Games That Don't Suck: Guillotine

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

My feelings towards the game company Wizards of the Coast, now in its third decade of operations, have always been ambivalent.  On the one hand, the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering pumped a huge amount of money into the hobby-gaming industry in the 1990s; on the other hand, M:TG is less a hobby than an addiction, and Magic players rarely have time or money for other kinds of games. On the third hand, WotC revitalized the old Dungeons & Dragons game in the early 2000s, developing an edition that was more elegant and easier to learn than its predecessors; on the fourth hand (apparently, I have entrusted this assessment to an octopus), they then developed a new edition that eliminated the previous edition's open-source rules and turned it from a role-playing game into a pencil-and-paper war game. 

If one wishes to view WotC in a favorable light, one might do well to focus on some of the less profitable, but equally classic, board and card games that the company developed in the 1990s.  Robo-Rally is perhaps the most famous of these, but I must confess a fondness for a more obscure Wizards title, one whose owners find that it sees a lot of play: Guillotine. This small game's subject matter sounds grim: the players take the role of executioners during the French Revolution, collecting the heads of aristocrats and other political undesirables and earning points based on their victims' prestige. However, Guillotine's humorous approach and cartoonish illustrations show that it does not intend to simulate the Terror, merely to use it as the backdrop for light entertainment.     

Guillotine has relatively few components: a deck of Noble cards, a separate deck of Action cards, and a cardboard guillotine. The Noble cards represent generic characters from the cinematic French Revolutionary era in which the game is set: cardinals, tax collectors, aristocrats, generals, and the like. Only Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre represent historic individuals.  Each Noble has a number, superimposed on a small picture of a basket, representing its victory-point value. Many have special abilities when “collected,” such as allowing the player to collect another Noble or Action card or giving a point bonus in combination with other cards. Some, like the Tragic Hero, have a negative point value and serve as pitfalls in the game tableau. One type of Noble card, the Palace Guard, has a geometrically increasing value. Others have point values ranging from 1 to 5.

The Action deck contains the cards that players use to alter the playing field in their favor.  Most change the order of the line, allowing players to move more valuable Nobles to the front so they can collect their heads – I mean, cards – on their turn. Some Action cards give players extra victory points at the end of the game. These each player displays, along with his/her previously-collected Noble cards, face up. Some Action cards “attack” other players, stripping them of Nobles or Action cards or imposing point penalties.

Guillotine's set-up and turn structure are simple and easy to learn.  One player places 12 face-up Noble cards in an execution line, with the eponymous cardboard guillotine at the front of the line. Each player receives 5 Action cards. The starting player performs the following on his/her turn: 1) play an Action card, 2) take the Noble card at the front of the execution line, 3) draw another Action card.  Step 1 is optional, the others mandatory. After completing these three steps, the player's turn ends and play passes clockwise (check) around the group. When all Noble cards are gone the “Day” ends and the dealer places 12 more face-up Nobles in line. At the end of day 3 the players count their victory points, and give suitable prizes to the person with the largest total, like tiny tricolor flags or a plate of madeleines or a slap in the face with a kid-leather glove.

The game has much to offer both newcomers and experienced gamers. It is easy to learn, as the rules are very short and the components very simple. It is fast-paced – five players (the maximum) can finish an entire game in 7-8 rounds of play, or fewer if someone collects Robespierre or plays the Scarlet Pimpernel (each of which ends that particular Day). The variety of Action cards and the special bonuses and abilities of many of the Noble cards ensures that each game will be different, and provides the players with enough choices – should I end this game Day? Should I screw over this player? Should I play this particular bonus and risk someone destroying it with another Action card? - to keep experienced players happy. And despite the grim premise of Guillotine, it maintains a light-hearted, cinematic atmosphere, supported by the elegant but deliberately unrealistic illustrations on the cards and the amusing names assigned to some of them.  This is not Simon Schama's French Revolution, but rather the setting of Start the Revolution without Me and History of the World Part One.  And, yes, there is a Piss Boy, though regrettably no Action card titled “It's Good to Be the King.”

