Ah, Captain’s Chair. I’ve already logged my appreciation of Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi’s remapping of Imperium into the Star Trek universe. Like that series, now sadly defunct thanks to the shuttering of the board-gaming side of Osprey Games, this is an information-dense deck-builder that absolutely revels in its moreishness. Quite literally. It features more icons, more decks, and more chrome-laden rules per cubic micron than any other deck-builder I can recall.

Now there’s a second-wave box, To Boldly Go. If you’ve played the original, you know what to expect. Seriously, newcomers can just read my previous review.

I really wasn’t bluffing. I’m not about to spill anything new. OR AM I? Look at me, playing like Q.

For the most part, To Boldly Go repeats the accomplishments of that original set, featuring six new captains who can either be commanded in one of the game’s default duels or faced as an opponent in the (excellent) solitaire mode. As with Imperium, these decks are what make Captain’s Chair Captain’s Chair. Like an unassimilated technological and biological lifeform, they’re distinct.

How distinct? Distinct enough that there’s good news and bad news.

First, the good. The captains in To Boldly Go are even more dissimilar than those in the base box. Even the ones that are relatively “baseline,” like Soval, Philippa Georgiou, and the long-awaited James T. Kirk feel different on the table. Having served as an ambassador to Earth, Soval fuels his abilities by dismissing them as a species — in game terms, by literally chucking them out of his hand. Which is a bit of a double-edged ability, since he wants to fill his deck with enough exemplars of mankind to keep his better abilities churning. Kirk, meanwhile, is an all-rounder, forced to emphasize the game’s various flavors of influence equally. The flipside is that, as the grandfather of this galaxy, he’s more likely to draw encounters, the ultra-powerful scoring cards that most captains only see one or two of throughout an entire session.

The other captains are wackier, and I mean that entirely as a positive. Khan breaks the game’s usual rules, dispensing with the customary science/diplomacy/military track to instead mind-control a diverse crew and start shouting Moby Dick quotes at his enemies. No, really. He has Moby Dick quotes. Archer, being the flashback character, starts with a deck that fits in his starting hand and nearly no away team tokens for conquering planets. Instead, he has to rush to form the Federation from scratch, giving him some incredible early-game momentum but the testiness of having to forge synergies from first principles. And then there’s Rebner. I haven’t seen a single episode of Below Decks, so I have to trust Buckle and Turczi when they inform me that Rebner’s whole deal is that he’s a total moron. He draws only three cards per turn, can’t utilize science or diplomacy at all, and his cards get stronger as they find and don big hats.

Actually, Rebner has become my object lesson for To Boldly Go at large. He’s a total hoot to play, and moreover he’s forced me to embrace a portion of the game I’ve always tended to overlook. Returnees to Captain’s Chair might already know what I’m talking about. In the market, there are four main decks that players can freely recruit from. Three of those decks — people, ships, and allies — offer immediate utility. The fourth, the one called “cargo,” has always been a little trickier to use. These are special items that… well, they do all sorts of things. Which is both the value and the drawback of cargo. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Most function as attachments, things you can merge with other cards to bestow new abilities. But they aren’t always that, and sometimes their wilder effects can be more trouble than they’re worth.

Rebner, with his crew’s emphasis on securing and wearing fancy hats, makes cargo a necessity. His starting deck has a bunch of hats, both in its starting pool and for later recruitment, a stark contrast with most captains who might have one or two tucked into their reserve. What’s more, a couple of additional hats can be found in the cargo market deck. They get a “helmet” tag and everything.

But that reveals an issue with To Boldly Go. More specifically, an issue with merging To Boldly Go with the original Captain’s Chair and any forthcoming sets.

In short, the original game didn’t contain any helmets. Which means that poor stupid Rebner is going to have a heck of a time finding any hats for his crew when using the original Captain’s Chair market, whether on its own or blended with the offerings from To Boldly Go.

Of course, the issue is broader than a shortage of hats. It’s that each captain has their own objectives to pursue, and these objectives often require them to dive through the market for specific keywords. Some of these tags are standardized across sets. Roughly half the card pool has been duplicated from the original box, and there are always plenty of humans, Vulcans, and Klingons. For captains who need specialized tags, merging or crossing-over sets just became a testy proposition.

