Mound Builders Playtest Update

Your humble narrator recently attempted to play-test Mound Builders, the new solitaire game of Mississippian-era exploration and survival. After two hours of set-up, re-reading (and re-re-reading) the rules, and slow, methodical play, I managed to make it into the early Mississippian era, the game's second epoch. My cultural empire extended deep into Shawnee and Caddo country, generating regular surpluses of hides and mica, before enemy war parties – notably the Cherokees, whose homeland I never managed to incorporate – began battering Cahokia's palisades.

Then I noticed I'd made it through the Hopewell era without remembering to trigger the revolts specified on the game's first set of history cards. I apparently misread a paragraph on page 9, column two of the rulebook (like you do). Well, so much for being methodical! And so much for trying to write a legitimate session report. I'll make another attempt to play the game correctly, but it will have to wait until June, as I'll be traveling and Mound Builders requires more play area than the average hotel table or airline tray-back provides.

(The image at right shows the game board at the start of the first [Hopewell] era, shortly before I began to screw everything up. Not sure where I placed the fifth peace-pipe marker; I suspect it's out-of-frame. The mug on the right edge of the board, used to hold chiefdom counters, was one I picked up at the 2012 meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory.)

A First Look at Mound Builders

My copy of Victory Point Games' Mound Builders arrived a short while ago, and having just dug my way out of a pile of editing I thought I would give my readers my initial impressions of the game before working on a more detailed review or session report.

Victory Point Games' motto is “The Play's the Thing,” which refers to their production of games with interesting rules or settings and inexpensive components. Mound Builders, however, represents a significant improvement in the physical quality of VPG's products. The event cards (“history cards”) are sturdy, trading-card sized, and well-illustrated; the counters are nearly twice as thick as those in previous VPG titles; the rule book has a glossy cover and is formatted like an actual book; and the board is large – 11 by 17 inches – and adorned with images and icons that immediately set the tone for the game. I can't imagine what the deluxe boxed edition must be like, though I suspect the counters are of gold-pressed latinum.

As in other States of Siege games, the game board of Mound Builders features a central city, Cahokia, that the player must defend from adversaries who advance against it on numbered tracks, or warpaths. These adversaries are the Shawnees, Cherokees, Natchez, Caddos, Ho-Chunks, and, eventually, the Spanish. One might quibble with some of the names here: the Shawnees were actually the Fort Ancient culture in the pre-Columbian era (they didn't acquire their historic name till later), the Natchez didn't coalesce as a nation until the seventeenth century, and the Cherokees were a pretty minor nation until the eighteenth century (though the designers note that they use the word as a catch-all for the southeastern Indians). There's something to be said, though, for using historic tribal names, which remind players of the continuity between pre- and post-Columbian Indian cultures.

The game tokens include six markers representing hostile armies, each of which has a stand to keep it upright on the board, indicating that VPG is moving away from its strict devotion to flat cardboard counters. Most of the other game counters represent the chiefdoms that the player can exploit or conquer during the game, chiefdoms identified by an exotic trade good they produce – copper, mica, feathers, seashells – and a numeric battle value. Once the second phase of the game, the Mississippian era, begins, the player can flip the chiefdom counters to the side displaying a mound, indicating they've been incorporated into one's civilization. As a whole, the counters indicate that Mound Builders is an unusual offering for VPG, with both military and resource-management elements. We will see whether or not these make for a rewarding game; I suspect they do.

Gamers identify those elements of a game that establish it in a particular setting or historic era as “chrome,” and Mound Builders has lots of it, particularly on its event or History cards. In the States of Siege game series, these indicate how many actions the player may perform on a given turn and which enemies' armies move up (and, in MB, which chiefdoms might revolt). In Mound Builders, all of the cards are beautifully illustrated with color images or photographs, displaying the Aztalan palisade, Hopewell pottery, an artist's reconstruction of Cahokia, and the like. Each also contains a paragraph of text describing the archaeological site or culture or development featured on the card, and I think they contain a fair amount of information that would be news even to seasoned American historians. Were I to use MB as a teaching tool, these History cards would be one of the principal reasons.

