of the battle initially went poorly, or because they
were surrounded by a flanking maneuver, they some-
times would turn and flee, progressively throwing the
soldiers around them into greater states of confusion
and terror, and exposing everybody to complete
slaughter. This domino effect was on bloody display
at Adrianople, for instance, in 378 CE, when Gothic
cavalry surrounded and hacked to death a larger force
of Roman troops, thereby accelerating the fall of the
Western half of the empire. Something similar hap-
pened six centuries earlier, at Cannae, where 50,00 0
Carthaginian troops commanded by Hannibal massa-
cred a force of 86,000 Romans almost to the last
man. In the first two years of World War II, the Ger-
man army performed roughly analogous feats of arms
by using columns of blitzkrieging tanks to encircle
and successively defeat Polish, French, and Russian
defenders.
This helps explain why these conflicts are such
popular themes for war games. Unstable battle dy-
namics tend to produce exciting, dramatic results.
World War II, with its highly kinetic battles, has in-
spired more war games than any other war. Indeed,
the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad alone (which ended with
the encirclement and massacre of the German Sixth
Army) has been the subject of at least 70 published
board game titles.
Compare this with World War I, which is a rela-
tively rare subject for board game designers. The
reason is obvious: The hyper-stable trench warfare dy-
namic that governed the conflict makes gameplay pre-
dictable and boring. In World War II, the availability of
massed tanks and air power meant that an attacker
could apply enormous striking power in a way that
could easily overwhelm an enemy’s localized defenses.
In World War I, on the other hand, the reliance on
trenches and machine guns created the opposite
dynamic: Many attacks resulted in hideous casualties
for the attacker and few for the defender. Any pertur-
bation to the battlefield dynamic would usually end
with a reversion to the status quo.
Does this suggest some sort of simple, linear rela-
tionship between battlefield dynamical instability and
gaming fun? No, because at some point, a military dy-
namic becomes so unstable that it does not really lend
itself to any satisfying form of recreational simulation.
It is notable, for instance, that hyper-modern forms of
warfare, especially those involving standoff missile
systems or nuclear payloads, are not particularly popu-
lar themes among war gamers. If you can annihilate
whole countries with the push of a button, the game
becomes a simple race to see who can push the button
first. There have been some good games produced on
the Cold War theme (such as Twilight Struggle), yet
these tend to avoid the apocalyptic military aspect and
instead focus on espionage, geopolitics, diplomacy,
trade, and technology.
In gaming, as in some parts of life, there is al-
ways going to be a sweet spot between perfectly sta-
ble and perfectly unstable system dynamics. The
rich-get-richer aspect of Monopolymay produce bit-
terness and social friction. But on the other hand,
no one would want to play a perfectly socialistic
version of the game, in which all income is distrib-
uted equitably, no one ever goes bankrupt, and the
game never ends. Likewise, a real-life economy in
which there are no winners and no losers would not
work because, as 20th-century experiments with
communism have showen us, an economy in which
hard work yields no personal benefits is an econ-
omy in which no one does hard work.* * *Board games take inspiration from real life. That does
not mean they always reflect the values and prefer-
ences we exercise in our real-life capacities as work-
ers, family members, friends and political actors.
Some of us may be drawn to the cutthroat dynamical
instability of Monopolybecause it makes for exciting
game play, while also recognizing the fact that real life
has to follow different rules because humans have
more complex and urgent needs than game tokens.
Even so, the dynamics that govern Monopolycan
help us understand how much of the character of our
societies is embedded in—and dictated by—the dy-
namical feedback processes encoded in our economy
and laws. If you want to improve the moral character
of a society, you do not necessarily have to change the
way people think and feel. Sometimes, all you have to
do is fiddle with the rules that govern what happens
every time they pass Go.volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 2 5This essay was adapted with
permission from Your Move:
What Board Games Teach Us
About Life, by Joan Moriarity
and Jonathan Kay, published in
2019 by Sutherland House.
$17.95. 180 pp. ISBN-13: 978-
1999439545