This isn’t to say the issue is a dealbreaker. Nor that it presents an intractable problem. There have always been tools for rifling through the decks of Captain’s Chair, in particular the “scan” ability that allows players to search through a certain number of cards — even multiple market decks — to mine a specific keyword. It’s pretty rare that you’re beholden solely to whichever cards are currently on display.

But it highlights a certain jankiness to the system. Turczi has compared sets to drafting cubes. Captains function best with the cards in their box, not necessarily when merged across sets. Which, to some degree, makes the whole thing a little less appealing, at least to this guy. I’d much rather rest assured that I could have Kirk face down Koloth or Picard take on some theoretical third-wave Borg Queen without worrying about the composition of the market introducing its own subspace turbulence.

Because, yeah, Captain’s Chair is good enough, even with these bumps, that I want to keep exploring what it has to offer. Even at its most maximal — frankly, thanks to that quantity-is-quality — there’s a thrill to seeing how Buckle and Turczi can mine their deck-building system for new ways to express this particular setting. I loved the diversity of cultures in Imperium, that it was possible to have something sprawling like the Roman Empire throw down with the Olmec and the Inuit, each with their own cultural focuses, and still function at all, let alone present such a compelling contest.

Here, decks are even more distinct. Combined with the additional flexibility of a system that stretches further than its predecessor, the result is a game that keeps me coming back. Even when, on occasion, it frustrates me with its avalanche of icons, a lane-battler core that sometimes gets lost amid everything else, and now the persnicketiness of sets that don’t effortlessly merge.

Maybe this was always inevitable. As Imperium grew, that system faced similar aches and readjustments. Any growing pains are only compounded by the sheer enormity of what’s contained in each box. So much for balance; then again, it was always a remote possibility with decks as varied as these.

Either way, here’s to another Captain’s Chair. Going forward, I think I’ll boldly shuffle everything together, consequences be damned.

 

A complimentary copy of Star Trek: Captain’s Chair: To Boldly Go was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

I’ve never been to Machu Picchu, but it was the site that demonstrated to me at an uncomfortably young age that history wasn’t just one thing but many, and that those many things were subject to a wide range of interpretations. Even, possibly, that they might end friendships.

Which is appropriate, because that’s exactly what Wiñay Kawsay, designed by Alison Collins, is all about.

At a sky-high level, Wiñay Kawsay is set at Machu Picchu. You can see it right there. The map is even helpfully labeled with the various temples and complexes that were constructed by the Inca Empire sometime in the 15th century.

But the game is also set elsewhere: in universities and magazine offices, at dig sites and museum storerooms, and in the minds and imaginations of historians, archaeologists, students, and countless readers and viewers. For such a complicated tale, not to mention one told by a freshman designer, Wiñay Kawsay is deftly told. Collins weaves an entire warehouse of threads together with real deftness. The resultant tapestry — perhaps more appropriate, the cumbi — appears simple. In reality, it’s anything but.

Most board games would have their players build Machu Picchu. In Wiñay Kawsay you’re here to deconstruct it. To deconstruct and dig and brush away sediment, to catalogue, to publish, to argue. In its earlier incarnation, the game’s full title was “Wiñay Kawsay: Publish or Perish,” a mouthful that was nonetheless instructive. You are historians, practitioners of a 20th-century discipline rather than artisans of the 15th-century, and the mountaintop ruins have yet to yield their secrets.

Little by little, your search scratches the surface. Gray blocks are removed from the map along with evidence cards, their backs color-coded with hints about their nature. This portion of the game is operated via worker placement, with researcher meeples deployed to recover blocks and artifacts. As the rulebook indicates, there’s an element of destruction to this process. Stones must be removed — carefully, with intention to be replaced, but removed all the same — to uncover what lies beneath. Artifacts will be removed for study and, often, displayed in far-off countries or private collections. In game terms, this translates to “impact.” For every block displaced and card recovered, you move along a track, leaving a trail of displacement in your wake.