The only thing discouraging me from using Mound Builders in the classroom is the rulebook, which is very complex – less so than for a game like Advanced Squad Leader, but more than other States of Siege titles or “gateway” games like Ticket to Ride. MB covers three historic periods, or eras, and is almost a different game in each. In the Hopewell period, the player focuses on exploring and trading; in the Mississippian era, the emphasis is on empire building and defense; in the Spanish era, the player will be struggling just to survive. Players also need to keep track of a large number of action options: building mounds, improving Cahokia's palisades, powwowing with the Great Sun, engaging in diplomacy to acquire chiefdoms, and attacking hostile armies, and that's not including the additional options in the advanced game. I suspect, though, that it is easier to keep track of these options once one has actually playtested the game, which I plan to do shortly.

A Mississippian Board Game?

Update: My copy of Mound Builders has arrived, and my first-impressions overview can be found here.

Victory Point Games is a small, California-based company that manufactures inexpensive designer board games, usually strategy games or historical war games. One of their more popular product lines is “States of Siege,” a series of solitaire games in which the player must defend a central point – usually a capital city – against enemy armies that advance on numbered tracks. Each turn the player draws an event card indicating which armies advance, any special events that occur, and how many actions the player may take, including attacks on enemy forces (which, if successful, drive the targeted army back a space or two on their track). Most include additional resources or political elements that the player must manage while defending the capital. Levee en Masse, for instance – a simulation of the wars of the French Revolution – requires players to maintain (through die rolls) a correct balance between Republic, Monarchy, and Despotism ratings, which shift during the game in response to historical events. Some have special “chrome” that distinguishes them from other titles in the series. Ottoman Sunset, for example, has a game-within-a-game that begins when Britain's fleet tries to run the Bosporus-Dardanelles gauntlet, for which players can prepare in advance if they spend their scarce actions to build fortifications. Other games in the series cover the English Civil War, the defense of Canada during the Seven Years' War, and the Battle of Roarke's Drift, inter alia.

I mention this here because VPG has just released a States of Siege game on what I had thought was an impossible subject for a game, and one highly relevant to this blog and my readers: The Mound Builders. Yes, it's a war game about the Mississippian civilization! Here's an excerpt from the catalog:

“Until the arrival of the Spanish late in the game, you will expand your control across the map of North America, extending it over the various chiefdoms encountered, incorporating them into your economic and religious sphere. Your domain will grow and shrink, but be aware that rather than a military advance and retreat, this process represents the rise and decline of culture, religious ideology, and an economic way of life, [all] threatened from outside by competing ideologies and lifestyles as much as by hostile armies.”

In other words, it's a bit of a departure from previous States of Siege war games, in that it covers several centuries of time and simulates socio-economic as well as military conflict. And it's nothing like Risk, and thank goodness.

Needless to say, your humble narrator plans to order a copy of Mound Builders in the very near future, and in a forthcoming blog entry will let you know how it plays, and whether it is suitable for team play in a classroom setting.

Worse than the Wars of the Roses

While my petite amie Susan and I were in London last month, the top three news stories were 1) the heat wave gripping England (anything over 30C qualifies as extreme heat), 2) the imminent birth of the Dutchess of Cornwall's baby, and 3) the Globe Theater's staging of Henry VI, Shakespeare's three-part play about the Wars of the Roses, at the sites of four of those wars' principal battles.

The Wars of the Roses proved more important, I think, as a romantic literary reference point than an actual historical event. Though the civil war lasted, off and on, for nearly thirty years, it chiefly took the form of a series of grudge matches between various nobles and their armed retainers; the combatants generally avoided ravaging the countryside, whose resources they hoped to win in the war. The most enduring political result of the wars was the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, whose founder, Henry Tudor (subsequently Henry VII), was the last man standing after all the Plantagenet claimants to the throne were killed. It was to curry favor with Henry's grand-daughter, Elizabeth I, that William Shakespeare memorialized the Wars of the Roses in two plays. One of these, Henry VI, was the Bard's first and, arguably, worst play, a point memorably made by Christopher Marlowe in Neil Gaiman's story "Men of Good Fortune" (Sandman, No. 13):

Marlowe: At least it scans. But "bad, revolting stars"?

Shakespeare: It's my first play.

