Chicago '68 is a board game for 1-4 players covering the Democratic National Convention of 1968, a pivotal moment for the United States' involvement in Vietnam and the evolution of party politics during the turbulent 1960s. Players take the sides of the protesters or the Establishment; in 3-4 player games, the two sides are divided into different factions. Rules are also included for solo play.
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"The World is Watching": A Space-Biff Review
[Mirrored from spacebiff.com, where Dan Thurot does some of the most thoughtful and insightful criticism in gaming.]
It’s a rare board game that asks you to locate yourself in history. To do more than merely visit some remote decade but to recognize your place within it, the ways it has accompanied your country, your family, your self all the way through to today.
Yoni Goldstein’s Chicago ’68 is, as the title indicates, about the Democratic National Convention of 1968 — fifty-six years ago this very week — when protests against the escalating Vietnam War flared into a riot between demonstrators and police. Its anxieties are our anxieties. War or peace, one nominee or another, racial tensions that remain with us still. We’ve played protest games before, but Chicago ’68 is the crispest example yet, neither abstracted like Bloc by Bloc nor given the bird’s eye view of Votes for Women.
Most of all, it has a profound, sickening familiarity that both of those titles lacked. This is play not only as history, but as a mirror.
The mean streets of Chicago.
I have strong opinions on the best way to play Chicago ’68. Inevitably these will differ from somebody else’s preferences, but they stand resolute as essential paths to understanding this particular slice of history.
First of all, this game works best with four players, something I would never say about Votes for Women despite it bearing that option on the box. This is no stapled-on multiplayer mode for the sake of expanding one’s database entry on BoardGameGeek. Playing with four permits direct control of the game’s four factions via human representatives. More than that, it generates a certain fog of war. Although its sides are tightly interlinked, miscommunications and divergences are crucial. In my most recent play, the two demonstrator factions developed contrasting notions about which approach to pressuring the Democratic National Convention would be most effective. Their goals were identical; the difference was a question of method.
My second preference is that the game ought to be played in its original turn format. Which is to say, each round — representing either the daytime or night of the final three days of the protest — should first be played by the Mayor and Yippies, and then the MOBE and Police. There’s an alternate mode in there, one that uses a specialized deck to randomize the turn order. It’s a more dynamic way to play. More chaotic, too, which suits the setting. But it also evades the game’s sharper moments and confounds the clear distinctions between the behavior of its factions.
Mayor Daley leans on his political connections to enact evil.
I don’t often care to talk about modes or player counts. These are granular details, difficult to conceptualize without the game arrayed between us, not to mention somewhat boring to discuss in a review. But in the case of Chicago ’68, it matters. Even the little details, like which side goes first in any given phase, provide essential textures that bring the game’s thesis to the surface.
Consider the game’s factions. There are four, broken into two broad camps. On the antiwar side there’s the MOBE, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and the Yippies, the Youth International Party. Despite being unified in their objectives, these organizations operate according to their own logic. Broadly speaking, the Yippies are the organizers. They seed the board with agitators who can lead the crowds to targeted destinations, establish rally flags where newcomers and stragglers may congeal into cohesive protest groups, and organize acts of street theater to communicate their message to the press and the American people. The MOBE, on the other hand, is the rank and file. They swarm the parks and streets of Chicago, massing in such numbers that the police cannot easily displace them. They also engage in clashes with the authorities, pressing against barbed wire, erecting barricades, or driving back police platoons with their bodies.
The same divide is evident on the establishment side. The leader is Mayor Daley, whose career was storied with corruption charges that only ever stuck to those around him, and who has promised peace in the streets. Mayor Daley is responsible for the high-level decisions: communicating with the governor’s office to deploy the National Guard, authorizing teargas and flamethrowers, pressuring the Convention to announce a delegate for Hubert Humphrey rather than antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. His allies, the Chicago Police, are the ones who lob the teargas and ignite the flamethrowers. This is the game’s most straightforward faction, here to crack heads, conduct mass arrests, and hold the line between the hippie-infested parks and Michigan Avenue.
This is what happens when theater kids decide to change the world.