Everything recovered reveals a function. Ornate pottery speaks to wealth. Sudden abandonment hints that the site may be one of the continent’s mythical lost cities. Guardhouses and moats and narrow bridges indicate military use. The astronomical alignment of windows and dwellings prompts thoughts of the heavens.

Very quickly, however, one thing becomes clear. There is no singular “truth.” At least there isn’t one hidden in the deck of evidence cards. There are tendencies, certainly. In the aleatory shuffle that begins each round, sometimes a corner of Machu Picchu develops in one way or another. A cluster of pink cards speaks to the site’s religious importance; a scattering of reds lends credence to the idea that this was a military citadel.

But it’s what you do with these fragments of evidence that makes Wiñay Kawsay so compelling.

First, evidence must be published. This is presented via an atypical auction system. One player approaches a publication — a journal of military history, say, or a compendium of ancient history. They arrange their evidence cards and at least one of the gray blocks they took from the dig site. This is their bid.

At this point, competing players are allowed to get in on the action with their own cards and blocks. When everything is revealed, this might result in competing interpretations. In fact, it’s downright common. Icons are tallied to reveal which interpretation is most favored at the moment. Then the player who submitted the bulk of the evidence in that interpretation becomes the publication’s author, adding a color-coded book or two to the professorial desk that serves as their resource shield.

In its abstraction, this auction system captures something of the discourse that is historical authorship. Ideas matter, but only in the turbulence of publication and counter-publication. Along the way, things fall through the cracks. One interpretation that seemed solid might slip out of favor, only to resurface later when its evidence card is dredged from the archives. Meanwhile, material artifacts — a broken spine, misgendered bones, grave goods — become tally marks in ideological tug-of-wars, disappear into a crate somewhere, and then are found later to be returned to Peru, usually with some gravity of ceremony to ensure your institution doesn’t get in too much trouble for pillaging somebody’s heritage.

Which is to say it’s all so very earthy. This is history as tangible product, something dug out of the earth and then fiercely argued over. History, even, as personal prejudice and petty squabbles. It’s history as the ongoing conflict between fieldwork and archive work. And the game hasn’t even unveiled its centerpiece yet.

When the game opens, you haven’t yet established a favored interpretation. That occurs naturally as you publish your first papers. But then, maybe twenty minutes in, the game shifts gears. You have your interpretation. Now you’re asked how you’ll defend it.

There are three options. The first one, the one most of us would recognize as history as an ideal practice, is Empiricism. Over time, your approach to the evidence changes. This requires you to put forward and defend multiple theories — sometimes contradictory theories. By publishing books in multiple colors, your ultimate reward is a well-rounded score derived from a whole range sources.

In some ways, Empiricism is a safe bet. Any and all evidence might become valuable. But as you’ll soon discover, it’s also a precarious approach. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum is Determinism. This approach puts forward a single theory at all costs, seeding only a single color across the map of Machu Picchu, but scoring those blocks over and over again. As a Determinist, you have the answer already in mind. The evidence is down there. All that remains is to find it. And to ignore, bury, or overwhelm any evidence to the contrary.

The third route sits somewhere in the middle: the Popularizer. Rather than having an interpretation at all, the Popularizer is here to talk about how cool history is. Basically, you’re the 20th-century history version of those I Fucking Love Science social media pages that share unsourced listicles about how neutron stars prove the universe is one big brain, maaan. In some ways, this is the safest route. As soon as you declare yourself a Popularizer, you ditch the burden of having an interpretation at all. Instead, you gain a documentary crew. This you place on one of Machu Picchu’s sites, where it earns points for every colored block. Not only some, like the Empiricist. Not only one, like the Determinist. All. As your popularity expands, you unlock additional film crews to cover further sites. Maybe you’ll even talk about aliens on some podcasts.

(Note: There are no aliens in Wiñay Kawsay. Thank goodness.)

What’s so fascinating about the model Collins has presented here is that it demonstrates not only the process of uncovering and writing history, but also its dangers and drawbacks.