Marlowe: And it should be your last.

Bearing this in mind, I do not regret missing the chance to sit through an outdoor performance of the play, even if it is staged on Tewkesbury battlefield. The other Shakespeare play on the Wars of the Roses, Richard III, was far better; it helped establish Richard's reputation (perhaps undeserved) as a Machiavellian villain, and became the basis for an excellent 1995 film version – a version populated with 1930s technology, in which Richard, ably played by Ian McKellan, emerged from the civil war as a fascist dictator.

Shakespeare probably helped English schoolteachers decide that the wars were, as a whole, a worthy subject of study, and thereby to plague several generations of students with their vagaries. George Orwell recounted in "Such, Such Were the Joys" that he had to memorize the principal battles in school, and did so with the aid of the mnemonic "A black Negress was my aunt; there's her house behind the barn." C.S. Lewis apparently had to learn about the wars in the same way, and his character Lucy would later characterize part of Telmarine history (in Prince Caspian) as “worse than the Wars of the Roses.” Favorable modern references to the conflict come mostly from those who approach the war as an abstraction, like designers of Kingmaker, a 1974 boardgame in which the players assemble armies of nobles, tromp around England collecting heirs to the throne, and then crown or behead the heirs as strategy dictates. More recently, George R.R. Martin allegedly modeled his Song of Ice and Fire series on the Wars of the Roses, but it was apparently rather a loose adaptation, involving mass killings of peasants, quasi-Viking raiders, weird religious cults, and the occasional zombie. None of which found their way into the historical chronicles or Shakespeare's plays, and more's the pity.

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Monsieur Sabrevois, Part Three

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Leaving Detroit, however reluctantly*, our guide to the early eighteenth-century Midwest takes us up the Detroit River into the heart of the Great Lakes region: Lake Huron, the Mackinac Strait, and Lake Michigan. Twelve leagues (24-36 miles) above Detroit, Sabrevois pauses to point out a town of 250-400** Mississaugas, members of the Anishinaabe ethnic group, residing on an island in the Detroit River. Thirty-eight leagues further, off the eastern shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, he notes another village of Odawas on an island at the mouth of Saginaw Bay. Both of these communities raise crops, presumably with corn as their main staple; both hunt and fish; and both, like the Odawas and Potawatomis at Detroit, make “a great many bark canoes” for transportation (p. 370). These vessels, constructed of birch bark on a light cedar wood frame, are sometimes considered stereotypical Native American vessels, but in the 1700s their use was confined to the Anishinaabeg. In The Eagle Returns (Michigan State University Press, 2012, pp. 7-9), Matthew Fletcher notes that these canoes were up to 30 feet long and could carry hundreds of pounds of cargo, and allowed the Odawas (whose name means “traders”) to travel hundreds of miles to trade. Sabrevois provides an additional detail here about canoe manufacture: both genders contributed to the finished product, with men cutting the bark and fashioning the frames and women sewing and gumming the hulls. The canoes thus represented a familial and communal effort, and one may presume the Anishinaabeg considered them an important part of their overall wealth.

Sabrevois bypasses the Indian towns and French settlement at Michilimackinac - “it would be possible, if one desires, to dispense with going” there, he writes (371), and so he does. His memoir proceeds instead to La Bay, known today as Green Bay, Wisconsin, which French missionaries and traders had been visiting for over 80 years. Its Indian residents in 1718 were the Ho-Chunk, known to their enemies as the Winnebagos (a derisive term, translatable as “stinkers”); the Menominees or Folles Avoines (“wild rice people”); the Sauk, who built their settlements on the Fox River 15-18 leagues (30-50 miles) above the Bay; and the Fox or Mesquakie Indians, “Renards” as the French called them, another 18 leagues further upriver, toward the Fox-Wisconsin River portage. He estimates these nations' respective populations, or at least that of their communities in eastern Wisconsin, at 300-500 each for the Ho-Chunk and Menominees, 400-600 Sauks, and 2000-2500 Mesquakies. The first three of these nations, Sabrevois asserts, have lifeways and languages similar to the Odawas', a curious assertion given that the Ho-Chunks belonged to a different language family (Siouan) from most of the other Lakes Indians'. I can think of two explanations for this discrepancy: either Sabrevois was misinformed, or the Ho-Chunks, a relatively small Indian nation by this time, learned to speak one of the more common Algonquian languages in order to communicate with their neighbors. If the second is true, I suspect the language they learned was Odawa, given the Odawas' extensive trading connections.

