Chairmen of the Boards

To Anthropologists tracing the early history of mankind, there are several tellate signs that indicate when a primitive society becomes civilized. Two virtually infallible indications (after the discovery of fire and learning to get in out of the rain) are the fermenting of liquor and the invention of games to help man while away the time between hunts. The story of his attempt to amuse himself by pushing objects along a board-game layout is almost as old as the saga of man himself.

Sir Leonard Woolley at the excavations around Ur of the Chaldees unearthed some superb game sets, foreunners of today's backgammon boards, inlaid with lapis lazuli, that have been dated at 3000 B.C. The mighty Egyptain temple at Qurna built in 1400 B.C. was erected with an early version of a chessboard cut into the roofing. The Indian emperor Akbar played what we now call parcheesi the right way, from a four-foot dais overlooking a magnificient courtyard of inlaid red and white marble slabs which made up the board and 16 beauteous slave girls who acted as playing pieces.

That the life of the gamester, while enjoyable, is not always tranquil has been write for all to see. In pompeii there is a mural depicting two men in a local tavern just about to come to blows over a game of Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum, a backgammon type of pastime called The Game of Twelve Lines. The innkeeper can be seen rushing up to them uttering the classic phrase "Itis foras rixsatis," which is, roughly, the Latin equivalent, get the hell outside."

The Emperor Nero, that ignoblest Roman of them all, was a prodigious gambler at the Ludus board, wagering up to 400,000 sesterces (about $17,000) a point. Nero could stand heavy losses, because he also loved simple heads-or-tails flipping contests for high stakes which he played wiith two-headed coins he had specially minted; being Emperor, he always got first call.Another Ludus player was Commodus, who went a step further and simply turned the imperial palace into a gambling casino with a brothel in the back.

Throughout history, the board games that men have invented for their pleasure have also been the mirrors of their desires, their environment, thier personal prejudices.

In 1774, a board game appeared in Anglican England called Royal Geographic Amusement in which players pushed tokens around 100 European cities with all the attendant dangers and excitements of traveling in the 18th Century. Far worse than going directly to jail and not passing go and not collecting $200 was to land in the square allotted to the Papal city of Ferrara. The unfortunate player who did so had to go all the way back across the Italian Alps until refreshing draughts of Protestant air could put him back in shape to travel again. Roman Catholics developed a board game of their own called The Game of Pope or Pagan. During the flourishing period of the Church militant there was a popular board game called The Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army.

Often board games have reflected the hazards that face the players in real life. There is a classic Arab game called The Hyena Game that is either played on a regular board or improvised on the ground. The object is to move a piece which represents the player's mother with some dirty laundry, to a water hole, have her wash the clothes, come back with a clean burnoose and not get eaten up by hyenas along the way.

Perhaps more than any other country, the United States has produced board games that not only reflect social attitudes within the country, but can adjust themselves to suit changing mores. One of the very first pasteboard games in America, put out by Milton Bradly in 1850, was called The Checked Game of Life. In that gilded age of innocence, the player who stayed on the path of virtue and landed on the life squares of Honesty, Ambition and Truth would find himself heading toward Honor and ultimately to Happy Old Age. The squares of Gambling, Idleness and In-temperance could lead him only to Disgrace and Ruin. A modern version, The Game of Life (for some obscure reason no longer checkered), is still being sold, but the rewards and setbacks encountered along the road are restricted largely to making or losing money.

In 1889 America was immersed in the Horatio Alger dream ahead in buisness called The Office Boy in which, according to the game instructions, is shown "the haps and mishaps in the career of a buisnessman from the start as an office boy, gradually working his way up to the Head of the Firm. If he is careless, inattentive or dishonest, his progress is retarded and he is sent back or kept in low positions; if capable, ambitious and earnest, his promotion is assured."

Thousands of new ideas for games are sent every year to board-game manufactures by hopeful designers. One such game, now making the rounds but as yet unsold, offers a different twist to the getting-ahead-in-the-buisness-world theme. In this game, the rising young executive is faced with a series of difficult decissions. One of these occurs when he discovers his employer flagrante delicto with a secretary in a motel. What should Horatio do? Should he keep mum and earn his boss' eternal gratitude as a loyal and devoted worker? Should Horatio blow the whistle and ruin the old man on the spot, or just hold it over his head as a bit of subtle blackmail in the years to come? Depending on the subsequent play of the game, any of these answers could turn out to be the right one.

