some spare words about Arcs

 Hello!

So I just wrapped potentially my favorite Arcs campaign that I've played to date. It was one of the closest finishes I've ever seen - the last card of the last hand of the last chapter determined the winner - but it was also a triumphant narrative that had me thinking a hell of a lot about the game we’d just played - which is madness, considering how many times I’ve now sat down to mess around in The Reach. I wanted to ramble about it all, just a little bit.

Act One had us start as the Steward (build a powerful empire!), Partisan (seize the initiative and cause trouble!), and Magnate (facilitate trading and export resources). Our Steward struggled to get things rolling in the early game, with high-scoring ambitions going to this outrageous, populist Partisan hoovering the limelight, with the wealthy Magnate funding them. The Steward’s empire was growing healthily, but its benefits were shared a little too freely - plenty of purple ships were on the board keeping things in check, but no points were actually there for the Steward, to make it all worth something. Act One eventually saw The Empire fall into the Partisan's hands, at the height of its powers! Actually, it didn’t so much as fall into their hands as it was neatly placed - gifted to them through a small court manipulation from the Magnate - who traded their agents for a hefty stash of resources leading into Act 2. This then soon led to the Magnate actually leaving that very same Empire - becoming an outlaw as an elaborate means of tax evasion.

Act Two was a stunner, opening with our Partisan revealing their true colours as the vitriolic Planet Breaker - leveraging their now staggering military might for Empire-sanctioned worldbreaking. Huge fleets of pristine empire ships watched on as planets were torn apart with ruthless efficiency.  Whilst this happened, The Magnate offered bountiful tributes of weapons to this despot in order to maintain preferential treatment - terrified by the powerful yet fickle monster they had helped to create. The Steward, scorned, became the equally cruel Hegemon - traveling to the deepest corners of the Reach to scorch the earth and raise banners in their name. This alarmed our Planet Breaker - there was only room for one despot in town! Time for a spot of warfare.

The Magnate took the opportunity to play both sides of the ensuing conflict, dispensing weapons to the highest bidder, and eventually securing monopolies on Fuel and Material both - just in time! The Planet Breaker swiftly fells the Hegemon with a decisive blow and subsequently shatters their original homeworld, removing another fuel city from The Reach. The Magnate spies an opportunity to permanently secure their monopoly - electing to themselves eradicate one of the final material cities! But their frequent tributes to the Planet Breaker meant that their monopolies were not enough - ultimately failing their second act objective by a single point of progress as the reach began to burn…

Act Three brought total chaos, as the Planet Breaker tried their best to fend off two freshly created horrors. The Magnate twisted into the Judge - seeking to restore balance and order - and the Steward-turned-Hegemon once again shapeshifted - into the chaos-oriented Gate Wraith, who would seek to blow holes in space, and send ships into an amorphous limbo called 'The Twisted Passage'.

In this final act, the Planet Breaker continually tried to keep these squabbling factions in check. The Gate Wraith collapsed space alarmingly fast, and the Judge halfheartedly arbitrated whilst accumulating healthy interest on their monopolies of material and fuel both. For the Gate Wraith - creating this twisted passage was not enough - they needed to control it - and saw returning to their Regency, to their Stewardship, as the only way to do so.

An immense, multi-chapter battle for the regency took place, whilst the judge quietly siphoned allies from the court. But whilst they were looking in one place, something far more frightening simmered. With all this attention placed on control of the Empire - nobody checked its health. A freak chance event caused the Empire to fall - turning both squabbling regents into outlaws, and decimating Empire control across the board. What’s worse, this event coincided with violent storms within the Twisted Passage - sending the already-ailing imperial fleet to a sudden demise. It was total chaos - reducing the entire board to just a few sad ships circling the drain.

