something unexpected that sends me down a few rabbit holes, or when I can deepen my understanding of a current - or recurring - obsession.
There are many games that indulge the thirst for knowledge with a near encyclopaedic zeal, while masquerading as a points-farming engine - i.e. play this in order to activate that, which lets you do X and Y. One such example is Wingspan6, a game about collecting birds to place in a nature reserve and thereby create the best scoring combination. Each bird is represented by a unique card detailing the bird’s characteristics, geography and habitat, the wingspan (ah-ha!), a bird “power” inspired by its natural behaviour, and a bonus fact at the bottom.
Learning about birds is a pastime I will gladly entertain, and naturally a game about birds is bound to capture my attention - but Wingspan is not just any bird game. Wingspan is the queen of bird games, in that it manages to weave ornithology into smooth mechanics which are engaging even for the non-bird-religious.
Aside from birds and disparate shiny things, I enjoy learning about people. There is a whole range of games that fall under the umbrella of “social deduction” - they create a setting where the rules of social interaction change according to the aim of the game. For example, you can pretend you are someone with the power to levy taxes against everyone else at the table, which you would get away with unless someone called your bluff. Or you might not have been bluffing at all - you are indeed that person! Pay up, friends.
The mind-twisting dynamic I just described is from a game called Coup7. You each get two cards face-down that represent two roles - you can then perform the action for one of the two roles, or indeed any action from any role that is available in the game, even if you don’t have the card for it. The other players will each have to decide whether to challenge your claims or not, based on their cards and their knowledge of your scheming tactics.
Games like Coup uncover a tapestry of human interactions that you might never experience otherwise. It’s when people are given licence to be someone else8, in some other place, with some other agenda, that real magic can happen. In the real world, it can have both wonderful and devastating consequences. In a game, it’s a journey of being, a tale of travel from who we are, to the many versions of us that we could inhabit. It’s all right there, in that little box!
Challenges
I really need those three blue tiles… if she takes those three blue tiles, I will have to take the four red ones and they will not fit and I will have to put them in the “shatter” row and my window design will be forever RUINED!9
This innocent-looking and colourful game of tiles is called Azul10. Don’t be fooled! It is an extremely cutthroat, elegant, fun little board game about creating glass-window designs reminiscent of the Alhambra Palace. What makes Azul compelling is its constraints: there are a handful of tiles to pick from, not all of them will work with your design, and other players can see it too, which means they can actively get in your way and grab tiles you might desperately need - and you can (and will) do the same!
Constraints can come from other players’ behaviour, but they can also originate from the game itself. Some of you might know of the game Catan, where you compete against other players to settle the island of Catan, gather resources and rush to build the most cities. Imagine if the island were to fight back. Imagine how a water spirit, River Surges in Sunlight, might Wash Away the settlements, or a storm spirit, Lightning’s Swift Strike, might Shatter Homesteads. At night, the Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares will visit Dread Apparitions on those who ravage the land.
The twist of this game is that you are not the settlers - you are the spirits of Spirit Island11.
And the settlers are nasty! In Spirit Island, you cooperate with your fellow spirits to spread terror amongst the evil little white men (the plastic pieces are white! and masculine looking! sorry), push them out of your land, destroy their little white homesteads, and clear the blight they bring with their passage. Each spirit has a different set of innate abilities, detailed on the personal board, and a unique set of cards, representing their powers. There is a mechanism driven by a random deck of cards that will tell you when and where new white pieces are added to the board, representing the arrival of settlers. It can get out of hand very quickly if they end up overwhelming the board. You need to work together very closely - this game is tough! The challenge will literally make your brain hurt.
My brother loves making his brain hurt, so naturally Spirit Island has become the one game we make sure to play every time I visit. It’s usually a team of three, us plus his partner, and we are now well accustomed to the arched brows of our parents walking by on their way to bed. “Oh, it’s the little white men… again”. Fitting the game into one evening is its own constraint, one that I am very inventive about. Such is the power of constraints, the reason why puzzles can both infuriate and intrigue us - they unleash creativity, and victory is all the sweeter for it.
Travel can be challenging. We struggle to fit all the sightseeing we want to do into a single travel itinerary. There simply isn’t enough time, or resources12. So we embrace the journey and its challenges - isn’t that what travel is all about?
Travel-ception
I am on the beach of a tropical island collecting wood to build a hut that should let me score at least a couple of stars. On the seat next to me there is a fellow Italian passenger waiting patiently for Heathrow Airport to get their act together and taxi our plane to the correct gate. I wonder if somebody got distracted by biscuits and placed a “1” instead of a “6” in the spot where you get the plane to park on time.
My attention is diverted from hut-building when the fellow passenger inquires as to what on Earth it is that I am playing. I had caught her staring, and I was sort of hoping she would ask. I pounce on the opportunity to showcase Palm Island13, a game of seventeen double-sided cards that can be played literally in the palm of your hand. She is on the plane with her husband and their two young kids. I watch with elation as the kids hold the cards and turn them over, a sparkle of curiosity shining in their eyes. I promise to provide a list of board game recommendations via email, which I type up eagerly when I get home.
The response is just pure excitement. They invite me over for tea, and of course I come prepared with a board game. I end up staying for dinner. I end up staying for several dinners over the subsequent months. It is through them that I discover a passion not just for games, but for introducing other people to them - for taking people along a journey.
Sometimes travelling is just travelling, but a board game is never just a board game.
Are you going to travel?
I have some recommendations…
This is exactly what it sounds like… you pull this token, you fail! Automatically! Welcome to Arkham Horror.
Role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons are a sister genre to board games and they are all about players inhabiting characters of their own creation in a storytelling-driven world.
You should know that this is a heavily sanitised version of my internal monologues on the subject.
Believe it or not, there is actually a board game all about planning a sightseeing itinerary in Japan, called Let’s Go! To Japan https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/368173/lets-go-to-japan
This was such a pleasure to read. I had no clue things like this even existed. So, on Thanksgiving Day, thanks!
As a world traveller, this is such a refreshing perspective! All journeys lead to learning.