This is where those little details matter. In the first half of each round, the Mayor and the Yippies square off in a contest of organizational will. One side plans performances; the other arms the police with deadly weapons. Later the MOBE and the Chicago Police get their own chance to shine, taking those organizational cues into the streets to either perform street theater, engage in clashes, or beat up some teenagers. This is, by the by, why I prefer the game when played according to its original logic rather than with those shuffled-up turns. Its distinctions are cleaner that way. The Mayor and the MOBE are not the same. The Chicago Police and the Yippies are not the same. Shuffled together, those delineations get a little too fuzzy for my comfort.
As games go, the interplay between these factions has all the tenderness of a skinned knee. Other titles — I’m thinking of Bloc by Bloc here — have sometimes relied on hidden roles to amplify the uncertainty. There’s no need for that here. As the demonstrators, your goal is to either pressure the Convention to nominate McCarthy or swing the media exposure in your favor. Either will suffice. Within those objectives, however, there’s plenty of room to differ on the best course of action. The same goes for the Mayor and the Chicago Police, albeit to a lesser degree. More than once, we’ve watched as the Police were so heavy-handed that they bled the Mayor’s political capital dry.
Along the way, Goldstein pulls a few tricks that prevent the game from getting too mathy. Arithmetic is the great limitation of the medium; everybody knows that four counters are better than three counters, so we board gamers are doomed to tally wooden pieces until our eyes cross. The same is true here, although only to a degree. Great mobs of protestors and police must be counted in order to assess relative control, but such moments are relatively rare. More often, this conflict is gauged by the presence of special pieces that are impossible to misplace. Agitators, around whom the protests take on form. TAC units, the Chicago Police’s stormtroopers, ready to billow clouds of teargas into the Hilton Hotel. The National Guard, ostensibly there to keep the peace but only beneficial to one side in practice.
With so many bodies on the streets, controlling the outcome is impossible.
That’s only the beginning. Goldstein deploys cleverer touches that both reduce the game’s mathiness and produce… let’s call it truthlikeness. Playing Chicago ’68, I’m reminded of my own limited time marching in demonstrations and protests. In one sense, the game has provided additional context to a handful of my own lived experiences.
The first of these touches is the street theater deck. These cover a range of activities, from holding a mock “unbirthday party” for Lyndon B. Johnson to dedicated women’s marches, musical performances, or Allen Ginsberg chanting ommm over a loudspeaker all afternoon. There are also perils to these activities, underfoot dog turds like sellouts or government moles that must be carefully pooper-scoopered lest they distract from your intended message. In practice, these cards operate like sidequests. Moving agitators into the proper destinations to conduct a performance confers some benefit. They provide focus to an otherwise undirected mob. They are the chants, songs, slogans, signs, and prayers that direct a demonstration’s fury in the proper direction.
But they’re only half of the equation. Golstein also offers a “mob chaos” deck. Whenever a clash between protestors and police hits a certain threshold, you’re forced to draw one of these cards. Now the expected outcome is thrown into uncertainty. Maybe somebody has been injured. Maybe the police riot has drawn too much attention and harmed the Mayor’s manicured image. Maybe a swarm of protestors has frightened the locals into reevaluating their position. Whatever happens, it’s transformative, both for the gameplay and the message it imparts. Because sometimes the mob, whether we’re talking about the mob of protestors or the mob of police, isn’t properly directed. Sometimes, even the surest action can fall victim to that invisible judo that twists the arm of public opinion.
TAC units incoming.
There’s nothing like it. Truly. Playing Chicago ’68, I was transported. More than that, those transported memories were imbued with new meaning. I thought about the chants I’ve chanted, the public prayers I’ve offered, the songs I’ve belted until my throat ached, surrounded by fellow demonstrators, united in this one commitment to justice despite differing in nearly every other respect. I also thought of the counter-protestors edging closer, some of them holding their holy rifles a little too surely. The police standing nearby, always on their side of the street and not ours.
It’s a hard game to swallow. I often say that we play games for two reasons, to either blow off steam or to take it in. Chicago ’68 is about the latter. It asks us to take in so much steam that we might burst. But that’s the point. With enough steam, we are animated. The kettle whistles. The engine crawls forward. The world changes, maybe.
Maybe. But not in 1968. That’s part of the game’s history, too. “The whole world is watching,” went the chant. The whole world was watching, all right. But too much of the world stayed home. Hubert Humphrey won the nomination, and then Richard Nixon won the presidency. The United States plunged deeper into the Vietnam War. Maybe the next time, we’ll get off the sofa.