The SFF Year in Review

A few impressionistic notes on some of the big events in the sci-fi and fantasy scene this past year, before we shamble into 2014:

In 2013, Peter Jackson continued to squeeze the last drops of life out of the Tolkien literary estate. We hope he will not attempt a film adaptation of The Silmarillion. Ana Mardoll continued the week-by-week takedown of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that she began late last year. Worldcon trended white, male, and reactionary. Charles Stross started his new Merchant Princes trilogy (he's halfway done now). Charlaine Harris killed off Sookie Stackhouse (more or less), angering her fans far more than her admission that she'd been phoning it in since volume 8. Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga comic book retained its awesomeness. Neil Gaiman published about fifty books and the first issue of a new Sandman mini-series. Apparently a Sandman movie adaptation is in the works, which will probably star Benedict Cummerbatch in the title role; the DVD will then feature a 10-minute makeout session between Cummerbatch and Gaiman. The long-awaited film version of Ender's Game tanked at the box office, as sci-fi fans learned it was by Orson Scott Card, who is a wanker. The latest Star Trek movie demonstrated about as much respect for the franchise as Card does for gay marriage. (Rob Bricken's fantastic review of the film is full of spoilers, but the movie was pretty much spoiled to begin with.) An entertaining new book about Dungeons & Dragons revealed A) that Gary Gygax had a touch of logomania, and B) that he and the rest of the execs at TSR went even crazier when the money started rolling in. Doctor Who celebrated his fiftieth anniversary by turning into Malcolm from The Thick of It (warning: link NSFW).There may have been some interesting games produced this year, but everyone was too busy playing Candy Crush.

Fish, House, Boots, and Sword

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Nine:

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

Brother Aldo opens this chapter by donning his Captain Exposition hat, telling Hiero and Luchare of the terrible time before the great Apocalypse, speaking with horror of twentieth-century skyscrapers and aircraft and the “poisonous wastes” (200) that the benighted pre-war humans and their machines produced. I suspect this struck me as tedious liberalism when I read this book in my teens, but on reflection it's easy to see why someone in the early 1970s, when the Great Lakes were dying and leaded gasoline was the norm, would hold this view. Eventually, Aldo continues, overpopulation and stupidity produced the final war that so dramatically altered the planet. His own order, the Eleveners, originated around that time, as a few ecologists (Good Scientists) banded together to prevent a repeat of the ecological devastation and madness of the past. Another group of biochemists and psychologists (Bad Scientists) bred mutants to be their servants, and became the Unclean Brotherhood. The Evil Unclean Mutant Conspiracy has now become so dangerous that the Eleveners have decided to ally themselves with the Kandan Confederacy, and sent Aldo to track down Hiero because the EUMC is afraid of his awesomeness.

After having his ego fluffed by Brother Aldo, Hiero and his companions, now joined by the itinerant ecologist, proceed out of the ruined city (which I persist in thinking is Toronto) and along the shore of the Inland Sea. Hiero decides at one point to consult his seer stones for guidance, and draws the ever-popular Fish-Boots-House-Sword/Shield combo. This foretells travel and combat and possibly something happening indoors. Or a walking fish with a sword defending a fortified blockhouse. Or an aging hoarder puttering through his house full of fishing trophies, antique weapons, and Nazi footwear. The reader may draw his/her own conclusions.

Shortly after Hiero's casting, he and his retinue arrive at a small, wooded cove where one of Aldo's allies, Captain Gimp (no, really), is waiting in a carefully camouflaged sailing ship. The vessel is covered in tree branches lashed to its mast and a camo net, a detail interesting enough to distract your reviewer from the author's goofy nomenclature. While reluctant to take Gorm and Klootz and Luchare aboard the good ship Foam Girl (what did I tell you?), Captain “Bring Out the” Gimp eventually yields to Aldo's persuasion and takes the whole party aboard. During the voyage that follows, Gorm gorges himself on maple sugar and honey cakes, Aldo grooms and tries to soothe the fretful Klootz, and Hiero and Luchare shag incessantly in their cabin, with “no complexes” (211) to hold them back, in Lanier's charmingly antique Freudian terminology. Aldo discreetly provides Hiero with birth-control medicine, proving once again that Hiero's church is not your father's Catholic Church, nor your first cousin's either.

