Afterthoughts: Maria

Maria, or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Hussars

As those of you who follow me on Twitter have come to know, on Fridays I get saucy and play boardgames with some friends. This being the age of Covid-19, we do so virtually! This has been an unexpected boon for me-- there are a lot of games I just wouldn't have played without something like Tabletop Simulator and its dedicated community of weirdos. So too Vassal.

Today, I'm going to gild the gorgeous trainwreck of my inebriated livetweets with a sober reflection on the game played. If you're a glutton for punishment, by all means explore the tweet threads yourself:

Part 1: In Which I Learn The Game (Poorly)

Part 2: In Which I Taste What I Think Is Victory

Part 3: Hamartia

The Game

Maria is a wargame about war, which as an observation might seem to rate up there with 'the sky is blue' and 'Colin you've absolutely ruined this dinner party'. It seems self-evident. But it's not! Not all wargames are about war-- many merely don warfare as an aesthetic. Some are actually about politics, or the industry which girds warfare, or the intellectual puzzle a strategic situation might represent. For a wargame to be about war, it needs to be saying something about armed conflict-- an observation-in-practice. That's the strength of games, after all; they can place their author's thesis in the active hands of players. 'Don't merely listen, do'.

For Maria, the thesis runs parallel to that of the famous military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (from whose writing this blog also takes its name) who noted war's fickle nature:

"We see therefore how from the commencement, the absolute, the mathematical as it is called, no where finds any sure basis in the calculations in the art of war; and that from the outset there is a play of possibilities, probabilities, good and bad luck, which spreads about with all the coarse and fine threads of its web, and makes war of all branches of human activity the most like a game of cards."

"What an astute observation, von Clausewitz," the game's designer said, "I'm actually just gonna do that".

And so they did. In Maria you have armies with an innate strength. More importantly, you have a hand of playing cards; when armies meet, you supplement the army's strength from this hand back-and-forth with your opponent until someone is unable (or unwilling) to keep playing cards.

Immediately, there's an interesting game going on-- you might know the inherent strength of an enemy's army, but it's harder to anticipate how well-stocked their hand is. The game further complicates your analysis.

If you take a look at that board, you'll note that there is a grid of card suits overlaid on the map-- when your army is embattled, you can only play cards of the suit listed in their territory. This conceivably adds to the bluffing element. Does your opponent's massive hand represent an actual ability to defend their territory? Or are all those cards in the wrong suit?

Hopefully, the texture of the game is becoming clear. Everyone is blitzing to capture cities, laying victory tokens over them when they do so. The game ends immediately when someone has gotten rid of all their tokens. But the game is not an unthinking blitz-- your aggression is necessarily guided by the logistical demands of your hand, your cards, your suits.

On the whole, the game seems to take the view that war is decided by decisive battles, but decisive battles are decided by solid logistics/supply.

There is more to the game than what I've described--a regular 'politics phase' in which players have wager on random events which punish or embolden their boardstate, for example--but the management of one's hand and one's army is very central. It's the meat and potatoes.

The Aesthetics

If the game is about war in broad terms, it is about the War of Austrian Succession in specific terms. Again, that seems like a farcically self-evident statement. But it isn't. Some games cohere very rightly to their aesthetic-- attempting to abstractly represent or simulate-in-part their period/subject. Is Risk about the Napoleonic Wars? No, not really.

I'm a real sucker for the wedding of aesthetic to theme/thesis, and so a game like Maria is the kind of treat I normally only get if I sit on command or don't bark at the mail person.

The War of Austrian Succession is one of those conflicts which make you sigh, happily, because you are not a historian who has to make sense of it. It is a conflict which--like many in its time period--seemingly straddles the line between feudal conflict and national conflict. It is, at its heart, an attempt to keep a specific woman from sitting in a certain chair.

And it is messy. Terribly so. Setting aside the gorgeous art, the well-researched random events, the game captures the messiness of the conflict by inflicting on the player an almost schizophrenic demand.

Here's what I mean. The play-entities are France + Bavaria, Prussia + Saxony, and Austria + The Pragmatic Army. But the Austrian player doesn't control the Pragmatic Army-- the Prussian ones does. And political events can mean that the Austrian controls Saxony. What a beautiful vichyssoise of nonsense.

The grander strategy, especially for Austria, similarly demands a bizarre notion of who is enemy and who is ally. Prussia, Bavaria, and part of France's forces are poised on the Austria borders. Austrian cities are, by any analysis of the board, easier to snatch up. Austria lacks the armies and resources to defend against all comers.

But.

Austria wins if no one else wins first. Which means one of the greatest points of leverage that player has is to threaten to throw the game to someone else. France/Bavaria and Prussia have to tiptoe carefully through Austria's cities, or risk helping another player win because of their own success.

This is exactly the kind of abstraction which keys very well to what you can read about in the history of the war. These politics are not easy, are not intuitive. They're messy in a way the real War of Austrian Succession was messy; which, to me, speaks very well of the decision of aesthetic. Or, rather, the decision to make the aesthetic more than just a nominal one.

Closing Thoughts

I think my opinion of the game should be pretty apparent if you've been reading this far; but I want to focus on something that happened in the final part of my Friday playthrough. I'd gotten down to only two victory tokens; if I could capture two cities anywhere on the board, I'd win.

But I didn't win. I got hammered pretty brutally.

And while my loss can in specific terms be attributed to two misplays (mistaking my Bavarian hand of cards for my French hand of cards, and over-committing an army in battle so that a small loss became a much larger one), those misplays were consequent to having a terrible run of cards. A very terrible run. The boardstate had bottlenecked around three territories, two of which shared a suit. I simply never drew the right suit for either.

And that sucked. It felt really bad. I felt stupid not because I was being stupid (barring those two exceptions) but because the cards I'd been dealt were largely useless.

In the mid-game, a run of bad cards prompts conservative play. Late-game? Conservative play is a sure loss, so stupid play has at least the forlorn hope of a win.

"Maybe if I run really fast across no man's land, I'll survive" says a French soldier in Verdun.

Now, I was tempted to call this a case where the rules are weak or bad-- because I'm not stupid, I am in fact very handsome, and my ego has the durability of a soap bubble. But the truth is that the rules are fine; to reduce the randomness of the card draw is to reduce the texture of the puzzle you're handed. It is to undercut the thesis in a way I'd probably not be okay with. Possibly, the reality of a late-game bad run of cards is just... part of that thesis, even if it isn't necessarily fun.

Still. The game is pretty dope, check it out.