But then! The very next round? Legions of those Empire Ships returned from the dead, ghost ships drifting through the Twisted Passage and once again staking a claim on this focal territory for the Empire - an Empire with no leader. There they lingered, until, at the very last second, the Gate Wraith wrested control of the Empire for good - their entire presence in the Reach now condensed into the storm at its center. With that, they took victory of the campaign - their final goal achieved. What did they have to show for it? A Reach that was utterly devoid of motion - planets and gates devastated with equal measure, not a single scrap of life left on the board save for flecks of stranded blight, and the lone outpost of a once great Magnate still hoarding his vast material wealth.

My goodness, what a delight it all was.

So this is all gooey narrative stuff, which I obviously adore, but I was also just in disbelief as to how it all ticked along mechanically despite the board state getting so loopy.

I played as the Magnate in this game, and whereas I’ve previously felt a little adrift in the negotiation space of Arcs, here things really popped to life. I felt confident and competent! I managed to have what people needed at the times they needed them, leveraging a powerful court position to make deals with a Steward who had no access to relics - and who was also curiously reluctant to use their signature ‘Dealmakers’ card - and a Partisan with a shopping list of needs for scoring ambitions every single round. At one point in the game I sold the initiative! It just clicked in a way I’ve previously felt a little unable to scratch.

I think that a (by his own admission) slightly weaker Steward led to a terrifically interesting gamestate. Stewards normally present a problem for Magnates, who really want the power that comes with the taxation options of the regency. I felt like securing the First Regent title might have created an embittered relationship, and so took myself elsewhere and became an Outlaw that resisted Empire control and violence through the odd favour of resources garnered through the ever-useful ‘Merchant Leagues’ card. I was more than happy to see the Partisan compete with the Steward for control of the Empire as it represented a high profit environment for me to thrive in - but my goodness it started to get really ugly once they’d shifted to the Planet Breaker.

Cripes, the Planet Breaker is simply terrifying when they’ve got a powerful Empire behind them. I’ve never felt like The Empire has been more ‘we’re the baddies’ coded, as this wrecking-ball of a fleet shot around the map and leveled planet after planet with zero resistance. Arcs stories have complex villains - characters pushed to the edge resorting to any means to make their beliefs into reality. Here, everyone was scum - no two ways about it.

I also found a rare situation where, as a C Fate, I quite quickly had my signature card taken away due to planet breaker outrage. Without ‘The Arbiter’ card, The Judge has a tremendously difficult time doing the ambition-balancing that makes them a threat - and it immediately made my Act 3 rather tough on a conceptual level. See, I thought I was out straight away! But I simply was not. Playing a very successful Magnate in Acts one and two meant that I had a near 20 point lead on both of my opponents - so I stood a significant chance of winning on that front even with the mega points our Planet Breaker had access to with their Grand Ambitions! I realised far too late that I should have committed hard to that approach - I could have been pretty unstoppable. Those fuel and material monopolies were nigh impossible to get off of me because there were so few cities left on the board due to empire mismanagement and a greedy planet breaker, with both other fates sporting flagships reticent to upgrade to get resource slots in favour of instead increasing their millitary might. I should have been declaring Tycoon every single round and completely palmed off my C Fate objective! I would have taken a small penalty in points, but I think I might have outstripped the planet breaker even with their grand ambitions.

And goodness, there were just so many sparkly little moments. I’ve left out of my retelling a moment where the Planet Breaker was no longer appeased by my Magnate tributes, and bragadociously arrived over my homeworld to eradicate it - it was next on their shopping list of populous planets to destroy! They felt unstoppable, not expecting me to seize the initiative and blast them into smithereens before they had a chance to fire a single shot - a fabulous moment!

Similarly, the Gate Wraith was popping open gates phenomenally quickly at the start of act 3 - and were just about to use one of my starports to open another! I felt helpless to defend it - with so few ships present anywhere on the board to contest. But then, out of nowhere, the Planet Breaker turns up and doesn’t fight their fleet, but rather detonates my starport! Rather than stay to fight afterwards, they then just peace out back to the Twisted Passage where they can’t be harmed, and the Gate Wraith has to drag their flagship off to the other side of the Reach to build a recently-broken slipstream drive. Very funny.