Here’s my favorite example. In one session, I was playing as an Empiricist. That meant I favored nearly all evidence, right? Well… sorta. As the game progressed, one of my rivals outed himself as a Determinist. Specifically, a Determinist for the military theory, the idea that Machu Picchu was a citadel that projected force onto the surrounding agricultural communities.

And he was doing a bang-up job of finding evidence. Red cards, the ones that support the military interpretation, were appearing all over the place. When a lull in mace-heads and splintered bones finally presented itself, our resident Determinist had already unlocked the special action that let him plunge into the archive — the discard pile, which is very much in-play throughout the entire game — to pull out cards that matched his ideological slant. The board was redder than the binding of Chairman Mao’s Quotations. Or the cover of a Dan Bullock board game. Very red indeed, is what I’m saying.

Which meant that I, the Good Guy, the One Who Accepted All Evidence, started burying red blocks every chance I got. I still earned them, of course. In the course of publishing articles about The Militant Traditions Evident in the Soil Layers of Machu Picchu, I gave the military theory its due. Still, while I was oh so impartial on paper, beneath my player shield I was hoarding red blocks rather than adding them to the map. I even scoured each round’s opportunity cards for new ways to swap one color for another. A lecture series became a chance to discuss how, yes, there were some military artifacts here and there, but they really bore religious significance. Adios red blocks, hello pink blocks. I capitalized on popular beliefs to add more yellow blocks to the Temple of the Sun. I abused radiocarbon dating to swap reds for blues in the Residential District.

And I won. By the slenderest possible margin, I took it. I’d become the very thing I supposedly despised, a vandal of the archaeological and written record. But I’d beaten my foe, and done so while remaining the very model of a modern history-writer. To the outside world, anyway.

I wish I could say that these abuses of history are the exception, but that hasn’t been my experience. I grew up in a culture that enthusiastically encouraged higher education for everyone… provided everyone then used that education to prove the right things.

Machu Picchu was one more bystander of that culture war. In middle school, a close friend bragged to our group about how his father was taking people on tours that proved the Book of Mormon had really happened: it had been a Nephite stronghold, a satellite kingdom of Zarahemla that was wiped out in the war against the Lamanites a few hundred years after Jesus Christ had visited the Americas. In reply, I pointed out that the latest radiocarbon dating placed its origins no earlier than 1420, and furthermore argued that it was problematic to rob an indigenous group of their history to service a white Christian millenarian narrative.

LOL. I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t know the first thing about the Inca, and I probably would have told you that “cultural appropriation” was when you really liked bratwurst. But those ruins were a long way from where my seminary teacher said Zarahemla was really located, so I bounced back with something like “That’s bonkers.” Eloquent seventh-grader fare.

Anyway, my friend got very upset. “Are you calling my dad a liar?” upset. Not-talking-for-three-days upset. So upset that he stopped eating lunch with me.

Because even when history is very badly done, it matters. That’s one of the things Collins seems to be saying in Wiñay Kawsay. These ruins are real. The artifacts we draw from them are real. But the stories we tell about them are only perceptions of reality. Better or worse, accurate or inaccurate, studious or half-baked, they were written by people who had their own versions of the Inca, or what certain items must have been used for, or how this story could be told.

This situates Wiñay Kawsay in rare company. Plenty of games use historical settings, but not many of them are about history. Wiñay Kawsay is about history. It’s about how history is the study of primary sources and artifacts, but about how it’s also about relating a story that makes sense. The result is a warning as much as it is a love letter, a game that believes in the process of making good history — in looking at the past, the entirety of it — but which is never unaware that bad history is always close at hand, one error, oversight, or unexamined bias away. Hopefully there are correctives, found in peer review and publishing and debate. Hopefully.

At any rate, Collins has crafted something impressive, a heady blend of sharp gameplay and shaper insight that’s far simpler and more playable than anyone could rightly expect.

 

A complimentary copy of Wiñay Kawsay was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

Geoff Engelstein was influential in bringing Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete to the United States in 2003. It’s unsurprising that Geoff, alongside his children Brian and Sydney, have tapped into the spirit of that phenomenal race game, pairing its traditional roll and move structure with several new flourishes. In fact, there is so much of that…

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