So It Goes | SPACE-BIFF!
Before he became a famous author, over a decade before Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut was a board game designer. A failed board game designer, with only a sheaf of notes, a single rejection note, and an unfinished patent to his name, but a board game designer nonetheless.
And now his sole surviving design is an actual board game you can buy and play and, if you’re anything like me, spend a few hours marveling at. Thanks to the efforts of the Vonnegut estate in preserving his notes and Geoff Engelstein in interpreting and tweaking them into a functional state, GHQ — short for “General Headquarters” — is, not unlike Billy Pilgrim, a thing unstuck in time, transported from 1956 to 2024.
In his pitch letter to Henry Saalfield of the Saalfield Game Company, Vonnegut talked up his design, as one does when trying to interest a publisher into taking more than a cursory glance at something you’ve spent the past year testing on the neighborhood kids. “It has enough dignity and interest, I think, to become the third popular checkerboard game,” he wrote. “The game would, I’m quite sure, satisfy the faculty of West Point as a tactical demonstrator.”
I’m not sure about that part, but GHQ does have a certain depth of place to it. The shorthand is that GHQ is to WWII what chess is to the Medieval battlefield. Where chess speaks to feudal realities — expendable serfs, riders who exploit openings rather than dash themselves against spears, the weirdly militarized influence of the church — GHQ proposes its own axioms.