Even the frustrations of present-day politics make their appearances on the game boards. Since last year's Presidential election, the radical-right community in Southern California has enjoyed the brisk sale of a game called Victory Over Communism. The idea of the game is for each player to answer a question on history or current affairs. If he is right according to the precepts of that political faction, everyone shouts "Freedom!" and the player is allowed to move along the board and "liberate a captive nation." There is a time limit placed on the game: 1964 to 1973. If all captive nations are not liberated by 1973, everybody loses.

The modern colossus of all board games is, of course, Monopoly. It would be all but impossible to find a literate American over the age of 12 who has not been exposed to it at one time or another. The stroy of how it began is vintage American rags-to-riches.

Like a lot of men during the great Depression of the Thirties, one Charles Darrow found himself unemployed. He stayed home and worked on a game he and his friends could play to while away the time till things got better. Because he was interested in real estate and remembered the boom days of the Twenties when he and his wife could go to Atlantic City for vacations, he devised a trading game about buying and selling property in that New Jersey resort, including a sinp of the famous boardwalk itself (every land parcel in Monopoly is named after a site in Atlantic City, except for Marvin Gardens, and no one, including Mr. Darrow, can remember how it got in.). His friends liked the game so much he make up some sets for them and then began selling a few to local department stores.

Darrow took his version of Salem, Massachusetts, and the head office of Parker Brothers. The leaders of the game industry, Parker Brothers had introduced the European game of ping-pong to America.

The members of the board played a few test rounds of Monopoly and liked it well enough, but it was clear that Mr. Darrow was an amateur at game design. In the first place, it was Holy Writ in the industry that 30 to 45 minutes was the absolute maximum time limit for a board game. Darrow's invention could take as long as three or four hours per game. Also, there was no"the end". Board games were supposed to work their way through a series of bostacles and finally come to a definite stop some where. Monopoly just had a "go" and the players kept moving around and around. Besides, it was too cumbersome, too complicated and just wouldn't do. Parker Brother shipped it back to Darrow with the information that "your game has 52 fundamental errors." Fortunately for everybody. Darrow knew so little about the game business that he stumbled on and committed the 53rd blunder of attempting to market Monopoly by himself, which is like someone writing a novel and then trying to peddle it door to door.

He managed to sell enough sets, however, to reinterest Parker Brothers, who finally took the game on and brought it out under their banner in 1935. In a business where a game breaks even if it sells 25,000 sets and becomes a best seller at 100,000, Monopoly was an incredible phenomenon. It sold 1,000,000 sets during the first year. After Christmas of 1935, Parker Brothers assumed there (continued on page 236)Boards(continued from page 116) would be the usual seasonal sag in game sales. Instead, Monopoly sold more than ever; people who had seen it played over the holidays wanted their own sets. The Salem office became so overrun with orders that they had to stowed in laundry baskets in hallways until the Parkers could get around to handling them. Each year since, Monopoly has been the largest-selling board game in the country. Parker Brothers' presses print up 15 billion dollars a year in Monopoly money, almost double the annual output of the U.S. Treasury. Monopoly has been translated into 11 languages and is played all over the world, and in some parts illegally. One of Fidel Castro's first edicts after taking over in Cuba was to order all Monopoly sets destroyed for being too"symbolic of an imperialistic and capitalistic system." In true Monopoly fashion, however, a sharp trader can pick up a nice profit on the black market in Havana by selling illicit Monopoly. The game has been banned in Russia for some time, but someone is playing it somewhere behind the Iron Curtain: The six models that were on display at the U.S. exhibition in Moscow a few years ago were all stolen by visitors to the exhibit.

Winston Churchill was a great fan of the game, as was President Kennedy. A group of American guerrila fighters who stayed behind in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor played the game almost continuously throughout most of the War. The edurance record for a single game is held by a group of Indiana college students who played for 336 hours straight. The men who pulled off the great English train robbery of 1963 fulfilled the dream of every boy who ever needed a seven to land on Boardwalk. They played Monopoly for real money--part of the £2,500,000 in small notes they stole.

