[HN Gopher] Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published
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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published
Author : musha68k
Score : 331 points
Date : 2024-10-20 16:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.polygon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.polygon.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Related NYT piece
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/crosswords/kurt-vonnegut-...
|
| https://archive.ph/t3CBZ
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It is Polygon, after all.
|
| But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is
| used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a
| military.
| gweinberg wrote:
| I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be
| "uncynical" in the first place.
| vundercind wrote:
| Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a
| familiar example.
| jhbadger wrote:
| "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
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| 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.
| Chathamization wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.)
| Chathamization wrote:
| 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.
| LVTfan wrote:
| Also important is that the supply of money, of houses and
| of hotels is fixed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's an enormous amount of strategy, but all bound up
| in a few points, and virtually all of them rely on social
| skills and values that are in short supply these days.
| It's virtually _all_ in the trading.
|
| If you play Monopoly and you don't trade, you haven't
| really played. And I don't mean all of the wacky trades
| that some families do (although I'm not against that), I
| mean trading money and property with other players. The
| two keys are:
|
| 1. In all games (not just Monopoly), people who cooperate
| win. If you make a mutually beneficial trade with another
| player, even if that player gets the better end of the
| trade, _all other players lose ground._ If you cooperate
| with another player by trading whenever there 's any
| reasonable opportunity, the game is between you and that
| player; no other players will have any chance of winning.
| If you trade with everyone, and they don't trade between
| each other, you will inevitably win. Cooperation is
| making 1 + 1 = 3. No matter how that remainder is split,
| the more you get in on that split, the more ground you're
| gaining. Jump in front of every trade offer and offer a
| better one.
|
| Almost every player that I've talked to who doesn't
| understand how Monopoly is a good game (and I've had a
| lot of Monopoly discussions) is completely incapable of
| understanding how a trade that gives somebody else a
| Monopoly can result in you winning the game. They look at
| you like you're stupid when you say you do it all the
| time. We live in a sick, atomized and alienated society.
| Getting the property that completes somebody else's
| Monopoly means you have a _good basis for friendship._
|
| 2. You may do a lot of little trades during a game, but
| inevitably you are building up to the _big_ trade which
| is your big gamble. You 've calculated all of the
| probabilities, you've judged your competitors positions,
| and you're going to offer another player (or maybe a
| couple of other players over two succeeding trades) a
| huge trade which will set the conditions for how the
| random endgame will play out. You've made it look like
| you're giving the other end of the trades a chance, but
| you've calculated ahead of time that you've maximized
| your own chances. If you're playing against naive
| players, you'll always win if you do this _first_ and you
| know what you 're doing. If you're playing against
| someone skilled, it's a question of who calculated the
| odds better and whether the dice hate you.
|
| edit: Another game with a similar feel and a similar
| benefit to cooperation is _Container_. A good game to
| soften up people who don 't know how to trade is
| _Bohnanza_. A game designed to show _aggressive
| cooperation_ is _So Long, Sucker_ , which requires you to
| cooperate to be in contention, and requires you
| (mathematically) to betray someone's trust to win.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| Wouldn't the game's rules make the point regardless of
| the author's intention?
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| There were two sets of rules to the Landlord's Game,
| monopolist and anti-monopolist. One of those was left out
| of Monopoly, making it harder to get the point across,
| I'd guess:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game#Descr
| ipt...
| phmqk76 wrote:
| When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?
| NeoTar wrote:
| 2014
| kortilla wrote:
| Around the same time websites like polygon came to the
| forefront to produce rage bait for echo chambers rather than
| thoughtful articles.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a
| bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered
| the game as saying:
|
| > In Sirens of Titan, there's this army of Mars which is really
| a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really
| in charge of what's going on. They're all mind controlled.
| Nobody has any real free will. They're just set up as a pawn to
| be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-
| style.
|
| The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it
| turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is
| completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated
| by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
| Chathamization wrote:
| Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's
| exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians
| to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the
| Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me,
| everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.
| Chathamization wrote:
| Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text
| implying that's not the case:
|
| > In Sirens of Titan, there's this army of Mars which is
| really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the
| officers, are really in charge of what's going on.
