Two games and Vincent's thoughts.

Two games and Vincent's thoughts.

Originally shared by Vincent Baker

Two games!

Dulce et Decorum by Troels Ken Pedersen
Love in the Time of War by Mario Bolzoni & Luca Veluttini

In Dulce et Decorum, you play English soldiers in the trenches of WWI. At the end of each round of play, as a group you read WWI poems aloud, "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae, "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead" by Charles Sorley, and others. Your goal is for your character to survive the war, of course, but achieving it is very difficult, and you might decide along the way to sacrifice yourself in one way or another instead. It's an emotional gutpunch, a haunting and harrowing game to play.

In Love in the Time of War, you play lovers, one of you a soldier gone away to war and the other a civilian left behind. At the end of each round of play, one of you writes a letter to the other, or that is, you describe the letter you write. Your goal is for your relationship, your love, to survive the war, but achieving that is very difficult. Especially difficult each round is the decision whether to write a truthful letter, sharing the pain and weight of what you're experiencing with your lover who might not be able to bear it, or to conceal the worst, shouldering the pain and weight for yourself. It's also an emotional gutpunch, a haunting and a harrowing game to play.

This is, by the way, the beauty to me of game design: playing a game can give you an emotional experience, even though it's just cards, pawns, dice. Think of the sinking feeling when you discover you have the losing hand in Hearts, for instance, or the frustrating injustice when you're up against a better player in Go. And then in a roleplaying game, even further, the emotional experience of playing the rules can reinforce and serve and draw upon the emotional experience of identifying with the characters.

In both games, Dulce et Decorum and Love in the Time of War, good gameplay means generally the same thing: controlling your descent. You and your fellow players start the game with all the resources you'll ever have, and have to spend them as wisely and carefully as you can, to buffer and shelter yourself from the bad turns that are coming.

And this is what I want to say about both games: they're both gambling games, not pure resource management games, and they're both mathematically unforgiving. You do have the losing hand. Your board position is unjust.

I played Dulce et Decorum at Fastaval 2013, and I couldn't stay ahead of the gamble. My character died when he stopped caring whether there were enemy soldiers in the opposite treeline, and simply stepped out into a field in Belgium. He died bereft of friends and hope.

I played Love in the Time of War at EtrusCon just last week, and Talisa Tavella's character and mine reunited at the end of the war. They were both scarred and sad, but they were together and still able to make the life they wanted. It was never a given, but Talisa and I played hard and had good luck and managed to pull it off.

Anyhow, two gorgeous, exhausting, unforgiving games that I love.

Here's a link to Dulce et Decorum. I can't find a link to Love in the Time of War. Mario Bolzoni, Luca Veluttini, help me out?
http://alexandria.dk/english#dulceetdecorum