The reasons for the game's popularity are locked in the black hearts of the millions who play it. Originally, it was thought the appeal of amassing realestate empires with play money would last only as long as the American Depression, but through boom times and war, the game keeps selling more than ever. In Italy, Park Place and Boardwalk are Parco della Vittoria and Viale dei Giardini. In France, one of the pieces is a chamber pot, but the basic irresistible lure remains. There are few games that allow a player to gain the upper hand and squeeze the life out of his opponent qite so inexorably. Fortune magazine inspected Monopoly and called it "a game that caters to the most grinding acquisitive instincts of every business man."

Shelley Berman claims, "It's that thrill you get when you know you've just wiped out a friend."

When playing Monopoly, a person can throw off the normal restrictive social requirements for honesty and, for a brief while, find bad sportsmanship and foul play at a delicious premium. It matters not whether you win or lose at Monopoly, it's how viciously you play the game. Long after a player has forgotten the outcome of a Monopoly session, he will joyously recall some particularly shabby deal he managed to pull off.

Mr. Darrow, now a millionaire in geuine U.S. money on his Monopoly royalties, cares not at all about the mystique that has grown up around his brain child. He is more than happy in his role as a gentleman farmer growing orchids in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and taking an occasional trip around the world, where he has seen Monopoly played in such unlikely places as New Guinea and Sikkim. To anyone asking him for tips on how to win, he gives the same sage advice: "Stay out of debt and buy Boardwalk and Park Place."

For people who don't mind going wildly into debt, the premier gambling vehicle of all board games is backgammon, something most people see for the first time pasted on the bottom side of a child's checkerboard. The game is almost as easy to learn as checkers, and a bright ten-year-old can pick it up with no difficulty. On the surface, all that is required is to roll dice and to move 15 pieces, or gammons, off the board before your opponent can. Beneath those simple moves, however, are a host of delicate decisions on whether to run or to block. Since the ante can be doubled at any time, a player may find himself caught up in a geometric escalation of the original stake. He suddenly finds that this deceptively simple affair can be one of the most brutal money games ever invented.

Last summer, Prince Serge Obolensky on New York, Palm Beach, etc., invited some big plungers to Lucayan Beach in the Bahamas for a black-tie dinner and a bit of backgammon. One prominent New York socialite opened a game for $50 a point. Within eight minutes he was one roll away from losing $16,000. He rolled a pair of tows and in a single toss cut his losses to $8000.

Backgammon and parcheesi are both progenitors of what expert gamesters call "track games," one of three basic board-game types. The other two are contests of static alignment and of open warfare. The track game, in which the playing pieces are moved along a prescribed route, comes in all varieties, from Monopoly to the straight chase events like Formula 1 by Parker Brothers and Le Mans by Avalon Hill--two simple but excellent re-creations of Grand Prix motor racing. Track games with their structured movement patterns are the most common types played and the most easily mastered.

By contrast, the ancient Japanese game of go is an exercise in pure strategy, has no movement whatsoever and can never be mastered. A strategic-alignment game of infinite subtlety, go is as much a part of the Japanese judo and the tea ceremony. Every major Japanese newspaper carries a column on it and proficiency in the game is often classed as the equivalent of a university degree. In go, a player attempts to surround the other's pieces either singly or in groups by proper placement of his own tokens. But once place, they cannot be moved again. When played by experts (there are nine degrees of excellence registered in Japan), go becomes an elaborately elegant affair where the obvious is always avoided. If one player sees a group of his opponent's pieces so arranged that they cannot be saved from encirclement, he simply regards them as dead and ignores them while he passes on to consider another part of the board. It would be considered a breach of decorum to actually deliver the coup de main in too simple a situation. There are five points of etiquette and courtesy involved in go, and if a player is within one move of making a capture, it is expected he will tap lightly on the board with one of the pieces, much as a chess player says "check." Scholars devote years of study to the intricacies of the game.

The open-strategy game of war typified by chess is enjoying a revival. Most probably invented in India, chess has been the master strategy game of history since its inception. Moslem chieftains used the game as a training device for sharpening the wits of their officers for war. In one ancient legend, a pair of Eastern princes staged a chess match instead of going to war at all, because both were convinced that the better player would undoubtedly win the war anyway, and it seemed silly to spill blood when the winner could be predetermined with out actually resorting to combat.

Despite its militant overtones, chess has always been a bit academic for the true war gamer who usually likes to spread himself out over a bit more territory. H.G. Wells created a board for playing home battle games that stretched from his living room out into the garden and featured a small cannon firing blanks to yield added realism.