(Aldo, we should note, needs at this point to re-earn Hiero's trust. Earlier in the chapter, he admitted to Hiero that one of the assistant priests of the “white savages” (210) back in Chapter 4 was a member of his own Elevener order, but that the Elevener agent was prepared to let Luchare die in order to avoid blowing his own cover. It's an alarming revelation, and one which suggests that the Eleveners and Evil Unclean Mutants have been fighting each other so long that their conflict has turned into a kind of Cold War, fought by espionage and deceit.)

Five days out, just as Hiero and company are beginning to relax a little, the Foam Girl is overhauled by a massive pirate ship, black flag and all. Scanning the crew with his mental mojo, Hiero detects a collective “aura of power and evil” (213), suggesting that the pirates were investment bankers in their past lives. He also determines, to his alarm, that four of the leaders have mental shields, a skill they must have learned from the Evil Unclean Mutant Conspiracy. Say what you will about evil conspiracies, at least they draw in enough villains to keep one's heroes' overall Enemies List tidy and well-organized.

And say what you will about Sterling Lanier, but he knows how to pack a lot of detail into a single chapter. This one's only halfway done, and already your humble narrator has written a long enough exposition of it that he will have to break this blog entry into two parts. Damn you for your competence, Lanier!

Coming next: Pirates!

Which Orson Scott Card is the Bigger Gobshite?

The long-awaited film version of Ender's Game debuts on November 1, and my readers may have heard that there is some controversy regarding the author of the novel, Orson Scott Card. In his youth Card was a talented writer whose evocative prose graced several best-selling SF novels, two of which, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, won back-to-back Hugo and Nebula Awards in the mid-1980s. In later years Card turned into more of a hack, allowing his native gifts to wither, and used his online columns and even some of his novels as venues for his increasingly virulent cultural conservatism. In a notorious 2004 editorial he denounced gay marriage as a grave insult to "real" marriage, the function of which, he argued, was not to promote love and enable mutual support between life-partners, but to "civilize" men and women and teach conventional sex roles to children. In his 2006 novel Empire, Card indulged several modern conservative fantasies, defending torture, demonizing liberals as pawns of wicked billionaires (I'm pretty sure one of his villains is George Soros in disguise), and devoting an entire chapter, "Fair and Balanced," to a giving Bill O'Reilly a giant reach-around. Most recently, he opined that President Obama might be planning to create a Secret Kenyan Muslim dictatorship in America with the help of his own force of Brown Shirts and the fascist mainstream media.

It's always dispiriting to see a once-talented writer descend into hack-work and crackpot politics, especially if the larger community continues to give them honors. Surely, though, Card's earlier writing is free of his right-wing politics and homophobia? Several online commentators have said as much about the novel Ender's Game, apropos of whether or not one should boycott the movie. As it happens I have no opinions about the film because I haven't seen it; it might be terrible, it might be slavishly faithful to the original, or it might subvert the novel, as the 1997 film version of Starship Troopers did Heinlein's book. In the latter case it might be worth putting money into the pockets of the producers (who include Mr. Card) to support a film that sticks its thumb in the author's eye. Readers should wait for the reviews before deciding. I can however, give some advice regarding the book: skip it.