And what a horrible space we lived in by the end of our campaign - next to no buildings on the board, five planets completely out of play, and every single gate collapsed into the Twisted Passage. It didn’t come out of nowhere, though! It gradually slipped, turn by turn, through greedy players and bad decisions.

The climax of the game was quite literally a perfect storm. The ‘Empire Falls’ card spells absolute disaster for anyone in the Empire - but its chances of triggering naturally are quite slim - a 50% chance of a crisis triggering from an event card, and then a further 33% chance of that card causing real damage. The Empire played the odds - putting all their effort into wrangling control of the power itself without ensuring that power had stayed relevant! Not only that, but the ‘Empire Falls’ card was seeded into the deck all the way back in Act One, when the Steward first lost their power! For that specific card to return at that specific time? When a shadow of a shadow of that Steward desperately attempted to crowbar themselves back into an Empire that they failed to control, and to maintain? It was exceptional. It was one of those moments that had everyone physically stand up. It had heads in hands, It had wide-eyed disbelief at quite how bad things had gotten.

The thing is - all of this still came with a lot of Arcs’ signature mess. Lots of rules disputes, lots of misremembering cards, lots of having to parse all of this on top of the trick taking game. Our Steward player, whilst playing the game, had the realisation that they probably wouldn’t be introducing the campaign to their game group in the near future. The whole thing took us about 10 full hours, and would have been even longer if our fourth player hadn’t dropped out beforehand.

Arcs, the base game, is the kind of box that I think anyone can love - given the right approach to the systems, and electing to meet it on its own terms. 

The Campaign? I would personally recommend it more than anything else out there in board games - I think it’s one-of-a-kind and spectacularly iterates on the ideas of everything Leder made before it, whilst building a more competitive (if more complex) experience. 

But it’s so much. It’s too much. It’s a bonkers, bonkers box. But I’m so glad it exists.

I’m hoping some of this will make it into a definitive ‘campaign guide’ for Arcs that i’ll make down the line - focusing on how to teach this huge new version of the game, how to approach it as a player and as the person who owns the game, and how to strategise within its monstrous sandbox. But that’ll come down the line. For now, more campaigns. What a treasure.

jelly

Sitting in the heat on a deliberate day with a sky open as god’s closet; breeze and heat corralling me toward the sweet pocket of calm that’s typically hard to find. I should meet the world in the middle here and bask but 

god! 

dammit, 

if I’m not too busy being fucked off for no good reason.

I read something, alright. I read something good and nourishing. It’s struck me right through with misery.

Increasingly I’m recognising the tendency in myself to struggle against great work rather than simply advocate for it and enjoy it. When someone’s real good at something I ought to be able to bask - but instead I soak the shade, rejecting advocacy for a self-defeating spite.

This feels common in creatives; and frankly I want to talk to you so I can get through to myself.

You’re familiar with the feeling? Engaging in work of your own and then chancing upon that of another, where its immediacy falls into sharp relief against your own tired, trite language? Whilst their work is fluid and fresh and engaging, yours is dribbled down the chin, wretched and queasy?

stop it!

you little ghoul!

By shaking the hand of creative work, you’re entering into a binding contract with self loathing, sure. There will perpetually be better, but relying on that yearning to drive you is a fast path to nihilism. You’re tilling your fields with fertiliser, bud! Great plants will soon grow but you’ll ever seek fresh ground to break after the harvest.

You are not a field, you are a garden! 

Allow that garden to be wild and spiny, with its half-burned grass and its weeds and its bees and over there’s a rockery and a path that dips to a bank cluttered with crushed cans and husks of pests and an apple core half-rotten in the grass with its brethren unpicked - that barbecue, neglected, still stings of petrol and rust and misuse and time but you’re to huddle round it like a campfire because those coals may glow onwards despite all the everything around them.

Your friends are here; they see it all as it is, and you see them as they are.

