Antarctica
- Summer at the South Pole! - Cooperative board game
Sunny
Games
Ages
10 and up
2-5
Players
Go
For Broke
MB
Games
10-Adult
2-4
Players
Last
year various members of my extended family gathered around a coffee
table to collaborate on a board game, in which players must work
together to save penguins and seals from hunters and the tangible
effects of global warming. These good intentions culminated in an
incident in which my nephew, Jack, made a miscalculation that
resulted in either the death, or at very least, the serious
inconvenience of an innocent penguin. Jack is a sensitive young man and was mortified by the thought that, through his hasty, ill-judged
actions, he had caused harm to an animal and let down the rest of the team.
“It's
not a real penguin, Jack,” I assured him, from the comfort of an
armchair which offered me a commanding view over a portion of the
North Yorkshire Dales. (I refuse, on a matter of general principle,
to participate in board games that do not allow me the satisfaction
of either crushing, or being crushed by, my opponents).
Jack could not be consoled so easily: A fictional penguin had suffered and its
imaginary blood was all over his tiny ten-year-old hands. In the
absence of a competitive element to the game that would have produced
a clear winner and a pool of losers plotting some dastardly
real-world revenge, his fatal misstep had given rise to a deep sense
of shame that isolated him from his fellow eco-warriors and their minor victory.
Overlooking
this potentially emotionally-scarring episode and its long-term
psychological repercussions, Antarctica
- Summer at the South Pole! does
at least attempt to convey a positive, educational
message about the importance of teamwork and the need to live in
balance with our environment.
In
comparison Go for Broke's contrarian philosophy can be
summed-up as: “We're all going to fucking die, so fuck everything.”
The
ability to fecklessly splurge cash and the compulsion to gamble at
every given opportunity, are vices that players must wholeheartedly
embrace if they are to triumph in this truly reprehensible game,
whose values are embodied by an archaic cartoon on the box, depicting
a man dressed in a top hat and tails, gaily scattering paper money
from a satchel.
The
object of Go For Broke is to lose a million of the game's
worthless currency. Each flimsy, large-denomination bill is labelled
as a 'specimen' in several different languages, so as to minimise the
possibility that somebody might mistake it for actual money and
accept it in exchange for a lobster dinner or a Ferrari.
No
explanation is given as to why the players would willingly choose to
charge headlong towards a life of penury by forfeiting such a huge
slab of money: Is the game a re-enactment of a boorish stunt by
members of the Bullingdon Club? A money laundering scheme? Some last
ditch attempt to claw back good karma? It is never made clear.
Nor
is any light shed on what the winner gains from bankrupting
themselves. On the face of it, the losing players, who retain at least
a portion of their fortune, seem better off.
My
assumption that I would easily win the game by investing the entire
sum in an ill-conceived government I.T. project was soon dispelled
by a cursory glance at the instructions, which are printed on the
inside of the box, and offer a formulaic range of options when it
comes to divesting yourself from your bothersome savings. These are
based mainly on bad luck, rather than bad judgement. As such, Go
for Broke allows only limited opportunities for smug political satire
or social commentary.
As
if to raise the game's inherent cuntishness to near-intolerable
levels, players are represented on the board by miniature champagne
bottles with removable plastic corks. Like Monopoly these game pieces
are locked into an erratic clockwise orbit around the fringes of the
board, where the only variety comes from occasional detours to the
racetrack, the casino, the stock market and a sleazy back-room dice
game.
A
raised plastic dais, in the centre of the board, houses the cogs and
wheels of Go For Broke's crooked financial system: a roulette wheel, three
hexagonal tumblers representing a slot machine, a wheel that
determines the outcome of horse races and a spindle that simulates
the ups and downs of the stock market. I have successfully used the
latter to predict rises and falls in real world shares and am now a
billionaire who engages in white collar crime by day, and fights
blue-collar street crime at night.
It
is possible that both the skill-set and the lassiez-faire attitude
towards the economy were learned by the architects of our current financial crisis from childhood games of Go For Broke. Rigorous
scientific studies are needed to determine whether there is a
correlation between prolonged exposure to the game, and being one of
the hand-picked arseholes who appear on The Apprentice each year.
In
summary: Antartica: Summer at the South Pole! preaches to
the converted, who will enjoy the game's emphasis on cooperative play
and its morally wholesome message. Everybody else will be reminded of
the Modern Parents comic strip from Viz.
Go
for Broke ably predicts, and then gleefully celebrates, our
fuck-witted descent along the slippery slope towards personal debt and
national bankruptcy. It is a bleak message – one that is hard to
swallow, which is why I recommend that every roll of the dice should
be accompanied by a hearty swig of gin. None-the-less I applaud MB
Games for their staunch commitment to realism. More please.
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