 
The most distinctive Indian group in the Green Bay region, according to Sabrevois, was the Fox or Mesquakie nation, whose language bore little resemblance to the Anishinaabe languages, though it was similar to those of the Kickapoos and Mascoutens (or Fire People). The Fox sustained their larger population with “extraordinary crops of Indian corn” and an “abundance of meat and fish” (371-372). Most likely they ranged into central Wisconsin, an ecological boundary zone (ecotone) between woodland and grassland, to hunt. They were less reliant on European trade than their neighbors to the east, at least as far as one can tell from their sartorial habits: Mesquakie men wore garments of fur and hide, while women wore a combination of woven blankets (as wraps) and deerskin waistcloths. One should note that they did fringe these waist-cloths with small metal bells or ornaments, obtained from the French in trade. Does Sabrevois mention, by the way, that France has just fought a war with the Mesquakies, in which its Indian allies slew or enslaved 1,000 Foxes near Detroit, and which ended with the capture of the principal Fox town in Wisconsin? He does not, except to note that the Mesquakies' towns are “well fortified” (371). Since the first Fox War ended in a treaty (1716) guaranteeing peaceful trade with the French, Sabrevois was presumably writing under the assumption that the Mesquakies were now friends and trading partners. However, this assumption would not last another decade.

Coming next: the tattooed multitudes of northern Illinois.

* Sabrevois was fired as commandant of Detroit for executing several Lakes Indians who had traded with the English.

** The author has estimated Indian population figures by multiplying Sabrevois's estimate of the number of men in each community or nation by 4-5. Sabrevois estimates that in the Wisconsin Indian towns women outnumbered men by 4 to 1, which may be slightly exaggerated.

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Commandant Sabrevois (Part Two)

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Jacques-Charles Sabrevois was for several years the commandant of the French post at Detroit, and it is to this community that his memoir now takes us. Detroit ("the Strait") had been founded in 1701 by Antoine Le Mothe de Cadillac, who established the settlement to bar English expansion into the upper Great Lakes. In 1718 the site had a small French fort and trading post, but most of the local inhabitants were Indians whom Cadillac had invited to Detroit to serve as his farming population and military auxiliary. At least three Native American nations had built villages at Detroit by the time of Sabrevois's memoir: the Huron-Wendats, an Iroquoian-language-speaking people whom the Mohawks had driven from their homeland in 1648; the Odawas ("Traders"), one of the three constituent nations of the Anishinaabe people; and the Potawatomis ("Fire-Keepers"), another Anishinaabe nation from southwestern Michigan. The Hurons had "100 men" (16:370) at Detroit in Sabrevois's time, probably equivalent to a total population of 250-300 men, women, and children; the Potawatomis had equal numbers; and the Odawas had "100 men and a great many women," a gender imbalance no doubt due to that nation's recent wars with the Iroquois.

Not surprisingly given their common background, the Odawas and Potawatomis had very similar customs, differing only in the construction of their dwelling places: the Potawatomis lived in portable huts built of overlapping reed mats, while the Odawas built wood and bark cabins like those of the Hurons. (Perhaps they adopted this building style from the Hurons while the two peoples lived together at Michilimackinac in the seventeenth century.) Both groups otherwise had the same economic base: fishing, commercial hunting, trading animal pelts for textiles and other European goods, and farming. Odawas and Potawatomis both cultivated the "Three Sisters" of Native North American agriculture (corn, beans, squash), along with melons and peas. Both had the same gendered division of labor: women did the "drudge" work of farming, preparing food, treating skins, and transporting and assembling shelters, while men did the "fun" jobs like hunting and fishing and fighting. (Lakes Indian men actually worked about as hard as women, but women supplied most of the calories and raw materials that their kinsmen consumed.) Both also had similar dances and games, of which more below.

