Dave Reviews: So Much Fucking Colonialism

Pax Pamir

I've lodged the odd complaint here and there about games which treat colonized nations of yore, and the people especially, as pieces in a board game when they were effectively treated the same way in real life during those periods of time. Pax Pamir puts players in the role of Afghans during the nineteenth century, deciding whether join a coalition with the British, the Russians, or to put their own people first.

To which I say: LOOK! LOOK! IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD!

Pax Pamir is a tableau-building game that works with a pretty small tableau (you only keep three from turn to turn without cards that let you hold on to more). There's a central market of cards, most of which are people who will be part of your tableau, or court, and provide various benefits. Many of them are allied with one of the three factions at work in the country. You start the game allied to the faction of your choice; however, odds are this will change during play, because as soon as you hire someone from a different faction, you essentially declare loyalty to that group and discard everyone from your current faction.

This sounds like a punishing effect to be carefully weighed, and it can be if you've started to rely heavily on certain faction-specific cards, but there are a couple of fairly common reasons to do it. One is if it looks like you've blown through a lot of cards for your faction and it looks like you're going to see different factions for the most part from this point on. Because not all the cards are used every game, this is somewhat unlikely, but an experienced player can get a sense of when they probably won't see many more cards of a given faction unless the deck got stacked hard in their favor.

The second, and more important one, is the dominance mechanic. Each faction has a couple dozen small towers that can hit the board, either standing to represent allied tribes or laying down to act as bridges between provinces. Transport and military might are the keys to power; therefore, if any faction has managed to get at least four more of their pieces on the board than both of the other factions, that faction is dominant and allied players receive VPs.

OK, so you chase the dominant faction, right? Not necessarily. If you've allied with the British, and the Afghans are pulling ahead, you might be able to score better if you switch sides. However, if no side is ahead by four, then scoring is based on personal power, so it may be better to see if you can keep the British just close enough so that the Afghan-allied players can't get their dominance points. It's an intriguing blend of not just risk vs. reward, but which risk you need to take vs. which type of reward you're chasing.

The one thing that breaks the theme a bit is that when one faction is dominant, all the pieces come off the board and players effectively start rebuilding with their current courts and allegiances. This is clearly necessary for game design—without it, early dominance would just turn into a snowball with everyone racing to join the winning side—but it's a little weird given the game's context. The rulebook says they come off because the region settles into an uneasy peace. I mean... whatever explanation you want to give, I guess. It feels like whichever side is dominant would start painting the other towers their color.

But that doesn't particularly matter for the gameplay itself. This is a game that's quite deep without being confusing (though you might forget some rules at first, like the connection between your tribes and your cards—if you lose all of one, you throw out all of the other). Setups are almost always fragile, but breaking them takes work on the part of your opponents, so you can usually defend yourself if you don't have greater priorities. And knowing what to prioritize takes experience, so your first game is probably going to feel ugly, even if everyone's new and you win. There's a good chance that, after one game, you'll feel a little 'meh' about it, or like you're missing something. But if you're even a little intrigued by how it plays, it's worth having another go, because there's a lot of play here.

One last soapbox moment: Though I've griped about games where you play as a colonizing force, it's possible there's some context in this game that is also problematic or could have been handled better. Some people might not like the fact this game is about European powers trying to meddle with a yet another nation, regardless of the role the player takes. But I think it's important to acknowledge the difference.

We tend to reward media that portrays people who defend their homes because there's something relatable at a very core level in that situation. We also often elevate conquering heroes, but nearly always in the context that they've fought for their nations, or gods, or some other higher purpose. A game where players act as the colonizers feels weird because, although colonization was done in the name of God and country, we now understand it to have been thoroughly fucked up. We understand that there was never any glory in it, nothing worth exemplifying. Playing as the people of the nation in question, even in a scenario where it's often wisest to work with the foreigners, at least puts you in the position of someone trying to make the best of a fucked-up situation in their home country.

I'm sure I'm in a minority, possibly a small minority, of gamers who legitimately enjoy a game more on that basis. But I am, and I get to pass out the scores, so bonus points to this one.

Score: Twenty-one out of twenty-four dominance towers (they're not goddamned cylinders, they're square).