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.

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.