This isn't an easy recommendation to make. I loved Ender's Game when I read it in high school: Card's prose was alluring, and his plot, while derivative, borrowed only from the best science fiction of the day: Dick's Time Out of Joint, Haldeman's Forever War, Sturgeon's More Than Human, a bit of Ursula LeGuin's Hainish novels. At the heart of the book and of its sequel, however, is a moral conceit that, once I finally read John Kessel's 2004 explication of it (which you should read as well), explains why I found Ender's Game so appealing as a teenager and troubling as a young adult. Intentions, Card repeatedly argues, are more important that deeds. If you mean well and your heart is pure, the consequences of your actions are irrelevant, even if you kick children to death or slaughter an alien species. Ender Wiggin was tormented by bullies during his childhood and systematically abused during his battle-school education. His assailants had no motives beyond self-gratification and anger, the adults who might have protected Ender were either unaware of the bullying or refused to intervene, and in the end he had no choice but to react with cold-blooded and overwhelming violence. Kessel notes that this not only builds reader sympathy for Ender, it also provides a moral justification for his savage violence. "Ender Wiggin isn't a killer," his teachers at the battle school assure us, because killers have to have hearts full of malice (unlike Ender, who merely wants to "win") and because they feel no remorse afterwards (as Ender supposedly does). "The rightness or wrongness of an act," Kessel writes in summarizing Card's message, "inheres in the actor’s motives, not in the act itself, or in its results."  

Who, though, shall make the determination of whether an actor's motives are good enough to justify murderous results? Anglo-American law leaves such a determination to the courts, with a sliding scale of punishments depending on whether one has killed in self-defense, or accidentally, or intentionally, or with premeditation. In a war, like the one Ender is fighting, such decisions often depend on whether one is on the winning or losing side, though sometimes the victors can show magnanimity and try to rectify their mistakes. (E.g. the United States, some decades after World War Two, paying reparations to Japanese-American victims of its internment policy.) In Card's moral universe, the ultimate judge of one's intentions is the author, which is to say God. And there is a much deeper problem with that moral universe, which is that goodness may in fact be an immutable characteristic rather than a product of one's upbringing or a reflection of one's actions.*  Ender's actions, Card tells us, are morally correct because Ender has a great soul – "there's greatness in him, a magnitude of spirit" – and he can therefore commit murder and abuse his friends and still remain great-souled. (Conversely, some people are inherently bad and cannot redeem themselves through good actions; they will in fact do a lot of damage if they try to behave well, a point Card made in a chilling Locus interview that Kessel cites.) Ender's great soul is in fact greatly enlarged by the wrong he has done to others, for in Card's view Ender suffered so much from the evil consequences of his actions that he became a kind of martyr.

 

Both this Christ-like martyrdom and Ender's intrinsic moral excellence make him the ideal candidate, in Card's mind, to establish a new religion after the end of the war, a faith whose central precept is "the morality of intention." Elaine Radford, in a 1987 essay on "Ender and Hitler," notes that the central rite of this faith involves "heal[ing] the community" by defending the evil actions of the powerful. One character in Speaker for the Dead justifies Ender's act of racial genocide by saying that Ender simply didn't understand, at the time, that the Buggers were anything other than varelse (alien). Another character beats his wife, but Speaker Ender justifies this by saying it's really his wife's fault. (Radford notes that Card displays considerable "contempt for women" in the two novels, which in my view may help explain why he later insisted that marriage was a social obligation rather than an expression of genuine love.)

Kessel observes that Ender is an ideal fantasy character for bright and disaffected teenagers, which explains why my friends and I used to enjoy his story so much and why it continues to sell up to 200,000 copies a year. "Ender never loses a single battle," Kessel notes, "even when every circumstance is stacked against him. And in the end, as he wanders the lonely universe dispensing compassion for the undeserving who think him evil, he can feel sorry for himself at the same time he knows he is twice over a savior of the entire human race. God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade!" One of the hard lessons of adulthood, however, is that suffering does not make one special – it merely makes one's tormenters assholes. It certainly does not grant anyone a license to kill. And being thought evil because you are in fact a sociopathic mass murderer, when you know in your heart that you are good, does not constitute martyrdom, or grant one the wisdom to found an interstellar religion.

To sum up: the later, crankish Orson Scott Card is a homophobic right-wing conspiracy nut, while the earlier Orson Scott Card is merely an apologist for murder and genocide, and a proponent of the idea that some people are intrinsically evil and some people are inherently good, no matter what they may do in life. I leave it to my readers to decide which Orson Scott Card is worse, though I rather suspect they are and always have been the same person.