| They're all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free
| will. They're just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to
| make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Because either the person quoted or the article itself
| wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between
| making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is
| that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a
| contradiction, but if the point is that everything is
| meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction
| than eating breakfast is a contradiction.
| dkarl wrote:
| I don't think the author doubts the _possibility_ , they are
| just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself
| thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go
| through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would
| be really interesting to have some information about. It
| appears there might not be any first-hand information, but
| maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article
| and connect it to other information that shows a change in
| Vonnegut's thinking about war.
|
| I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and
| novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he
| wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also
| had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed.
| After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the
| executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a
| child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that
| were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a
| can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to
| death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his
| friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there
| in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the
| accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head,
| sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the
| nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he
| wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night
| in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence
| every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence,
| and his nightmares went away.
|
| If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution,
| wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then
| stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange
| about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as
| he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's
| not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it
| has been raised before, might eventually unearth some
| information that fleshes out his story.
| oorza wrote:
| The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably
| the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love
| and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where
| a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can
| wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once
| because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost
| WWII.
|
| People contain multitudes.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical
| as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a
| militarized society was great, unironically.
| WillAdams wrote:
| No, the Federal Service was not completely military ---
| that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in
| the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply
| bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is
| specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to
| determine which would have orbits which would intersect
| with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who
| joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.
| borski wrote:
| While I agree with your premise, it's worth noting that
| much of the military is also "bureaucrats doing necessary
| government work."
| WillAdams wrote:
| Which is why there is a rather marked divide between the
| "pencil-pushers" and "the tip of the spear".
|
| That said, there are lots of instances of the clerk-
| typist being told to grab his rifle and fill out a billet
| for a patrol and similar things --- RH actually speaks to
| this and other similar, but broader concerns in _Starship
| Troopers_
| borski wrote:
| True. Honestly, I thought it was a great film, and I've
| watched it a bunch of times. I thought it explored that
| topic quite well.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Starship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense
| to give control over society to those who felt a
| responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it
| through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting
| question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and
| run with.
|
| That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable
| evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but
| doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said
| militarism was good, haw haw".
| WorldMaker wrote:
| While not a complete satire in tone, Starship Troopers
| was very much a "bildungsroman" showing a child growing
| up in that society and getting lectured about it and
| growing up (and growing more cynical as childhood naivety
| wanes). The book is extremely didactic and written "this
| is the way society should/must be", but that doesn't mean
| they were the actual didactic thoughts of the author
| (especially as the protagonist does start to question
| them late in the book, despite being a proponent of it
| all in youth). As much as anything the book seems to me a
| "gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment) meant to ask
| hard questions of an extreme take on a possibly good
| idea. The possibly good idea wasn't intended to build a
| militarized society, but the fact that it led to an
| awfully militarized one, seems to me to be an intentional
| contradiction in the narrative that Heinlein asks of the
| reader, in the _way_ of a satire /farce (even if not
| actually satire/farce) to question the extremes of the
| thought experiment, to question the didactic lectures for
| their problems and failed assumptions.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Modern social media has beaten the idea of any nuance out
| of its consumers. I think it's very challenging for
| younger people today to understand satire and subtext,
| even the very concept of a thought experiment. When one's
| primary mode interaction with the world is short thoughts
| that are designed for maximum engagement and outrage,
| there's no room for subtlety. There has been a ratcheting
| effect of social discourse, and one who dares defy the
| orthodox positions, even to positions that were not
| controversial 10 years ago, draws the wrath of legions of
| anonymous mobs. Ultimately, people are rewarded for
| increasingly polarized discourse and disincentivized from
| moderation and especially from challenging thoughts. It's
| no wonder people are incapable of anything but taking
| something like Starship Troopers at face value.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I've been saying a bunch of similar things for a while
| now. I sometimes refer to it as being past a Poe's Law
| Singularity and good satire is hard/impossible/dead.