Stop. Take time to bask. That sun shines briefly and it is better enjoyed together.

some spare words about SHUX 2022

This was originally sent out as the body of a SU&SD Donor Newsletter - I've cross-posted it here because I wanted to gush about this incredible convention to whoever wants to listen!

Tom: Thank you! Really, thank you. If you were at SHUX, you contributed to the most wonderful, affirming, powerful thing in a nearly 5,000 mile radius from my current location - which is quite the feat as I live about 5,000 seconds from a place that makes the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten.
 
I’d like to use this newsletter to share some highlights.
 
First, the games, and the people that played them. We walked past a table playing Panic on Wall Street which Quinns insisted I first spectate, and then have a go at rolling ‘The Dice That Determines The Stock Market’. I’ve never seen a table of people go from ecstatic to crestfallen so quickly as I personally tanked everyone’s bank balance. Apparently, those dice have sides that make the numbers get bigger? I somehow managed to roll in such a way that every number got smaller. I think people might have been legitimately angry.
 
There was a delightful moment where the entire hall erupted into various cheers and applause - the team presumed it was a proposal but, no, some folks just finished a marathon game of TI. It was heartwarming to see the Blood on the Clocktower folks so busy all weekend - a continual drip of excitable social deduction fans giving that huge tome a little try. I’m gutted I only got to experience a single round of Jonathan Ying’s excellent ‘Spot-It-Royale’ (or ‘Dobble-Royale’) - watching 20 or so strangers bond over the need to win.

It’s just charming to be at a convention where people are excited about games, but they’re just as excited about people. We did a signing on the second day and I’d never signed anything before in my life before that point, so scribbling my signature on hundreds of things in a row was quite the introduction. What I remember, though, was a group of people who came up to the table, nattering like old friends. I’d asked where they’d all come from, and they told me they’d all travelled from different parts of the states. ‘Oh, so you’re used to travelling to meet up, then?’ ‘No! We just met yesterday!’ These people looked like they’d known each other for 24 years, not 24 hours! It felt special - like proof that people at SHUX were so trusting that anyone would help them have a good time. Even when not sitting down to actually play a game, people were excited to tell you about them - sharing stories and highlights, giving you the scoop on what might secretly be the next best thing, and pointing excitedly at what they’re desperate to try.

 

That attitude extended into the live shows, where everyone felt like they were there to enjoy themselves. Our shows were at many points disorganised, chaotic things that fell apart in all kinds of exciting new ways - but having an audience that truly has your back is absolutely essential for someone like me, who is generally quite uncomfortable clambering onto a stage (more on that in just a moment). I felt at ease for the first time during a live show, and that’s no mean feat - having a crowd of people with hearty, unique laughter for any one of our Quite Bad Jokes made being on that stage an absolute joy. They made me comfortable enough to ‘be myself’ onstage rather than try and ‘Go Presenter Mode’ as I often do, so, thank you.

 

And an even bigger thank you to the volunteers and expo hall folks who made the weekend actually possible! It warms my soul that people would volunteer so readily to do something that serves only to increase such daft joy; and I hope that people treated you well (I trust they did!) And I’m glad those folks meant we got to do a convention safely, how we felt it should be done. Yes, masks significantly change the ‘vibe’ of a convention in a tangible, if hard to entirely pin down way; but we felt it was the right thing to do. Every single person not only obliged us, they kept the ‘vibe’ as buoyant and energetic as if the masks weren’t there in the first place, they managed to create a convention that felt so normal - better than normal - in abnormal times. Thank you.

