I’m pretty sure that actually exists.
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Gosh.
There’s a game that’s going to struggle to be hugely popular. Interesting stuff though…
I note it’s not listed on BGG, and I guess it was an event thing, never made for commercial sale.
That particular thing is what I call a “gotcha” game: har har, you thought you were playing rail logistics but actually you’re a Nazi. Which I wouldn’t do to people I liked.
I had been thinking about that (still haven’t finished the video) particular comparison. I have avoided Undaunted and I think all other WWII themed games like Memoir '44–I just wouldn’t want to be or put anyone into the shoes of the Nazis. So I am also looking forward to the SF variant. (If someone had a copy and asked me to play I probably would–once. But I wouldn’t want to own these games)
I am very interested in playing Weimar on the other hand–I have my copy waiting for me here. And so is even my dad. But in Weimar the Nazis are not a playable faction they are a mechanism the factions must overcome to prevent their rise to power. Completely different premise.
John Company seems more like if someone made a game about a small town administration in 1938 trying to manage the town. And players portraying all those cogs in the wheel or maybe even active participants in the Holocaust. Is this an apt comparison? I can’t know. What I know is that I wouldn’t want to be playing that game. Maybe once as an experience and never again.
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I’m not in any way trying to tell you how you should feel, and I fervently hope this doesn’t come across that way, but (with the proviso that I haven’t played the game, I’ve only read about it) in Undaunted isn’t it ‘Germans’ rather than ‘Nazis?’
i.e. it’s just regular ‘soldiers in battle’ stuff, not atrocities (well, apart from the fact that war consists almost entirely of atrocities really)?
Of course anything that makes someone uncomfortable makes them uncomfortable. And I’m not greatly interested in war games anyway, but if I were, I think I’d be ok with playing as a regular German army unit, whereas I certainly wouldn’t be ok with playing as the SS.
Edited to add that while I haven’t played John Company either, I think your comparison seems pretty apt.
I am having a difficult time answering you. The difference between Nazis and Wehrmacht soldiers in my mind isn’t as great as it would need to be for me to make much of a difference in portraying them in a game, I guess. Nazis are arguably worse. But… the Wehrmacht isn’t exactly an innocent entity in German history. Caveat: I only have the typical general knowledge most Germans should have. I am not a history buff and school has been a while.
Add to that that I am not keen on war-games in general. (exceptions may apply for consideration)
And I have played a solo learning game of John Company but was far too busy grokking gameplay to do much beyond that. I learned a few historical tidbits of course… but nothing of greater depth than what I knew before.
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Yeah. I will bow to native German knowledge of course, but from my position as an accidental expert* on WWII, there seems to bave been a lot of post-war scrabbling to separate the “clean Wermacht” from the “bad SS/Nazis”—helped by other Western powers wanting to let Germany re-arm to stand with them against the Soviets. Alas, plenty of regular German forces committed war crimes and joined in the extremes of Nazi actions.
(I think there’s always a tendency to want to think “that wasn’t people like us, that was specific evil people who are now dead, not my friends and neighbours”. Obviously it’s comforting to think that.)
* I started running an RPG campaign of WWII with magic, I needed to know how particular historical figures would react to the emergence of magic, and I like doing research. So for a decade I had emulations of various historical figures living in the back of my mind.
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Maybe what I’m trying to express is an idea that perhaps the Wermacht are at least separable from the horrors to the extent that while many of them did indeed do horrific things, it’s possible at least that some of them didn’t, and they also did ‘normal’ war things like take part in non-war-crime battles?
I’m no expert, but I don’t have the impression that even that much can be claimed for the SS…?
Given some of the historical figures who one would assume may have featured in this - rather you than me…
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Hence the excuse, “I was just following orders,” didn’t save many from the post-war courts.