| Poe's Law examples (someone taking satire as serious
| surface level only takes) are too easy to find today,
| including in the very names of modern startups and
| corporations. RIP satire, you were a good friend once,
| and so it goes. It's possibly a good thing Vonnegut did
| not survive to see this world on the other side of the
| singularity. (Or it is possible it only happened because
| too many writers like Vonnegut passed away out of this
| timeline.)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| First of all, it's _Sixth Column_. Secondly, the "white
| people" were the remnants of the US military after the
| United States had been invaded and conquered by a pan-Asian
| bloc that emerged that had previously conquered and
| absorbed the Soviet Union. The religion was just a ruse to
| cover their rebellion. They beat the invaders using a sci-
| fi mcguffin that, among other implausible things, could
| selectively be tuned to kill based on genetics.
|
| It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone
| would derive "genocide" out of it. IIRC, it was a plot
| point that the invaders also treated Asian-Americans
| brutally.
| MassPikeMike wrote:
| Certainly people contain multitudes, but in Heinlein's case
| some of the diversity of viewpoint was intentional. The
| happy universalism of "Stranger in a Strange Land", the
| libertarianism of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', and the
| patriotic collectivism of "Starship Troopers" were, I
| think, the result of Heinlein choosing three very different
| political philosophies and exploring where they led. (This
| is not my original theory, but I can't seem to find a
| reference for it.)
|
| To me it's one more sign of how masterful a storyteller
| Heinlein was that his embrace of the contradictions was
| conscious and not just a result of some sort of inner
| conflict.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ends in a Socialist
| Revolution. (This is underscored in "The Cat Who Walks
| Through Walls" where the moon weary noir world-hopping
| protagonist comes from a worse version of the moon than
| "Harsh Mistress", one where the revolution was stamped
| out and is even more the dystopian "libertarian fantasy"
| people think "Harsh Mistress" is. The protagonist then
| later gets a chance to hop to "Mike's" version of the
| Moon and it is a far more pleasant, much more socialist
| place.) On the embrace of contradictions, it does seem to
| escape many how in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" the AI
| Libertarians hope to build on the Moon Libertarians dream
| to exist says "Libertarians can have a taste of
| Socialism, for a treat" as the main plot for the second
| half of the book.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Wha? The best sci-fi novel ever written? An Ode to free
| love?
|
| Stranger In A Strange Land is so creepy, I started to
| wonder about the sanity of Heinlein. A sex cult around a
| pseudo-alien? C'mon. It feels like it was written by a 14
| year old.
|
| I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever
| written.
|
| But tastes obviously differ.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel
| ever written.
|
| In a world with both Greg Egan and Ted Chiang writing
| sci-fi, one has to exclude their novels from any best-of
| comparisons just to give other authors a fighting chance.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Ted Chiang hasn't published any novels.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Oh damn, DEI has finally made its way into books! The
| Horror. I totally dsagree. We dont have to shoot down
| exceptionally good peple just so that the mediocre are
| noticed. I dont want to notice the mediocre, I dont have
| time for their stuff.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| I think Heinlein's politics are quite consistent. "Right
| wing libertarian who believes that some social mores should
| be pushed and challenges and others need to remain
| unquestioned." A tale as old as time.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
|
| > What he meant, of course, was that there would always be
| wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe
| that too.
|
| - _Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five_
| Thrymr wrote:
| Humanity is doing pretty well at glacier reduction. It is
| true that total glacier eradication is a bigger challenge.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and
| protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or
| being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree
| with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree
| about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is
| essential and want it to function properly
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A
| lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors
| of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats
| on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc.
| Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply
| racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California
| voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige
| candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on
| trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.
|
| Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his
| commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in
| with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and
| good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more
| to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.
|
| I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal
| idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down
| and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught
| to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually
| cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism,
| MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism,
| xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the
| former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far
| more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than
| "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even
| replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and
| even things you might personally benefit from if we want a
| peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class
| moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never
| challenge it too much.