There was this great volume of pride that blossomed in that final show, that closing ceremony. Tears were not so much jerked as they were yanked by that wall of post-it notes where people scrawled their memories of the weekend. It’s all packed down in an instant - it’s a controlled explosion of cardboard that vanishes as soon as it arrives. And I got back home and I tried to explain to my partner about the whole thing and I just dissolved into tears, instantly. I couldn’t get words out about how much enthusiasm there was, because all of the language I could use was too saccharine, too true, too overwhelmingly positive to be taken seriously. But I was so serious - I was so jetlagged, I was so delirious, I slept for upwards of 16 hours solid afterwards! But I got every single emotion out of me in that one moment where I cry-laughed through an explanation of the most chaotic and excitable 72 hours of my life. Thank you.   It reframes your purpose in this hobby, both professionally and personally. Seeing that many people bonding over silly cardboard reminds me how much I owe to silly cardboard - how much my social anxiety and nerves are quelled by the presence of that silly cardboard, how silly cardboard has created or reinforced some of my most treasured memories and wonderful friends. I don’t want to clutter a space that’s intended to show off the work and feelings of others with my own personal guff - especially as the work of said others trumps any small thing we do for the show. But I will, of course, because it leads to more thank yous.   I’m really, really nervous. I’ve been told, lots, that it doesn’t come across that way - especially not in the highly edited videos that I put out for SU&SD, but it’s something I’ve come to really recognise about myself in recent years. ‘Nervousness’ or ‘Social Anxiety’ or whatever else you might want to call it retrospectively explains a lot of my odd behaviours and currently explains a lot of little tics and mannerisms that I won’t point out for fear of being noticed.   I once had to give a speech after receiving a little miniature award for a piece I wrote as a student. I choked out an ‘I’m bad at this’ and then immediately left the stage because I thought I was going to hurl. More recently, Quinns introduced me to one of his friends, a friend who seemed cool, and I spent my first 10-20 words of my introduction to them on babble, noise, not-words because I couldn’t hang on to what I was meant to do in a social environment. And at PAX Unplugged, faced with the prospect of doing my first live show in front of so many people - I was nervous to the point of being physically quite unwell. Before the show, I felt like I was having an actual fever, shaking, pale, queasy, yuck.   SHUX solved all that, and you can visibly see it onstage! I’m cosier than I’ve ever been before when presented with such kindly, helpful humans. But I’m now back, in a weird way, to being nervous about it all again. You’d think that’s silly! SHUX was great, I was fine, it was all good, NIGHTMARE SLAIN and all - but I think I only got to that state of ‘un-nerves’ because every single person caught me at any possible fall. SHUX reminded me not just that you people were there to catch you and help you and chill you out and stab imposter syndrome right through its barbarous heart, but also that outside of the live events, everyone has caught me digitally. Those first videos of mine were quite bad, my videos still make me cringe - but everyone being so eager to enjoy themselves, so invested in the channel, in boardgames… it creates this bubble of support that makes me feel deeply fortunate to be where I am - truly lucky, blessed, undeserving of such positivity. Seriously, thank you.   So what next? SHUX has filled me with a hell of a lot of energy. By the time this goes out to you folks, both the Stefan Feld City Collection video will be out, alongside a Turncoats review the week after. I think these videos are a good representation of how I want the site to continue over the next few months - a bit of that old, stable, good-time SU&SD feeling, and a bit of weird experimentation. Because I know that the folks in the comments, the folks in Vancouver, the folks who keep this site running, will catch me. Thank you. ­

some spare words about Gloomwood

Any work in this space is an exercise in trying to get me to write more. These are written in an hour maximum and are a bit messy round the edges in a deliberate attempt to make me stop trying too much. Maybe you can enjoy bits ?? I don't know. Thanks! Also there are spoilers.

Gloomwood creaks. If there’s one sound effect that permeates through this game’s entire ethos it’s creaking; floorboards moaning underfoot, doors that screech from their hinges, a lift that lets out a tremendous, bellowing groan. It goes a long way to sell a world that’s, to put it lightly, not in great shape, aching from what its as-yet-unknown antagonists have been up to. The creaking continues into other objects, too; there’s sputtering, dribbling sconces, guards whose wheezing coughs give away their imminent end, mechanisms that are reluctant to start and eager to stop. There’s an atmosphere here, to put it lightly; an atmosphere that flows freely from a rigorous understanding of the first-person perspective, from a truly decadent suite of sounds, from making every shadow into a chasm for light, and from a complete and utter disregard for how games ought to look.