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A lot more than most people realize escaped the courts though. There were simply too many people who had in some form or other participated. If you count all the Sympathisanten and all the Mitläufer and the opportunists who profited… and all the (in-)famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung really only started once the adult generation who was part of it all had left the mainstage around the 80s. The courts dealt with the most egregious cases. Even today, a lot of the current big industrial corporations in Germany are still having a hard time with Aufarbeitung of their role during the Dritte Reich: Thyssen-Krupp, BASF, All the car companies, Adidas, Deutsche Bank and many more. The Bundeswehr was founded on the leftovers of the Wehrmacht. I’ve visited the place where it was founded. I had not known myself until a few years ago that the first officers of the new army were some from the old…
I could keep going.
My personal knowledge could be better, but @RogerBW got it quite right there:
Anyhow… to get back to the original game discussed.
That is really what John Company does, isn’t it? It puts you into the role of some people who don’t seem particularly guilty of direclty horrible deeds. They themslves might not think they are doing anything particularly harmful: They are just cogs in the wheel, following orders, doing business as usual and overlooking comfortably the really quite horrible result of the sum of those actions.
I took it as a given that the aim was to showcase this and the more you already knew about the role of the East India Tea Company… the worse it feels?
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Having not played this is not my impression. Chairman of the EIC equates more to governor of India, I think, for a while. I think you are playing people at the top of the pile who politicked and dictated. For a while the company was the de facto government but maybe this game is set when India was administered by the British government one of the posts in the review talks about a position as governor? You are playing families that give orders I’m fairly sure.
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The game has several eras to choose from. Early, mid and late Company. I was playing early era.
These are definitely people at the top with decision making power. Except none of them can do it on their own. The results happen not because of individual actions but because of the collective turning of the cogs even so. Or so was my reading of it. But that is from one learning game where I was scrambling to grok the rules more than reflecting on the thematic aspects.
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It’s a bit of both. You aren’t “just” cogs in the machine because you are pulling the strings, to mix metaphors, but you still can’t achieve everything alone, because there are many people pulling on those strings.
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The governor general is a role that can be introduced through voting in a new law, and replaces the regional governor positions iirc.
Regional governors are introduced by deploying troops in India (to loot).
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Okay, I’ve watched the video now.
Got to give it to Tom, he did a good job. In recent times reviewers (including SUSD, who arguably first spearheaded that approach to boardgame review in the ‘mainstream’) tend to justify unquestionably that someone is right to be offended by a game. In the most extreme examples, half the review is a list of reasons you too should be offended, charading as a history lesson. Even vaguely referring to a historical figure in a euro game is enough to trigger this kind of response (Carnegie…). I don’t mean this in a “end this wokery!” way, just that they apply that perspective and end the conversation there. Job done.
It’s good to see a video that examines that reaction and why games can be right to tackle difficult subjects, whilst still allowing people the space to make their own minds up on if it’s right for them. I relate to viewing games through that lens a lot more, about what the game is conveying rather than simply forbidding subjects.
To a certain extent I did get the impression that they are allowing this game to ‘get away with it’ because it is a smart intellectual game not like those other dumb games, but later on he touched on that too. So fair does, they’ve put the work in and thought of all the angles.
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Yes, but note the “with Tom” part of Quinns’ comment. Maybe he would have liked it fine if Tom wasn’t involved. 
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I think there may be multiple intersecting elements here. On the one hand you’ve the historical context and how that may be hurtful to a bunch of people. (As someone of basically lily-white ancestry I don’t really feel qualified to comment on that, while at the same time I’d want to know that some people are going to have a problem with the setting.)
On the other you’ve got the metagame of “we are greedy people, and in an attempt to satisfy that greed we take actions that have horrible effects somewhere a long way away, which we don’t personally have to observe”. One thing this game does is show how historical events can be explained by profit-seeking, suggesting that all the positive rhetoric of the day was just window-dressing.
But I think the important thing is to develop that awareness: we’ve got this loot by taking it from other people, we’ve colonised this territory by killing the people who were already there; we’ve got trade with this place because our Navy turned up and threatened to re-enact the Anglo-Zanzibar War. Once one has learned that mode of thought it can be very hard emotional work to play a board game that’s setting out to instil it.
Which Spirit Island does too of course.
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