Some of the game pieces with banners. Photo: Jessica Metheringham.
‘It’s easy to create a social justice message, harder to weave it into a sophisticated product.’
So many board games ask players to fight or farm. Jessica Metheringham decided that enough was enough, and set about devising something different
Two years ago, I had an idea. Sam Walton was talking about how he and Daniel Woodhouse, also known as ‘Woody’, had broken into BAE Systems’ site in Warton with the intention of disarming planes bound for Yemen. Listening to some of the details about plane spotters and sizes of crowbar, I thought: ‘This would make a great board game.’
I play a lot of board games. I made a game for my sister’s thirtieth birthday, which involved both pirates and probability. When my first baby was very little the highlight of my week was the parent and baby board gaming group, where we played cooperative games without small, easily-swallowed pieces.
In the games I’ve played I see the same patterns coming up; most games have a central narrative of either conquest or creation. It’s relatively rare to find a game which isn’t about either conflict or about producing goods through farming, building or trading. (Pandemic is one well-known exception, where players work together to find a cure for four diseases.) I enjoy all of these sorts of games, even the fighting ones – a conflict strategy game can be very cathartic. But there is something of a gap in the narrative. I wanted to fill that.
Sam and Woody’s activism fits well in a game context. There’s the suspense of sneaking into the base. There’s a clear objective of disarming a plane. And there are quite a lot of factors that could be tweaked to change the game play – where are the guards, which hangers are empty and which are occupied by planes?
From all of this I’m creating Disarm the Base. It’s a cooperative board game in which the players work together to unlock hangers, disarm planes, and get back to where they’ve left their banners and placards before the time runs out or the security guards see them.
Sam and Woody were not the first people to try to disarm warplanes. Twenty-three years ago, in January 1996, four women succeeded in causing significant damage to a warplane bound for Indonesia. The four activists – Angie Zelter, Joanna Wilson, Lotta Kronlid and Andrea Needham – were known as the ‘Ploughshare Four’. They were acquitted under the Genocide Act on the grounds that they were taking reasonable action. Sam and Woody took one of the hammers they used in 1996 with them when they entered Warton.
One of the things I’ve found difficult has been getting the tone right. The actions these activists took were illegal: they were arrested and tried. But they were also acquitted. Their motivation was their desire to change the world for the better. Does this game celebrate illegal action? Am I promoting breaking into a base? Subtlety is important, although there’s a real risk that nuance gets lost in making the game.
In most mainstream military strategy games the motives of the soldiers are glossed over. Game developers tend to give them obviously evil enemies, such as Nazis or aliens, and don’t explore their values or why they signed up for the battle. In contrast, I feel that I have to make the background motivation of peace activists clear – perhaps because it’s new, but perhaps because the military storyline is so well established and the protest narrative is not. So, in Disarm the Base the players use codes to get into the hangers, not axes. They disarm the planes with bolt-cutters. The amount of damage that would be caused is as minimal as possible, given the objective of disarming planes.
Direct action is necessarily action that challenges fundamental principles of established thinking. The aim of Disarm the Base is not to sneak out without taking responsibility, but to get back to where your banners and placards are waiting – the implication being that the next stage is to announce your success and wait to be questioned.
There have been more challenges than emphasising motives – mostly to do with how the game actually plays. One feature of the game is guard pieces, which leave a guard hut to come and block hangers. The guards’ function is to prevent the players from entering a hanger to disarm the plane inside, and the players use cards to encourage the guards to move. Finding the balance between too many and too few guards has been the most difficult part of balancing the game.
The game has evolved in simple ways, too. The board contains lights at each corner and a gate in each side, and initially I had simply numbered each one. Then the illustrator, Mark Bijak, gave me a draft with the lights and gates corresponding to points of the compass. It suddenly made it seem so much more real. Mark’s stylized illustrations will make the board feel like a base at night, with bright tiles to show the floodlights in the corner coming on and colour-coded planes hiding in the hangers.
I’ve been surprised by how the unfinished game has lurched between too hard and too easy. The very first play test demonstrated that the game worked, but that it was far too easy. As I’ve refined the rules, tweaking the numbers of cards, the game has become harder. Recently it’s been too hard when playing with four people, but too easy played by two people. The solution is going to be to take out some cards for the two player game, but which cards and how many of them?
As I’ve tweaked it, sometimes it’s become less fun. This is a game first and foremost, so it needs to be enjoyable. It needs to work as a game in order to keep being played. It’s easy to create a clunky social justice message, but much harder to try to weave the normalisation of direct action into a sophisticated creative product. Disarm the Base encourages people to think about the way in which direct action could take place, from the suspense of avoiding the guards to finding the right ways to break into the hangers and disarm planes. It’s just a game, but it’s a game that is different.
Further information: www.disarmthebase.com
Profits from the game will be going to Campaign Against Arms Trade. A Kickstarter (online pre-ordering system) will open at the end of July.