Okay, so, New Blood’s low-poly, “boomer-shooter” approach to visual design is hilarious from certain angles - and undoubtedly ripe to be picked apart by those twitter accounts you see complaining that TLOU2’s blood doesn’t smear enough when you roll around in it like an animal. Obviously, I do not care about ‘The Graphics’ and nobody should care about ‘The Graphics’ - it limits our ability to truly let games get under our skin to care about ‘The Graphics’! But some people, bless their hearts, really care about… ‘The Graphics’. Stop caring about ‘The Graphics’ and embrace… the vibes.

Everything you do in Gloomwood is slow. Really slow. R e a l l y s l o w. You have to wait for Guards to finish long, languid patrol patterns while hiding in nooks and crannies, you have to press your ears up to doors to check the coast is clear for a cautious trudge across a hallway, you have to sluggishly pull yourself up long chains and ropes to slink across darkened rooftops. This caution is brought on by a whole number of factors - but most obviously it comes from the game’s approach to Souls-Style saving. There are phonograph save points scattered throughout the levels - they don’t replenish your health and reset enemies like your bonfires, sites of grace, and "goblin lanterns" do - but they serve as bookmarks interleaved between long stretches of cautious onward exploration. The levels loop back on themselves like in Souls games - expecting you to start small and gradually creep outwards, unlocking new scraps of territory to master until you have the lay of the complex, compact whole.

Why is this pace relevant? Precisely because it lets you slow-simmer into the tone - it forces you to care about environment, sound, pacing and lighting so that the image astounds even if the individual aspects are ripped straight from the 90s. Sluggishly poking your way through these dense knots of space means that you stay enough to let the game imprint itself into your brain beyond its first impressions - so you can latch onto the image . The mellow glow of a lighthouse lantern sweeping its way across a weary dock, or a skulking approach to a cliffside hut with its spluttering owner displacing the floorboards one step at a time.

It’s these images that let the game work its way into your imagination - but they just would not function if this title didn’t spend so much of its attention on the important stuff, on the immersive stuff. A lot of the game is spent in a cannery in which guts (fish? human? who’s to say?) coat much of the earliest floor you’ll slop your way across - and had the game rendered some exquisite lower intestine I might have found the section typical, ogglable, and forgettable. But by lavishing you in squelches, hiding the textures under heavy blotches of darkness, keeping you crawling through the level… your very own great organ - the brain, not the lower intestine - produces an image transcendent of ‘The Graphics’. The game burrows into your imagination and makes a little home there.

There’s more to this trick, of course. The way that your inventory is a physical, tactile object that you pull items from - out of the ‘menu world’ and into the ‘real world’. The way that NPCs travel just a little further than you think when investigating a distraction, or each surface having its own audible effect on your footsteps reminding you that you’re here. But all this only exists, only sings, because the game looks like it does - drenched in black and polygons askew.

The magic trick is creating a game that feels like it’s from the 90s - but the trompe l’oeil of its visual design is just a small brick in a larger edifice - it’s the façade that enables this game to feel like those games felt…. But not really. It feels better, but only because the care is placed where it need to be in order to let this world run riot in your very own imaginative sandpit.

some spare words about Hardspace: Shipbreaker

 Any work in this space is an exercise in trying to get me to write more. These are written in an hour maximum and are a bit messy round the edges in a deliberate attempt to make me stop trying too much. Maybe you can enjoy bits ?? I don't know. Thanks! Also there are spoilers.

In January of 2022, a disastrous Fox News interview stymied (read: halted) the exponential growth of the r/antiwork subreddit. During the pandemic, in the rare gaps of reflection afforded in opaque times, the occasional class warrior in all people stewed in the digital percolator. Something about the unchanging four walls of a hasty home office allowed labour to materialize as an object to be examined, poked, prodded, appraised; an outlet was needed for discussion of this immutable part of life that seemingly never satisfies. Antiwork initially rallied against pointless labour, it championed adequate compensation for the sale of body and brain, it committed itself to the pursuit of a healthy work-life-balance. It represented a level of class-consciousness and solidarity that the platform previously showed little empathy towards.

