Games Britannia Part 2 of 3: Monopolies and Mergers

Following on from the previous episode, here Benjamin Woolley shows us the influences of board games over the last 200 years on British society and how they have developed into game that can become a moral teaching for many people.

One of the games that stood out for me in the programme was a game titled The landlords game, it was a board game invented and patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904. The game was supposedly designed to explain to people how the 'land grabbing' and renting system worked. It was also used to provoke children to gain an awareness over unfairness, hopefully taking this new awareness into adulthood. This game was first published in Great Britain in 1913 with the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit, this game later was the major influence that then created the most popular board game in history - Monopoly. The similarities can easily be seen, but the versatility of this game was that each place on the board can be changed by naming them differently, a feature that has made the current monopoly so successful. Depending on the place of sale, the board can have specific place names that are popular to the place of sale.

After this point, family board games were being produced to bring families through the Great depression, Cluedo and scrabble became a popular family game during this time, these them started to form the biggest game companies at the time, some even are around now, producing the same games.

But since then not much has changed in the content of board game, but they are just not as poular as they used to be. New board games such as War on Terror by Trrorbull games have similarities to Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit as they both contain content in which relates to the current world, it was designed to give people the chance to see why countrys do what they do to acquire countries and land, and how much cheaper it is to fund terrorism. This is mainly just a play on satire, but the game company are finding it hard to find suppliers that will stock such a sensitive game.

The final part of this series, Woolley will be looking at the 'Joystick generation' and viewing how videogames have affected us as Britains.

My iterations of The Royal Game of UR

Recently I had to write an essay about iterating an ancient board game from the 2600BC period. This is the oldest known game to man and I found this one of the most interesting games I've had to study. The game consists of a set of nets which combine to be the game board which the players have to manoeuvre around to get the end to score a piece. The players roll a set of 4 D4 dice with 2 sides marked in order to move around the board, this gives the game an element of chance with these game bits. The game board was found to have specially decorated cells and consistently throughout there was found to have a rosette square believed to have importance with the game play.

My task was to iterate the current mechanics of the game to improve the games overall playability. But before we can iterate the rules, what were the rules?
 The most basic rules are currently considered to be these:

• Using four sided dice, each players moves their pieces around the board, the player must roll the exact number to leave the board.
• If a piece lands on a marked rosette square(one with a star on it in this case) the player receives another go.
• If a piece lands on a square with an opposition piece on it, the piece is removed from the board and must restart.
• A piece on a marked rosette square cannot be taken.
• First player to get all 7 pieces to the end wins the game.

Board diagram:

My iterations of these rules were and why:

Players were able to stack two game pieces on top of one another and move them simultaneously, the player was only allowed a maximum of two stacked, this was because when we played by the original rules the game lasted too long and so we iterated this so that we could speed the game time up.
Players who landed on the rosette square were not allowed to stay on there, they had to roll and move that piece instantly, this was iterated as players began to 'camp' on the rosette squares and it became frustrating for the other player.
Because of both these iterations, it created another problem with the game dynamics, players began to put stacks on rosette squares which gave them the ability to move their stacked pieces up the board too fast, so we made a mechanic which stopped the players from putting stacked pieces on rosette squares. From these iterations we found the game ran faster, yet not too fast. It made the game more enjoyable to play.



Game board image: http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/ps121289_m.jpg