Afterthoughts: Dune

 Dune You Have The Time / To Listen To Me Whine

I am a rare breed of Dune fan, in that I am very excitable about a series I have remarkably little knowledge of. I've read many of the novels, but at the time I was young and all those paint chips I ate almost certainly warped my knowledge.

Further, I saw the movie adaption by David Lynch which was so formative to my personality that on any given week I am at least twice as majestically sweaty as Sting was in that film.

The boardgame is something of an odd duck. It was published in 1979 by Avalon Hill, having only been recently rejiggered from a Roman historical theme to that of Frank Herbert's celebration of dusty invertebrates. It remained out-of-print for a long time (briefly reflavored by Fantasy Flight Games as Rex: Final Days of an Empire).

Only recently has Gale Force 9 re-published it with some spit-and-polish. That's what I played. As usual, I shitposted about it on Twitter as I did so.

Part 1: Wormtime

Part 2: Time for Worm

Part 3: W O R M

The Game

Dune is a game about information. Like most games about information, this means it is largely a game about deception. The boardstate is appropriately cloaked in layers-upon-layers of misinformation, despite how transparent a lot of stuff is.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The core gameplay loop is that each player controls a faction with a vested interest in controlling the titular planet Dune (properly, Arrakis); if a single player controls three of the cities, they win.

Battles between troupes of troops is carried out with a kind of wagering system that can be frustrating for someone like me, whose sense of math and calculation is as reliable as a Sapho-stained mentat's ability to kill the chill vibe at a party. That's a little Dune joke for ya, just some Dune humor to spice this blog post up lmao I'm so good at this writing thing.

Pictured: A kanly-duel over who gets to compliment my writing first

But really, it can be annoying. You're wagering four things:

1. How many troops you're committing to the fight. Any troops committed will die.

2. How much spice you're committing to the fight. Spice boosts the effective strength of any committed troops, but is similarly lost.

3. Which leader from your pool you're committing, ranging from nincompoops to nightmarishly competent generals. Helpfully, leaders only die if they're specifically murdered and will otherwise survive a loss.

4. Treachery cards to either protect your own leader or try to murder the other.

From that vichyssoise you eventually get a total strength. Higher strength wins. Loser loses all their troops and the territory.

But fuck me are there a lot of factors that go into figuring out what you're wagering-- what's the maximum strength they can achieve? What leader are they likely to commit? How badly do they actually need the territory? How much spice is in their bank to boost their strength? What treachery cards do they have, or more importantly, not have? Will they commit their Super Special Cool Soldier guys (the Sarduakar and Fedaykin)? There's a lot going on.

This might sound like a condemnation-- it isn't. While the process isn't what I'd call elegant, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The game is not these calculations. The game is about finding out the information to make these calculations easy.

Every faction has access to slightly different information. House Atreides are the only ones who will reliably know what treachery cards each player has. The Bene Gesserit can compel their opponent to commit certain types of cards.

And this extends to other parts of the game as well. The Fremen know where the planet's storms move (and therefore which territories are dangerous to hang around in), the Harkonnens have a decent knowledge of which leaders are prepared to stab their player in the back.

The strategies each player pursues is informed by the information they have--or can easily have--which makes analyzing someone else's move an act of Byzantine interpretation. Knowing the special rules they're using only helps a little-- you still don't know what hidden information is informing their maneuvers.

An Aside About Cool Stuff

Above I'm only describing one specific segment of play, but there is so much going on in this game. Everyone is playing the same game and a different game. Remember what I said about a player winning if they control three cities? Not entirely true.

The Spacing Guild wins if no one else controls three cities.

Except the Fremen win if they control their ancestral territories and deny control of the other cities to the major houses.

Except the Bene Gesserit win if the faction they predicted wins, at the time they predicted they'd win.

Let those nuggets settle down in your mustard sauce. Imagine the kinds of cold-blooded Machievellian information-brokering those goals could provoke in a player. Are the Bene Gesserit allying with you in good faith? Or are they trying to help you win, so that they win, so that you lose?

But Is It Good?

I don't fucking know, why are you asking me?

When I played War of the Ring there was a particular sensation which I'll call 'Getting Punched In The Crotch' that I associated with it. Very frequently I would aspire to move a certain army to a certain territory, or assault a certain stronghold-- only for my opponent to slap down a card that said some variant of 'lmao get fucked scrub'. It was unsatisfying because there was no way for me to know what Crotch Punch was coming, but it happened so regularly that I knew a Crotch Punch was likely.

My initial instinct is that Dune had something similar going on-- a treachery card could pulverize my army, a miscalculation could see my entire plan to take a city collapse. What distinguished the experience in play, though, was that while Dune takes pains to make a lot of information hidden it is never strictly inaccessible.

Someone at the table knows. Alliances can be formed based solely on the desire for/need for certain information. Information is as much a currency in the game as the spice tokens which pepper the board like cocaine dust above a day-trader's lip.

Where in War of the Ring I eventually gave up trying to plan for Crotch Punches--hurling my armies and ambitions at the wall to see what survived--in Dune I tried to do my homework. Because I could do my homework.

The caveat, of course, is that it is still homework. It was mentally exhausting for me to constantly and with well-deserved paranoia try to evaluate whether what I knew was sufficient for the plans I had. As satisfying as it was to be right, it was an uphill climb to get there.

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