January was where two conflicting ideologies brewing in the forum came to a head - that of fair work, and that of no work. The latter fermented from a simple start  - the malt of post-scarcity sprouting vague tendrils that consume discussion and spit out idealism, ‘reckons’. What movement existed was struck through with a misrepresentation that devoured itself; culminating in the interview where a moderator of the space gets somehow dunked on by Jesse Watters. Utterly defenceless, the moderator can’t place the ideology they’re supposed to represent, and Watters clumsily shears the philosophy through its transept into two uneven halves.

The clip is shared. The community is aghast. Class solidarity flips to class conflict. It happens.

Get this; Shipbreaking is satisfying. Shedding great plates of titanium, prising back each layer to delicately clip the innards from their moorings. This comes with knowledge - you learn layouts and know precisely where to punch a perfect hole to jettison cargo. You develop process and a flair from execution where you drift, clip, neaten, correct. Each new task comes with an implied moment of sizing up your quarry, a hands-on-hips examining of the stretch of plates and pipes before kneading out the stiffer knots of metal. In countless reviews and critiques, there is talk of the bones or ribs of the ships that you slip through in a dance of reverse-repair; a tiny little vet making incisions in a metal mammal. It is a joyous game, and it is joyous labour.

This is the magic trick of Hardspace: Shipbreaker; highlighting labour as a worthwhile, entertaining, and fulfilling pursuit. It rapidfire simulates the mastering of a craft, the satisfaction of a ‘job well done’; but encases that spark in an interior system that’s outwardly oppressive. That doesn’t make much sense, but I'm trying to get this written fast - and besides, it’s very easy to pretend it does make sense. If you can simply imagine the words fitting together better it’ll save both of us a lot of time and me a lot of effort. Thx xx

Here’s the antiwork comparison. Shipbreaker illustrates the “worthwhile” of labour: within or extant from the system of capital it exists in. It sits firmly on the former of the two camps - “let us work in a meaningful way within the bounds of the human rather than the financial”. The game knows Shipbreaking is an enjoyable art, its characters share a fondness for the job; it should be done… but not like this.

There’s a core here that’s clumsily explored in the capital N “Narrative” of the game. The cast of characters does slide maybe too far into black-and-white territory - they certainly contain depth and dimensions but socket into a narrative that’s awful obvious. Take Weaver! A yearning for the joy of a job he’s no longer fit to do is displaced by a management of it; a care and affection for people that honeys his voice in fatherly advice. His purpose in the narrative is ultimately just to become straightforwardly, linearly radicalised. We’ve all been there. Hal, the company representative, is a funhouse mirror of every bad boss you’ve ever had. His purpose is to be the blank-slate baddie who instead gets linearly, more obviously toxic - and whilst the twists of the knife and outward cruelty are effectively cartoon-villainish, they’re never unexpected.

And while we’re here, the implication of a winding path of repetitive debt leading to immortal slavery is something that’s not leant into or made obvious enough. That’s a silly sentence, so we’ll unpack it. The corporation the player works for, LYNX, allows its labourers to make huge profits by taking on the dangerous task of shipbreaking - but a ferocious sign-on-fee means that the player has to work, and probably die, before they’ll ever pay it off. Dying sounds bad for everyone - so luckily LYNX has a solution - the Everwork program - providing memory-complete spares of employees the moment they perish. The price? More money than you’ll have earned in every shift prior, nudging you further into that big hole we call debt. Now that idea has ballooned like a children’s bouncy castle, we can play in its imaginative space.

LYNX is effectively running a house-always-wins form of labour where credits earned are neatly offset by predictable mistakes and extortionate supply costs - and the Everwork program being inescapable means employees are essentially locked into eternal, ageless servitude. They’ve manufactured labour that can never fail, and a workforce that can never escape meaningfully. You’re an immortal slave and work is your hell. Maybe Shipbreaker is just entrusting players to put these pieces together, but I’ve not heard anyone talking about this implication. Evidently it’s just because I have a massive, massive brain, and a colossal head to keep it in.

