History on the Tabletop: Interpretation, Contingency, and the Power of Play

The past, it is often restated, is a foreign country. And like a foreign country, no matter how many times you visit, no matter how intimately familiar you become with the place, the non-native will never be fully familiar with the place. In the film Rental Family, Japanese native Shinji Tada tells American expat Phillip, “You could live in this country for a hundred years and there will still be things you won’t understand.” Indeed, how many of us really know our own national homelands? Region, generation, social class, and economic status – all limit our ability to know all there is to know about a place, and certainly shape the understanding we do have. If we can’t fully grasp our own present, we certainly can’t expect any single medium to capture the entirety of the past.

I raise this because of a recent discussion I participated in at SDHistCon – a historical board game convention – on how well (or how poorly) history-based board games reflect the past.

Of the many arguments against the value of such games for providing historical understanding is the predominant focus on warfare. It’s true that in the history of board gaming, so many of the games produced have been war games. 

This of course started with Avalon Hill’s Gettysburg and the hundreds of games they’ve produced since then, and continued in and through the 1980s with the widely popular and top-selling Axis & Allies (originally Milton Bradley).

But while war games continue to feature prominently in historical board game production and sales, since at least the 1980s, a range of other non-military games have appeared. Consider, for example, Die Macher (1986), which simulated the dynamics of the West German political system of the time, or The Republic of Rome (1990), which gave players the opportunity to learn the intense internal balancing act of the Roman Senate through gameplay. In 1996, Age of Renaissance appeared and explored Mediterranean mercantile empires while Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013) explored nineteenth-century abolition from the ground up. Many, many more could be added to the list.

But the other obvious argument against the value of board games for learning history is that the medium of the board game itself is ineffective. It is too narrow, too limiting, to capture history in its fullness. There is a lot that could be said in favor of this argument, and I don’t mean to create a strawman that’s easy to chop down, but I do want to respond to this argument from the perspective of a professional historian.

From that vantage, I want to provide some perspective on what history is and is not. In short, history is an interpretation of some aspect of the past, and no written history ever captures the fullness of that past. In the first place, what historians write is always limited by the sources they have available to them. Even as historians since the 1960s have become enormously creative in their definition and use of sources, they are still limited to what’s available to them. Second, the perspective of the historian matters. It shapes the questions they ask, and how they ask them. It shapes how they interpret the sources. Historical interpretation is also shaped by sub-disciplinary focus. There is military history, and diplomatic history, and political history, and social history. Let’s use the Vietnam War as an example. How one approaches the war historically depends upon whether the historian is Vietnamese, French, or American. It matters whether the historian fundamentally believes that the Cold War was all the fault of the Soviet Union or all the fault of the United States or somewhere in between. And is the history a strictly military narrative? A cultural study? Does it look at the war in Vietnam or protest movements in the United States? Does it look at battles and their outcomes or the experience of the common soldier? No history of that war can capture all of the possible bases, and new interpretations are bound to focus on new aspects of the war or bring new perspectives to old aspects of the war.

History-based games, it seems to me, offer the same range of possibilities. Granted they have tended to focus on the military past, and in doing so, they pay a lot of attention to grand strategies or combat tactics, catering to all the armchair generals out there. And much of this has to do with the entwined origins of wargaming and tabletop games. It also has to do with the convenient transferability of hex-and-chit game design from one military contest to another. But as the board game hobby has developed since the 1960s, game designers have become enormously creative in the innovation of new game mechanics applied to new aspects of the past.

Thus much as historians have explored new ways of researching and writing about the past, game developers have done the same. With each year comes more games that explore politics, economics, social interactions, music, the urban environment, and race relations. Consider, for example, Cross Bronx Expressway, which “simulates the socio-economic processes of urban development, and the human costs that result.” Another great example is The Nights of King Ludd, scheduled for 2027, which simulates the Luddite movement in industrial England in the early nineteenth century.

As a historian and game-lover, I don’t need convincing that one can learn history through games, but I also believe there are good, rational reasons why learning history through gameplay works so well.

Learning through games taps into one of the most basic ways human beings make sense of the world: play. Long before we sit in classrooms or read monographs, we learn how things work by testing boundaries, experimenting with choices, and seeing what happens when a strategy fails. As developmental psychologist Jean Piaget famously observed, “Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.” One of the reasons for this is that play lowers the stakes of getting things wrong and turns passive observation into active participation. By pushing against the rules and watching how the world pushes back, you discover for yourself how a system actually operates.

I have seen this dynamic firsthand over years of developing and facilitating role-immersion games for students and educators through Reacting to the Past. Whether participants are debating the crisis of the American Revolution or wrestling with the ratification of the Constitution, something shifts the moment they step into a historical role. They stop treating the past as a list of names and dates to be memorized for an exam and start treating it as a live problem to be solved. Even when the medium is a tabletop board game rather than a classroom debate, that same instinct takes over: players lean in because their decisions actually carry weight.

When you apply that kind of playful engagement to the past, games can do something that written history often struggles to achieve. In the first place, written history is almost always linear, and that linearity can make past events seem inevitable in hindsight. We already know how the story turns out. A well-designed historical game, by contrast, places the player inside a dynamic system of constraints, scarce resources, and competing pressures—and it strips away that hindsight. To play the game well, you have to wrestle with the same kinds of trade-offs that historical actors faced. Do you spend political capital to pass a measure now, or hold it in reserve for a looming crisis? Do you push an advantage on one front and leave another exposed? Through those choices, players begin to grasp not just what happened, but why certain decisions were made, and how easily things might have gone differently.

Of course, no game will ever turn us into native citizens of the past. Just as Shinji Tada reminds Phillip in Rental Family, there will always be things about another place and time that remain beyond our reach—just as there are corners of our own homeland we never fully know. A good history book can serve as an indispensable guide to that foreign country, written by someone who has spent years studying the terrain. A good historical game, however, drops you onto the street, hands you the local rules, and asks you to find your way. You may never fully belong to that world, but through play, you begin to understand how it worked from the inside.