LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE

Best served cold, somewhere else

Living Well Is The Best Revenge is a dice-rolling card-flipping game that’s part tableau builder, part dice placement game, and mostly an unfulfilled vibe. Just look at that name. Just look at that cover. You know why I picked this up for review – it looks really cool with the ‘French GCSE textbook meets Dungeons & Dragons’ art style of Steve Rhodes. It’s got one of those funny long names that should be the title of your favourite post-rock band’s third album. It promises dumb dice rolling and a bit of fun. The cards even kind of ‘transform’ from one side to the other when they’re unlocked – we all like a levelling up montage after all. But Living Well Is The Best Revenge is more of an unsatisfying compromise, rather than beating up the school bully.

Each player takes a couple of dice, and lays all of their double-sided cards in front of them. One a player’s turn they’ll roll their player and power dice, while everyone else rolls theier power dice (a single dice at the start of the game). If their opponents match one of their own unlocked cards, and the current player’s dice results, they get a point. The current player can then use already unlocked abilities by matching numbers, or always on powers. After that players get to unlock cards exactly equal to their player dice total. As you can tell, this is a lot of back and forth for what should be a simple dice game. The fun comes in how you apply your dice and what you unlock with your rolls – but every step has some little twist of bookkeeping that ensure it doesn’t flow and it’s not really all that fun. Oh, and there’s also reroll tokens in the mix too for an extra layer of admin.

There is a school of game design which seems to like to take a single idea and then add obstacles to the player and call that a game. This is a great example of something a little undercooked or overdone. It’s not that there’s too much in the game, just that the flow is so poor that it gets in the way of what should be a silly little game with some cool art that you play while having some beers and a salty snack.

The powers are fun take-that stuff (literally halfling someone’s points is a laugh), and the dice allocation and unlocking is quite pleasing, but the whole thing fails to come together in anything meaningful.

Living well is avoiding this game, however nice it looks.

CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT

Imagine, some four or five millennia ago, not far from the banks of the Tigris, a merchant and some local bureaucrat sitting down in the shade of a storehouse to play a game. Maybe the board is carved out of wood, maybe it’s etched into the dirt or rock. The playing pieces might be individuallysculpted dogs or pigs, or just pebbles.

Their act of play, this familiar ritual which anyone today – despite colossal changes across almost every other domain of human life – would instantly recognise and comprehend, might just look like an age-old exercise in destressing and goofing off. With the important work of trade out of the way, the pottery or grain or cattle properly accounted for, the tithe paid or the deal agreed upon, these two people get to shed their professional roles for a while, rest their legs and distract their minds with something of little consequence.

And, to be sure, this is part of it. Games can be chew-toys for the psyche, diversions that occupy all the algorithms that might otherwise turn themselves towards the infinite task of anticipating and proposing solutions for every problem that might arise. A game takes the paranoid military dictator in our brain and says ‘hey, you know what would be really helpful? Can you make sure all our fighter jets have got cool lightning bolt decals?’ and that’s him harmlessly occupied for the next month rather than trying to start wars.

But more is going on here. Some historians have gone so far as to argue these two domains – trade and negotiation on one hand, play on the other – are indivisible. Since, wherever civilisation springs up, games appear simultaneously, mightn’t it be the case that either is necessary for the other to exist?

Tabletop games – and I’m using ‘tabletop’ here in its metaphorical sense, given that, for the steppe nomads scratching grids into flat rocks, a table would have been decadent encumbrance – are inherently political. Not in the sense of their embodying one particular ideology or another, but in how they allow the formation of ideologies at all.

Games are politics you can touch. Let us say that this stone here is a child trying to get to the watering hole, and this stone here is a hungry wolf. If you don’t say ‘ok’, if you don’t agree to that establishing of a shared truth, the game is not possible. The stones remain two boring, ordinary pebbles. But as soon as two or more people collaborate in the communal space of the gaming table – okay, these are the safe spaces where the child can rest, these are split sticks we’ll throw to see how far the wolf moves each turn – something miraculous happens. We transpose something onto nothing. And in this abstract space consisting entirely of temporary agreements, incredible drama and complexity can take place.

Many basic, foundational components of civilisation – currency, bureaucracy, laws – cannot exist without consensus. This consensus, as in a game, involves the transposition of something onto nothing. The emergence of ‘spade money’ in Qin Dynasty China, for example, required merchants and labourers to agree that special representations of spade heads could actually stand in for goods or services. Yes, it’s an ornamental spade too fragile to actually dig with – and therefore, in a practical sense, worth very little – but let us say that it is also money we can exchange with each other. The shared agreement, the political game, makes a new reality possible. Something that is not true becomes, through consensus, if not true then real.

Many developmental psychologists note that, as children grow older, their games move from exercises in freeform imagination to more complex, rulebound affairs. During games of hide and seek we had an elaborate ritual for deciding how long the player who was ‘It’ had to count before coming to find us, where various tests determined the number they’d count up to, whether they’d count fast or slow and whether they’d count in anything from quarters to increments of ten.

Some of these rules were obviously inherited tweaks that prevented unfun strategies – the person counting was required to incant ‘no fools around me, up nor down me’ as a kind of ward against anyone who might attempt to stand right next to them and touch base the instant they opened their eyes. We agreed upon boundaries to the area of play.

In any given game we were competing against each other, but the enterprise that made our competition possible was pure politics. ‘Politics’ has its root in the Greek polis

– which we see today in words like ‘metropolis’ – meaning city. Etymologically speaking, it’s about managing the complex demands of lots of us living together. To do that, we have to practise negotiating and agreeing upon a shared reality, the terms over which further debate can take place. The merchant and bureaucrat playing by the Tigris aren’t just blowing off steam – they’re practising and reaffirming their commitment to this sort of cooperative bedrock.

To me, games are like those test areas you see in spy movies or science fiction, where the characters are looking down through reinforced glass while on the other side, down in a hangar bay a huge flamethrower tests the heat-shielding on the experimental car, or test dummy gets vaporised by a faulty teleporter. We get to explore, safely, a range of negotiation strategies, based on a range of needs, from temporary alliances and friendly trades through to deception, betrayal, browbeating and outright aggression.

But even when a game doesn’t allow for explicit politics within its mechanics, the fact it works at all is a testament to our incredible capacity as humans – perhaps our key competitive edge – to construct a shared reality.

Now, I’m sure this will come as a rude shock, but in the real world politics doesn’t always result in positive outcomes. Sometimes this capacity for constructing a consensus creates groups playing radically different, mutually incompatible games for very real stakes. The very existence of alternative games feels like a violation. It feels like cheating.

This isn’t to dismiss political ideologies as mere games, so much as to elevate games’ importance in our lives. An election is a game with clear rules, a time limit, a scoring system – the only un-game-like element is its real world consequences. Televised debates take a very game-like form, where candidates are given time limits to deliver answers to set questions or offer rebuttals, then various media outlets hold polls to determine the ‘winner’.

In recognising the ludic character of political discourse, economics, the justice system and so on, we can take a step back from them – not to disengage from decisions affecting our lives, but to better appraise the assumptions undergirding them. What are the unspoken rules guiding who gets to play, and what is and isn’t considered a legitimate move? Who decided upon those rules? Who do they favour?

In playing games, we practise working together to manage healthy conflict within a broader context of trust, mutual respect and the desire for everyone to come away better off. Even if we can’t transplant these ideals to our international politics just yet, hopefully we can bring a little of it to our daily interactions, and recognising that there are better and worse ways of winning.

In playing games, we practise working together to manage healthy conflict within a broader context of trust.