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Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost Board Game Is Finally for Sale

Kurt Vonnegut’s Lost Board Game Is Finally for Sale


Kurt Von­negut’s life was not with­out its ironies. Fight­ing in World War II, that descen­dant of a long line of Ger­man immi­grants in the Unit­ed States found him­self impris­oned in Dres­den just when it was dev­as­tat­ed by Allied fire­bomb­ing. To under­stand the rel­e­vance of this expe­ri­ence to his lit­er­ary work, one need only know that his cap­tors made him live in a slaugh­ter­house. It’s not sur­pris­ing that anti-war sen­ti­ments would sur­face again and again in the books he wrote after com­ing home. But one would hard­ly expect him to have spent his time away from the writ­ing desk on a mil­i­tary-themed board game.

“After releas­ing his first nov­el, Play­er Piano, in 1952, to pos­i­tive reviews and poor sales, he need­ed oth­er streams of income to sup­port his grow­ing fam­i­ly,” writes the New York Times’ Julia Carmel of the young Von­negut. Of all his endeav­ors — which includ­ed pub­lic rela­tions, a car deal­er­ship and a very brief stint at Sports Illus­trat­ed — he was most pas­sion­ate about design­ing a board game called Gen­er­al Head­quar­ters.” Read­ers of Von­negut’s nov­els might expect a sar­don­ical­ly didac­tic object les­son on the futil­i­ty of war, but in fact, “GHQ is a fast-paced two-play­er bat­tle game in which each play­er maneu­vers mil­i­tary units — infantry, armored vehi­cles, artillery and an air­borne reg­i­ment — to cap­ture the oth­er player’s head­quar­ters.”

Von­negut nev­er did man­age to sell the game, which has only just come avail­able for pur­chase at Barnes & Noble stores. Its long-delayed pro­duc­tion was the project of a table­top game design­er called Geoff Engel­stein, who ran across a brief men­tion of GHQ that even­tu­al­ly inspired him to inquire about the game’s sta­tus with the writer’s estate. The 40 pages of notes amid Von­negut’s papers include sev­er­al revi­sions of its rules, but also pitch let­ters to board-game com­pa­nies sug­gest­ing that GHQ could “become the third pop­u­lar checker­board game” — and even “be used to train cadets at the U.S. Mil­i­tary Acad­e­my at West Point.”

Despite prob­a­bly hav­ing missed its chance to enter the stan­dard mil­i­tary-acad­e­my cur­ricu­lum, the game could nev­er­the­less become a must-have among col­lec­tors of Von­negutiana. Accord­ing to the Kurt Von­negut Muse­um & Library’s online store, “this first edi­tion of GHQ fea­tures deluxe wood­en pieces and a 24-page com­men­tary book­let, show­ing Kurt Vonnegut’s actu­al design notes to give insight into his cre­ative process.” It may “lack the sig­na­ture dark sense of humor that runs through Mr. Von­negut’s writ­ing,” as Carmel puts it, but it sure­ly could­n’t be with­out his less wide­ly acknowl­edged — but no less char­ac­ter­is­tic — instinct for enter­tain­ment val­ue.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

A New Kurt Von­negut Muse­um Opens in Indi­anapo­lis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rol­lick­ing Nov­el

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

The Fiendish­ly Com­pli­cat­ed Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Dis­cov­er The Cam­paign for North Africa

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.





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