|
| Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper
| or an Obama or a Chris Christy.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Obama wasn't necessarily anti-gay marriage, but like most
| liberals at the time (and like liberals for most issues), was
| sitting somewhere in the middle. He was in support of civil
| unions which would grant legal rights to gay partnerships but
| would leave the labeling of it as a marriage up to the
| states. A sort of "separate but equal" application to
| marriages. Did he actually believe this in his heart? Who
| knows, but that's what he said and did as a politician. It
| almost doesn't even matter what candidates say, they are
| looking to sway voters and donors, not actually make
| policies. You really just have to wait until a president's
| second term for progress to happen.
|
| The slow march of progress has to navigate what is
| politically acceptable for most people of the time these
| changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that
| granted gay marriage rights during his first term.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're doing a thing here where you're equating "Democrat"
| with "liberal". That's less true than people think today, but
| it wasn't even a little bit true in Vonnegut's heyday. It
| isn't perfectly accurate to say we had four political parties
| in the 1960s (liberal and conservative Democrats, liberal and
| conservative Republicans) but it's not far off. The
| ideological sort picked up in earnest in the mid 1970s, and
| wasn't a dominant force in politics until the election of
| Reagan. Prior to Reagan, the Republican party platform was
| open to abortion!
|
| Chicago under Daley (and long before) was deeply segregated
| (it still is). But Daley's was a conservative government.
| righthand wrote:
| Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks
| often appear prejudicial. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a
| misinterpretation.
| jrockway wrote:
| So it goes.
| hammock wrote:
| Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is all sarcasm, right?
| krisoft wrote:
| yes
| samatman wrote:
| Twaddle, actually.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other
| side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be
| based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone
| else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still
| worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an
| opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it.
| There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially
| when it comes to something so life-affecting as war.
|
| I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves
| believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking,
| even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone
| else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated
| discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just
| from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought
| experiment to at least not take things personally if someone
| comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure
| you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online
| seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when
| challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but
| just to state your own opinion).
| donio wrote:
| BGG entry: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/422478/ghq
|
| How-to play video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXPIhvFPjw
|
| Space-Biff review: https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Thank you.
| snarf21 wrote:
| All credit for this go to Geoff and his efforts to bring this
| to life. He is a well-known game designer with dozens of
| published games and founder of the podcast Ludology (no longer
| an active host after 100s of episodes) that posits that _Games
| are worthy of study_.
|
| He is also a co-founder of the TTGDA (https://www.ttgda.org/)
| that aims to be a guild like resource for designers. It is his
| connections that got this into Barnes & Nobles. Also of note,
| the TTGDA has recently convinced B&N to list game designers on
| all detail pages and search results in the same way they do
| today for books and writers. He also runs a free newsletter
| called GameTek (https://gametek.substack.com/) that is a
| continuation of an old podcast format he did where he does deep
| dives on specific games and game concepts. In short, he's
| awesome.
| grahamplace wrote:
| For any Vonnegut fans who find themselves in Indianapolis, I
| recommend checking out the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library:
| https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/
|
| When I visited for the first time this year, I learned about GHQ
| and the upcoming release
| cableshaft wrote:
| I also recommend it. I was in the city for Gen Con last year
| and decided to go and it was a very interesting museum.
|
| Lots of letters and interesting artifacts and tidbits about his
| life.
| 0xEF wrote:
| The nearby city of Bloomington, home of Indiana University,
| also hosts Granfalloon each year. I believe it's in July? I
| just happened to be in town for work and caught it.
| treetalker wrote:
| Is the game fun?
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Please let us know!
|
| https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kurt-vonneguts-ghq-the-
| lost...?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Please clarify what you meant when you said "All women are
| whores", Kyle Benzle. Does that include your mother?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010046 (showdead=true
| to view evidence)
|
| kylebenzle on Sept 28, 2022 [dead] | parent | context |
| favorite | on: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial
| sca...
|
| All women are whores. Sorry to break it to you.
| consentfactory wrote:
| Reminds me of Memoir '44.
|
| https://www.daysofwonder.com/memoir-44/
| donio wrote:
| Other than the theme the two have very little in common. Memoir
| 44 is card-driven and uses dice for combat resolution so there
| is a lot of randomness. GHQ is a pure abstract with no
| randomness at all. On the gameplay side GHQ is much closer to
| chess than to M44.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| The path to getting this game published was not easy. At one
| time, Barnes and Noble rejected the idea of publishing and
| selling the game because "Not enough people know who Kurt
| Vonnegut is" [1].