The author thanks Robert Bricken for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

* I hesitate to say a "racial characteristic," but Elaine Radford points out that Card claims Ender's intelligence is entirely innate – the product of "breeding, not training" – and that this is a characteristic of twentieth-century eugenic theory.

Worldcon Memories

The first science fiction convention I attended (apart from a small Doctor Who convention in Connecticut) was also among the largest, and it is fair to say it left an impression on me.  The 1989 World Science Fiction Convention met in Boston over Labor Day weekend, and I went for all four days, staying in a crowded suite with 20 college students, sleeping on the floor, eating sporadically, and goggling at everything.  It was the first time I had seen cosplayers, quite an experience for a callow and immature 19-year-old; I decided to keep a respectful distance and not to look them directly in the eye, and consequently none of them ate me.  It was the first time I had watched anime - “Japanimation,” as we called it then – with more than one or two other people, though the fifty or so people with whom I watched Megazone 23 late one night represented less than one percent of the con-goers, and they were about all of the anime fans there.  It was the first time I had been in a convention dealers' room, a great flea market of nerdly swag, and while I was a poor student I still was able to buy a dozen or so home-made buttons with geeky slogans (e.g. “He's dim, Jed!”) two paperbacks I'd been hunting for some time, Cory Panshin's Rite of Passage and Philip Dick's A Scanner Darkly (the latter out of print, believe it or not), and a graphic novel or two.  It was also the first time I'd seen science fiction writers in the flesh, and it was not entirely a deflating experience.  I remember seeing Isaac Asimov bustling through the convention center halls while I ate breakfast one morning, attending a panel on world-building where Larry Niven sat like a bump on a log, and attending another panel on Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, where David Brin denounced Bloom and his boyfriend Hegel while Hal Clement crankily defended traditional education.  Rounding out my fanboy inauguration, I participated in a playtest of a new diceless role-playing game called Amber, and an impromptu round of the old card game Illuminati (I played to lose, and played weird); had a rambling conversation with my roommates about Immanuel Kant and asteroid mining; talked with an earnest old nerd about “Lojban,” the Logical Language of The Future; paid a wandering poet five bucks for a poem he imposed on me around 2 o'clock one morning; and slipped out to see the movie Batman (the Tim Burton one), which was still playing in local theaters.

Worldcon wasn't the happiest or most pleasant episode in my life, but it was certainly exciting, and I've been chasing that particular high ever since, through one Star Trek convention, four general SF cons, and about 15 gaming conventions.  This year I thought about attending the World Science Fiction convention in San Antonio to see how it compared to my memories of Noreascon.  I didn't go, but I've read several accounts by fans who did attend, and preliminary reports suggest that I would have blended right in, insofar as the convention's prime demographic was white, male, and aging.  It also sounds like it was a pretty conservative crowd, full of climate-change deniers, homophobes, and mil-SF types who want Heinlein taught in the schools (presumably not the books with incest and rape-oriented plotlines, but who knows?).  I suspect this was the case at the '89 convention too, but that was a quarter-century ago.  It is depressing to realize that the same people who went to Noreascon 3, or very nearly, are the principal attendees of the modern Worldcon, and that their interests and politics haven't changed at all – indeed, they may be narrower and more regressive than they were in the Reagan era.

Not that Worldcon is in any institutional danger.  Tobias Buckell notes that the convention has been at the same size (4,000-6,000 people) since the early 1980s, and Cheryl Morgan observes that Worldcon is a fan-run, print-centered convention, and therefore can't expect to compete with corporate media conventions like DragonCon or SDCC.  Fair enough.  But the reports I've read suggest that even within these limits, Worldcon's attendees don't want to reach out to young people, and don't have a problem identifying themselves (in some cases, at least) as sexist oinkers.  It would be easy enough for the organizers to add a Hugo Award for young adult SF, which has exploded in the last ten years; to place more programmatic emphasis on graphic novels and manga; to adopt anti-harassment policies like those adopted by Chi Fi*, and to offer student discounts.  But the old grumblers who've been going for twenty years might not like it, and they're the ones who currently have the money and inclination to attend.  So be it. In fifty years some of them will still be going to Worldcon, perusing glass-cased displays of Gor novels, quarreling about whether Bradbury was a better writer than Bester, and making snide remarks about female novelists.  Perhaps one or two of them will wonder, while waiting for their nursing aides to show up, why no-one at the con was under the age of eighty.  Then it will be time to go back to the Home, or off to the Soylent Green factory.