Honors for developing the most intricate war game of all time, however, must go to the respected U.S. military historian Fletcher Pratt, who invented a Navy battle game using hundreds of scale model ships that finally became so intricate he had to rent a giant dance hall to play it in. Dozens of people were needed to more the models and execute firing commands. To be at all proficient, a player had to master the formula for the fire power of his ship, which was a brain numbing (Gc2 × GN + Gc2 × Gn' + 10TT + 10A2 + 10A'2 + 10A" + 25Ap + M) Sf; + T.

The devotees of sophisticated war games who wish to stop at something a bit short of Pratt's extravaganzas have found their answer in games produced by the Avalon Hill Company of Baltimore . Avalon Hill makes a whole line of games that take tactical maps and re-create famous battles of history, including such epic clashes as Waterloo, Gettysburg, stalingrad, Midway and the Battle of the Bulge. In addition to the normal excitements of war gaming, the Avalon Hill varieties give the player the added fillip of rewriting history. Moving along the hexagonal squares that overlay a rendition of the Belgian counytryside, Nappleon can now move out and engage Von Bülow's Prussian force near Tilly to his right, while Marshal Ney routs the British at Quatre Bras. Then, as his cavalry screen at Nevilles holds up allied reinforcements, Bonaparte can lead a smartly executed seizure of the positions at Mont-Saint-Jean and reap the satisfying victory over the Duke of Wellington that history denied him 150 years ago.

Avalon Hill players are the Monopolists of the war-game business: A simple victory is rarely enough. For them, nothing less than total annihilation of the enemy will do. A truculently aggressive group, they have their own newspaper and advertise for opponents to play them through the mail in any given historical battle with much the same quiet humility of Cassius Clay. "Wanted: American general who thinks he can crack my impenetrable defense of Festung Europa," went one announcement. "If you're not an experienced player, don't waste my time." The company takes votes among its regular players to determine which battles shall be engamed next. Since the players have largely picked the battles themselves, they have no compunctions about getting in touch with the company if anything bothers them. Avalon Hill official and game designer Tom Shaw long ago stopped being surprised at getting calls in the middle of the night from as far away as Rhodesia to settle a bitter argument about some obscure point of tactics.

The exact relationship between men and the games they play is as delicate as gossamer: If there is one sure thing in the game business, it is that no one really knows what makes a game popular and what doesn't. The list of failures is a distinguished one. George Parker, the founder of the game dynasty and inventor of a raft of successful games, was convinced that his best creation was a game called Chivalry, which was never a best seller. Darrow tried his hand at a couple of new games, but couldn't even find a moderate success, let alone another Monopoly. A game can even fail for being too accurate a reflection of real-life problems. Avalon Hill once put out something called Railroad Dispatcher. It reflected the problems involved in shuffling trains so perfectly that it became a big hit with railroad dispatchers, but practically no one else.

Officers of the 3M Company, which has just entered the game business with a series of excellently produced skill games, are convinced their future lies in the field of challenging brain games. But even with the most advanced marketing and merchandising systems at their command, they know they are pursuing a shadow. "You can computerize games just so far," one said, "and then you just have to stop and see if it's fun or not."

Robert B.M. Barton, the current president of Parker Brothers, once made up a lengthy list of the essential rules necessary for a board game to be "fun." He put out specific instructions on how complicated a game should be, what the right number of players is, how long it should take, and so on. One by one, new games successfully broke the rules, until today he is left with no more than the basics the ancient Chaldeans had to begin with--there should be some sense of conflict and there should be a definite winner. The most recent big new game by Parker Brothers, Risk, was adjusted to fit these two remaining rules. Invented by the talented French cinematographer and author Albert Lamorisse, Risk was originally called Conquest of the World. In spite of its ringing Gaullist title, Parker Brothers tested the game and found it was possible to play indefinitely without anyone ever completely conquering anything. It took a year and a half and more than 1000 test games to work out a new set of percentages so that there could finally be a winner and a loser. In a not infrequently confusing world, it is sometimes comforting to know for sure which is which.

Aldous Huxley, who had a habit of putting things well, perhaps put it best. "With their simple and uneqivocal rules," he said, games "are like so many islands of order in the vague untidy chaos of experience. In games one passes from the incomprehensible universe of given reality into a neat little man-made world where everything is clear, purposive and easy to understand."

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