Photo courtesy of Ben Madison
Ben Madison
Board game designer Ben Madison with the game 'Black Skin Black Shirt'
Like books and vinyl LPs, board games continue to hold their own in a world of digital overload. While chess and checkers, Monopoly and Scrabble remain mainstays, recent decades have seen a proliferation of new titles for niche audiences, many of them based on historical events.
One of the Midwest’s most active historical board game creators, R. Ben Madison, lives in Milwaukee. Since 2004, Madison—sometimes working with collaborator Wes Erni—has devised some 20 board games produced and distributed by a variety of companies in the U.S. and abroad, especially Texas-based White Dog Games. Madison’s resume includes games on the Byzantine Empire and both world wars. His recent release for White Dog Games, Black Skin Black Shirt, revisits the 1930s attack by Fascist Italy on Ethiopia.
Like many a music fan who picked up guitar and started a band, Madison’s board game career began as a hobby in high school. He purchased a World War II game and, he says, “almost immediately started tinkering with the rules and adding new pieces—but that was just for my own personal enjoyment. Still, it put me in the role of ‘designer’ almost immediately.”
Writing His Own
While studying abroad in 1983, Madison joined a University of London Union gaming club, where he “got involved with a self-published political/military role-playing game designed by two English guys there, called The 1898 Campaign. When I came back to the U.S., I wrote my own version of that game and started marketing it locally. It wasn’t done to make money but to get people involved in the gaming community, and to that extent it was a success even if it only lasted six months or so.”
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He began making history board games after meeting Erni in 1984. “Wes is a phenomenally good math analyst and getting the math right is a key element of designing a game that is balanced and gives players a feeling of tension and excitement,” Madison says.
Getting the history right is also crucial. Madison aims for accuracy, stacking the balance in favor of the real-life winners of the conflicts he depicts, but a wargame can take a path of its own. With a false move on the Allied side, could Germany have emerged victorious from World War I? Could Ethiopia have triumphed over Italy?
Accuracy and Odds
“It’s a good example of how historical accuracy and game balance often collide, because—thanks largely to the use of mustard gas—the Italians had a huge military advantage over Ethiopia. But I can’t design a game where the player always loses, and in this game you play the Ethiopian side while the game system plays the Italians,” Madison says. He researched the military and diplomatic facts in detail and found “places where the player might gain some small advantage. In a balanced solitaire game, you shouldn’t win the game much more than 50% of the time. But yes, in this game you can win, if you hold the Italians back long enough for the Italians to get dragged into the Spanish Civil War which diverts Italian resources away from fighting you.”
Madison has drawn some of the maps that are crucial to historical games, but “White Dog has some phenomenal artists who are much better at map graphics than I am,” he says. “My last few game maps have been done by José Ramón Faura, who lives in Spain—I’ve never meet him, only talked by email. But he’s amazing.”
Players used “counters”—cardboard squares that represent armies and other military, economic, and political forces. “I usually do my own counters, using Paint.net and (everybody laughs at me for this) MS Paint. The other big art object is the game box cover. I’ve done a number of these, but some were done by professional artists,” Madison says.
Although Madison began designing board games for multiple players, “I had already shifted to designing solitaire games before Covid hit, but it really intensified the market for solitaire games. So my name was already out there and I was in a good position to capitalize on the new audience stuck at home without a big group of buddies to play with.”
The audience? “The stereotype of board gamers is middle-aged men who grew up with the hobby in the 1970s and 1980s, but I know for a fact there are younger gamers out there. Conventions are a big draw for some people, and often feature presentations from my publisher (White Dog).”
