🎲✂️ Historical board game idea: a collection of games published as an anthology or edited volume, similar to what you see in academic treatments of complex topics. Like 5-6 designers take on a beefy historical topic or era and each make their own game about one part of it.
This would be a fun project to do leading up to a convention. Imagine if we were given a prompt - The Battle of May Island - and then all played each other's prototype of the same event at SDHist. The breadth of ways to tackle it would be so cool to see.
I agree! Lots of opportunities. Let’s chat about it at the con in November!
Heck yes, excited to see where this goes Brooks!
Big fan of this idea Brooks, if you want a collaborator for it feel free to let me know!
I’d love to do this!
You see this to some extent in game series or with different perspectives on similar topics. But what would it look like to let each person pursue their own system/model around a unifying theme, with the purpose of creating discourse? I think it could be fascinating, if daunting for a publisher.
I’ve got my own ideas about where to start. This may be something I work toward over the next several years.
ATO magazine did this in a focused way with their 4 Roads to Moscow and 4 Roads to Paris issues. In each, they had 4 different designers design a game on the same topic. Operation Barbarossa in the first, the Fall of France 1940 in the latter.
Interesting! I was wondering if someone else had done it - I assumed but wasn’t aware. Thanks for sharing!
Finally a reason for me to make the Elias Brown cider game. When the Battle of Concord started, Brown sold hard cider to both sides and spectators. No one had the heart to shoot him. If this isn't the perfect theme for a push-your-luck game... In all seriousness, your idea is brilliant.
Love this. It will help to have some form of centralized research to make this work.
Not quite the same but you might look at 2007's Stonehenge anthology, if only for thoughts on process and what did/didn't work well
I like this concept a lot, but it feels like it would benefit from a flexible shared system (like COIN, etc) rather than a series of fully novel designs to thrive in an anthology format.
I think you could go either way but I’m more interested in seeing wildly different perspectives, models, and arguments made through different designs. Systems are wonderful in many ways but can limit the ability to push boundaries.
Then maybe it wants to be different games about the same moment in history? The most interesting promise of an anthology is what its content has in common.
Maybe! It’s just a brainstorm at the moment. I think these things can be approached in a number of different ways. The commonality could be thematic or methodological rather than being rooted in a single event, for instance.
Yeah! I like that.
Sign me up!
I'd be into this.
Dude. Yes.
Dr. Tom Sawyer's Medievalists Design Games event at UChicago seems like a good model for things like this
Thanks for the rec! I’ll see what I can find about this.
You should join us for the Year of Games symposium at UChicago this October! voices.uchicago.edu/yearofgames/...
Ah! Don't know if I can make it this year, but is this an annual thing?
I believe so!
I love this idea!
Sorry, and to say, you should do this!
I did start a project like this when I was involved with a games magazine, a game anthology tha could be played from the mag each month - but importantly you would be able to carry over elements from the last game into the new one. Didn't quite get over the starting line but...
... some very fine designers did some very kind preliminary work.
I would *love* to see something like this - sort of an inverse of the COIN multipack, where instead of four games in (broadly) the same system on related but distinct topics, you would have (e.g.) four games with completely different systems on the same topic
@rollplusfun.bsky.social - not only would this be a great way to explore a topic from different angles, it could also highlight the ways specific game design conventions have certain types of analytical emphases or preconceptions baked in