Regardless of these flaws, this core is molten-hot and mature for the medium; it knows what it is doing. It’s a game that’s meaningfully in conversation with gaming. It’s in conversation with the dopamine drip, the progression loop, the mastery, the numbers going up. Maybe I'm being silly but I love the word ‘credit’ here for the game’s currency - acting as either generic spacebucks or a signifier of merit and ownership. And that bottomless pile of debt forces you to look for progression elsewhere - namely in slowly reassembling a ship that’s part-hobby and part ticket outta this dump. A critical plot-point that pinches it away from you playfully (and emotionally) manipulates those linear strings of upward momentum we’re so used to having in basically all of games. When you realise that the aforementioned credits aren’t a meaningful metric, you can focus on the work outside of its capital - and I think that a lot of people who doggedly stick to credits as a yardstick for improvement report the game not quite working for them. LYNX Tokens, the other form of currency, reek of scrip - the scent of which twins with the banjo-laden soundtrack to drag the game’s redolent connections to Americana, prospecting, and ‘gold in them hills’. Lovely stuff.

But by virtue of the media and our preconceptions of it, what the game is telling you about work can’t ever truly sing in a way that isn’t abstract. It is unavoidable that the player can stop playing; breaking that delicate illusion in two. The player is free to interpret this work as joy, as stepping away from the machine allows them to pocket the tactility and satisfaction into chunks, dinky squares of chocolate to savour rather than an unending slab whose sweetness is dulled by monotony.

I’ve not worked true “hard labour” jobs, but I’ve regrettably done an awful lot for the service industry. These are jobs where your fingers get all flaky and raw from dishes and your bones ossify from standing rather than, you know, imminent death from several hundred tonnes of flying space debris. But there’s a flicker of comparison in there. The feeling of an early-morning-opening or a late-night-close comes with a rooted satisfaction, running a ‘tight ship’ (rather than destroying one, I suppose) and having an ownership of a space that you’ve perfected, only to have it twisted by one shift too many, one hour when you didn’t need one, one overseer who hoovers up… credit…

So why is Antiwork important to this story? I’m not sure. I forgot. I think I wanted to illustrate some larger connection between the inherent value of work and the CAPITALISATION that’s turned the process of extracting that personal value sour. Antiwork is precisely at odds with itself in a way that Shipbreaker illustrates; ‘work can be fun! Not like this…’. As the game closes out with a successful unionisation effort and an understanding that the player may want to continue working the shipyard, you understand that play and work can be twinned in a way that’s healthy. They keep the Everwork program, you can work forever; it’s the choice that’s important. “You didn’t waste your time” - the game is keen to remind you - “this work is good”.

There’s a line from the ferociously punitive 6/10 IGN review that I really like: “By the end of its campaign, the repetitive objectives and intentionally slow progression made shipbreaking start to feel like exactly what it’s simulating: hard labor.” Goodness, isn’t this juicy. Shipbreaker, and this review of it, work in tandem to blur the line between games about work and games that are work. It’s fascinating to me because it ties repetition and boredom to labour. Beforehand, the satisfaction flowed thick-and-fast and work felt like it wasn’t. It illustrates the former side of the antiwork spectra. But doubtless, for our noble reviewer - with deadlines and critical burdens to worry about - the game slipped from fun to job. And then Shipbreaker wraps back round on itself: its point is made and its critical pearls ripe for plucking. If I were paid to write this I would enjoy the game less, which is the whole point. ‘Aint that something weird.

I don’t really have a conclusion, I’m not a very good writer yet. But you are very capable, what with your huge, succulent brain with all its slippery thoughts and unctuous feelings. There’s “gold in them hills”. Play Shipbreaker and let its illustrations and imperfections sit in your brain for reference or action. It is an achievement, a broken disco-ball of interpretation where a light, caught at the right angle, dazzles.