To the Hurons of Detroit Sabrevois devotes relatively little attention, though more than he gave the Senecas who resided near Niagara. They are, in his telling, an "exceedingly industrious nation," brave, intelligent, and generally praiseworthy, but rather dull. Their town near Detroit consisted of a fort enclosed in a double wooden palisade, several bark longhouses - Sabrevois calls them "cabins" but describes them as "high...and very long" - and extensive fields of corn, legumes, and "sometimes French wheat." While Huron men were expert hunters and spent most of their time, summer through winter, in their hunting ranges, Huron women generally remained closer to home, tending their fields, gathering wood, and guarding the Hurons' fort, a task they leave to "old women."  (16: 368). Of the Hurons' cultural and religious lives, Sabrevois appears to be unaware.

Sabrevois provides far more information about the cultural lives of the Potawatomis, and by extension the Odawas. Their clothing style, he observes, was beginning to change in consequence of the fur trade: women increasingly wore white dresses, glass-bead necklaces, and vermilion to community events, while men dressed in red and blue cloth garments in the warmer months, though they generally donned bison robes in the winter. Their dances Sabrevois divides into three types: war or "scout" dances, wherein men took turns striking a pole and reciting their martial exploits; social dances, in which dancers of both genders moved to the accompaniment of male singers, drums, and rattles; and midewiwin or medicinal dances, performed in the evening by older men.

Of the Detroit Indians' games, finally, Sabrevois describes two, which he has probably seen played in person. One is lacrosse, which the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Huron towns play against one another in the summer, with some of the French joining in as well. It is, as most modern North Americans know, a field game in which two teams of players (20 each, in this case) drive a wooden ball toward their team's goal with wooden rackets. Sabrevois noted that the game's players, all male, usually dressed in no more than breechcloths but usually painted themselves lavishly, some with white pigment in patterns resembling lace. (Sabrevois infers that this "lacework" was a coincidental effect, not a deliberate one.) The Indian spectators were just as lavish in the bets they placed on the games' outcome, wagers which could collectively exceed 800 livres' (francs') worth of goods (367). The other Native American game Sabrevois encountered at Detroit was "dish," a game of chance in which the players "tossed on a dish" eight "balls" or disks with two differently-painted sides (369), winning the round and the bet whenever seven or eight tokens landed on the same side. Thankfully, they did not have to yell "Yahtzee!" to collect their winnings.

Aztecs and Samurai

In a post from my Voyagers to the East series, I noted that Hernan Cortes brought a dozen Aztec Indians to Spain in 1528 for presentation to Carlos I, and that several members of this cortege, whom Bernal Diaz described as jugglers and acrobats, wound up moving to Rome to adorn the court of Pope Clement VII. Courtesy of Charles Mann's fascinating book 1493, I have since learned that this was not the first party of Nahua to visit Spain: in 1526 Spanish priests had brought over another group of Mexican "jugglers," who turned out to be skilled players of the game of ullamaliztli. The Venetian ambassador to Spain reported on the ball players' padded garments and on the immense speed and dexterity with which they propelled the ball to the goal. The purpose of the game puzzled the ambassador, but more puzzling still was the ball itself, made of some sort of "pith" that caused it to jump about. The pith was actually rubber, which Europeans had never seen before, and the ball's behavior was such that the ambassador couldn't describe it because there was no precise word in contemporary Italian for "bounce."* (Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created [Knopf, 2011], 240-42.)

Jarring juxtapositions like this one are among the more compelling features of Mann's narrative. Another, more jarring (and fascinating) example of this trope occurs in Mann's discussion of Asian migration to colonial Mexico, which apparently was quite substantial in the seventeenth century. Spanish treasure ships had begun regular voyages across the Pacific in 1565, stopping in Manila to exchange Mexican and Bolivian silver for Chinese silk and porcelain. Apparently, many of these vessels brought Asian immigrants back with them to Latin America. The 100,000 or so trans-Pacific travelers included Japanese emigrants who had been stranded in China or the Philippines when the Tokugawa regime sealed the home islands' borders. A few of these were samurai whom the viceroy allowed to retain their katanas and employed in Mexico's colonial militia. I am fairly certain I made the previous sentence up. (Hastily checks book.) Nope, there it is on page 324. Mann cites a recent article by Edward Slack, who identifies the countries of origin of colonial Mexico's chino population (China, the Philippines, Japan, India), describes their professions, and observes that Asians were the only non-whites in Mexico licensed to carry weapons and serve in the colony's militia. (See Edward R. Slack, Jr., "The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image," Journal of World History 20 [Winter 2009], 35-67.) Professor Slack does not offer suggestions for how one might turn this fascinating story into a film plot, but such a movie script (perhaps a mashup of Yojimbo and Treasure of the Sierra Madre) almost writes itself.