|
| [1].
| https://web.archive.org/web/20211201220314/https://www.getre...
| failrate wrote:
| And now his board game is sold in Barnes and Noble.
| Daub wrote:
| > "Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is"
|
| Barnes and Noble can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut
| [1]
|
| [1] Vonnegut, Kurt. "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's
| Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death". Delacorte Press, 1969. p147
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Indeed! Why [doesn't Barnes and Noble] take a flying fuck at
| the mooooooooooooon? [1].
|
| [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick_(novel)#Anthropo
| logi...
| dosinga wrote:
| By now I wouldn't be surprised if more people know who Kurt
| Vonnegut is than Barnes and Noble, at least globally
| bunderbunder wrote:
| This from the store that commissioned a portrait of Vonnegut
| (among other authors) that featured prominently in their
| branding and store decor?
|
| https://www.behance.net/gallery/15574393/Barnes-Noble-Author...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| At large orgs, the left hand rarely knows what the right hand
| is doing. Meetings, in general, are a waste of time, but
| there's something to be said about keeping everyone on the
| same page.
| mmooss wrote:
| I walked into a B&N in a wealthy neighborhood of a major city.
| I went looking for the literature section, couldn't find it,
| and was finally directed to a narrow set of shelves at the end
| (i.e., the narrow edge) of an aisle. That was all they had.
|
| Why and when did we discard all that literature?
| cwyers wrote:
| I remember one time going into a Books-A-Million and being
| flabbergasted when I asked someone at the Information desk to
| look and see if they had anything by T.S. Elliot in stock, and
| she said, "What does the T. stand for?"
| jb1991 wrote:
| I was one of the first to get this game. Quite a while ago, pre-
| release. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to play it. My dog
| thought it was his new poop mat and took a massive giant turd on
| it and the pieces. I feel like there's some literary symbolism
| here.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If there was poop on it, would you clean it or throw it out?
| Thought experiment to decide if you should keep a thing around
| or not.
| jaapz wrote:
| "Is it worth cleaning poop off of" just doesn't have the same
| ring to it as "does it spark joy"
| hotspot_one wrote:
| obviously you've never had children.
| billfruit wrote:
| So many comments, but hardly any mention of how good/worthwhile
| it is.
| Tempat wrote:
| It's only just come out, not many have played it yet.
| tmountain wrote:
| The SPACE-BIFF review gives some context: "Is GHQ a good game?
| Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it
| may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With
| its zones of control and special units, it might have helped
| shape the coming century's approach to tabletop gaming.
|
| But that isn't what happened. In our time and place, GHQ is a
| serviceable game. It suffers from the same endgame as many
| modern abstracts, packed with fiddly little moves that amount
| to very little. We would write that it could have used a good
| developer. But that doesn't really matter."
|
| https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/
| pragma_x wrote:
| I'm not saying they are in any way all that similar, but if
| you're doubting what an 8x8 grid can do for a turn-based wargame,
| may I suggest Into The Breach:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/590380/Into_the_Breach/
| RunSet wrote:
| Or a game you may have heard of called "Chess".
| soperj wrote:
| Is it new?
| senkora wrote:
| Half-off on Switch right now. I might pick it up.
| xoxxala wrote:
| There is also Godzilla Voxel Wars, which is pretty much the
| same gameplay as Into the Breach, if you prefer that theme.
| Both games are good.
| 100k wrote:
| It's quite fun, I played a lot of it during the pandemic.
| It's sort of like Advance Wars, but when you lose you can
| choose to send one of your leveled up characters back in
| time, which lets you use them again in a new game.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| It's excellent! Sort of like chess but with mechs. And if
| chess had multiple classes of pieces with different movesets.
| I played well over 100 hours on switch. Each class requires a
| different strategy to use effectively, and it's fun feeling
| your way through them. Highly recommend!
| Rickasaurus wrote:
| This is a great how to play video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXPIhvFPjw
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