* In fairness to the 2013 Worldcon, it did, in fact, have an anti-harassment policy, but this is still not universal at SF cons.

This One Goes to Elevener

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Eight, continued:

(For the previous installment in this series, click here.)

Hiero and friends have defeated the frog mutants who attacked them in our last installment, but the sinister salientians' boats are too small or fragile for our heroes to use, or else Hiero and Luchare and Gorm are too tired to think, for instead of fleeing the island they choose to stay and fight the Evil Unclean priests who are on the way.  Were we talking of a more conventional post-apocalyptic action hero we might assume that Hiero simply doesn't know that the Really Bad Guys are on the way, but Per Desteen has already used his extra-sensory perception to sense their approach, so ignorance does not explain his or his friends' disinclination to skedaddle.

Around dawn the EUMs glide up to the island in their lightning-gun boat, and their leader, S'carn, oilily offers Hiero one more chance to join the Evil Conspiracy. Hiero replies that he knows the offer is a trap, and taunts the Unclean priest with the sort of pulpy, campy diction that makes reading this book such fun:

“Come and try with your weapons! I defy your Unclean crew, your filthy, perverted Brotherhood, and above all, you, shave-pated master of foulness. If you have us fast, come and take us!” (192)

It works better if you imagine Hiero's part played by some forgettable action hero from the 1970s, like Jeff Cooper in Circle of Iron, and the evil priests played by a talented but dissolute European actor, like Max von Sydow or David Warner.

The heroes then resume preparations for one last stand-up fight, when, abruptly, deus ex machina arrives.  It takes the form of an old and plainly dressed “Elevener,” who warns the EUMs to depart. They refuse, naturally, whereupon the newcomer summons his secret weapon: an immense mutant fish with six-foot-long teeth!  The leviathan proceeds to shatter the Evil Mutants' boat and its crew. As the Elevener – whose name is “Aldo” - subsequently explains, the Eleveners have some psychic mojo of their own, including the ability to communicate with non-intelligent and semi-intelligent animal species.

Aldo tells Hiero, Luchare, and Gorm that he has come to find out why the heroes are causing such havoc on the Inland Sea. He promises, after Hiero summarizes the party's adventures thus far, to tell all he knows about the Unclean Menace and its plans, which apparently date back to the great radioactive war 5,000 years earlier. This must, alas, wait for the next chapter.

I'm not sure what became of Mister Giant Fish, but I suspect he swam off to digest his Unclean Mutant meal in peace.  Bon appetit!

Coming next: Sterling Lanier writes the first rough draft of Norman Spinrad's Songs from the Stars (1981).

Forthcoming

Things have been a bit quiet here at TRV this month, as your Humble Narrator has been working on his other weblog and attending to duties, some pleasant and some less so, in the Mundane world. Shortly this will change, and several posts should be forthcoming on the following:

1. The next installment of my summary-and-analysis of Hiero's Journey (Chapter 8, part two) will be finished or before Thursday, October 10.

2. My recollections of the 1989 World Science Fiction convention, and some thoughts on the current state of Worldcon, should be posted by October 20.

3. An attempt to answer the question "Is the Orson Scott Card who wrote Ender's Game the same Orson Scott Card who believes Barack Obama is an Evil Muslim Hitler?" will, I hope, go up before the premiere of the E.G. movie on November 1st.

4. And, at some point, "Games That Do Not Suck" will resume with a look at one of my favorite light card games, Guillotine. The Reign of Terror was never this much fun!

**

Meanwhile, here is my recent review of Thomas Disch's cultural study of popular sci-fi, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, and a short article on the epic 1970s TV battle between Kamen Rider and Starfish Hitler, who is much more entertaining than Evil Muslim Hitler.