Milwaukeean Makes History with Board Games

by

A&E Feature

Like vinyl LPs, board games have seen a comeback in the digital age from people seeking the physical pleasure of objects—aside from cellphones—that can be held and played. Milwaukee’s Ben Madison transformed his hobby of playing board games into a parttime job of making and introducing new ones for gamers. Since 2004, Madison—often working with collaborator Wes Erni—has produced some 15 board games published and distributed by a variety of companies in the U.S. and abroad.

This summer Madison adds two more games to his resume, a revised edition of “Death in the Trenches” (published by Compass Games) and a brand-new title, “Kaiserkrieg!” (from White Dog Games). Both concern World War I and are part of a flourishing genre of war games within the board game field.

His newest games belong to a distinct subgenre within that genre. “I like strategic games, big campaigns, not games about individual battles,” Madison says. “I’m not as interested in the military side of war as in the political side. The big picture of war interests me more than the nitty-gritty.”

In 1983 Madison, a political science-international relations major at UW-Milwaukee, spent a semester abroad at the University of London. There, he met students playing a sort of Dungeons & Dragons historical geopolitical game called “The 1898 Campaign.” “It was a roll playing game of political leadership of countries and alliance forming,” he recalls. Back in Milwaukee, he began working out an American version of “1898” with friends, including Erni. “We were always thinking about improving (existing) games,” Madison continues.

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In 2004 Madison and Erni entered the gaming marketplace with “Byzantium Reborn,” based on the post-World War I struggle between Greece and Turkey for control of Asia Minor. The following year saw the first edition of “Death in the Trenches,” which won a Charles S. Roberts Award, the board game industry’s answer to the Oscars.

Madison brings unusual scope to his historical projects. “Death in the Trenches” doesn’t stop at the western or even the eastern front but embraces the war in Africa and the Pacific as well as the Senussi Revolt in Libya and the Armenian Genocide under the Ottomans. Unlike “Death in the Trenches,” a game for two players (or two contesting teams), “Kaiserkrieg!” is a solitary pastime. The player draws markers from a bowl and rolls dice to help determine moves around a map of Europe.

“It’s a game of chance and strategy,” Madison explains with random draws converging or confounding the player’s calculations. “Kaiserkrig!” is played from the perspective of the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey. The odds are stacked against victory—since in real life the Central Powers lost to the Allied British, French and Americans—but the game is designed to give the player an opportunity to rewrite history.

“The outline should conform to reality—with boundaries to the unreality,” Madison says. “It’s a question of balance. Do you want a game that is so balanced that both sides have an even chance to win? Do you want a Confederate victory in a Civil War game? Is the purpose to reflect history or enjoy the contest? I err on the side of history,” he says. And yet, in games as in war, a seemingly random occurrence can alter the outcome.