* The English word "bounce," per the Oxford English Dictionary, existed but was not used to describe the bouncing of a ball until the seventeenth century.

10 Centuries, 10 Links

1100s: Here's a recent Slate article on the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen. (The shield-chewing berserker rook is probably my favorite, with the pensive queen a close second.)

1200s: A blog entry, lavishly illustrated, on the geological and strategic importance of the town of Stirling during the wars of William Wallace. Look closely enough and you can see a tiny figure of Mel Gibson, mooning his adversaries.

1300s: The 14th-century Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 75,000 miles during his lifetime, is being honored with a videogame. Apparently, there are zap guns.

1400s: While we're on the subject of guns, want to watch a short video demonstrating the use of the Hussites' early 15th-century handguns, the pistala (pipe gun) and hakovnice (hook gun)? Of course you do. (The clip is about halfway down the page).

1500s: Double-entry bookkeeping was first used in Europe in the 14th century, but the first popular text on the practice, Quaderno doppio col suo giornale, wasn't published until 1540. A webpage from the AMS follows the narrative of this 16th-()century textbook and finds that it is still a useful explanation of this accounting practice.

1600s: Sarah Underwood and Kathleen Brown try to guess what the 17th-century Pilgrims must have smelled like at the first Thanksgiving. Best not to read this one before dinner.*

1700s: Lynn Hunt, one of the world's experts on the 1789 French Revolution, recommends the five most influential books on the subject. Looks like I'm going to have to read R.R. Palmer's opus fairly soon.

1800s: The U.S. Mint will issue two coins in March 2012 honoring the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The coins will refer to the two images that most Americans associate with the war: the Star-Spangled Banner, and unnamed warships firing desultory broadsides at each other.

1900s: Did the French build a fake Paris during the First World War to fool German aerial bombers? Apparently so.

2000s: And Hungary has apparently decided that the best way to start the second decade of the 21st century is to slide back into fascism...


(Update, 12 July 2018: The Underwood and Brown piece is no longer available, but this more recent essay by Ruth Goodman suggests the Pilgrims didn't smell as bad as one might think.)

Gaming by Wire

Via the Cliopatria weblog, a New Scientist article on the first chess game played by telegraph. This match took place in England just one year after the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph, and while it ended in a draw it also started a fashion; intercity telegraphic chess games spread as quickly as the telegraph lines that carried them. By the early twentieth century there were even some clubs that held telegraphic bowling and billiards matches. The article does not mention, however, whether or not there were any Victorian-era equivalents of World of Warcraft addiction.

Hedgehogs, Board Games, and Debt

A few items too short to justify a full-length post, but interesting in their own right:

* This article is proof, if proof were needed, that the English are far more sentimental about animals than Americans could ever hope to be. "Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital," indeed! On the other hand, if you ever need a leg cast for a baby hedgehog, you know where to go.

* There are more strange stories associated with World War Two than we will ever know, but this plan to help POWs escape from captivity, by way of Marvin Gardens, is one of the more ingenious Allied ideas I've come across. (Afterthought: isn't "Marxist-themed Monopoly game" an oxymoron?)

* And, finally, as we head through the holiday shopping season, some historical perspective for those who believe consumer debt is a recent problem in America: in the second edition of The Affluent Society, economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that American consumer debts in the thrifty 'fifties rose by 55 percent (1952-56), and grew another 133 percent - from $42.5 billion to $99.1 billion - between 1956 and 1967. "Our march to higher living standards," Galbraith concluded, "will be paced, as a matter of necessity, by an ever deeper plunge into debt." (Affluent Society, Second Edition [New York, 1969], 158.)