Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space edited by Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky

Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space, edited by Chad Randl and D. Medina Lasansky, is an anthology that aims to explore how “board games, past and present, tell us about larger place-based cultural attitudes, assumptions, and anxieties” (xi). Addressing a wide variety of themes placed at the intersections of space and place, game studies, and cultural studies, the anthology centers around how board games have “the power to reconfigure perceptions of space” and the ability “to deploy (and sometimes recalibrate) existing understandings of place” (xxxv). Situating the anthology within a growing board game renaissance, Randl and Lasansky draw on the idea of board games not as disposable play objects but as valuable reflections of culture across space and time.

The essays are contextualized by core research in both game studies and cultural studies. The introductory materials summarize Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle” and Yi-Fu Tuan’s “place” in relation to physical games, arguing that the design, mechanics, and themes of board games, specifically, show “play as a process that reflects (and even shapes) popular conceptions of the built environment” (xii). Randl and Lasansky aim for a broad, exploratory take on this theme, inviting scholarship on popular and failed games, Eurogaming and independent game design scenes, and games as both fun and serious play objects. Randl and Lasansky admit that the anthology only “scratches the surface of games that incorporate themes, issues, and representations of place” (xxii) but that the essays are intended to serve as introductory “proposals for future scholars and gamers” curious about play and place (183).

As such, the thirty-eight essays contained in the volume are divided into eight deliberately loose chapters. Recurring themes across each chapter include how board game design reflects and reinforces political and social ideas of space and place, the role of both dominant and marginalized cultural narratives in building play spaces, and play as a rhetoric for navigating or reinterpreting notions of place. In regard to the first theme, plenty of essays in the volume examine play as a form of propaganda—when a board game abstracts a space, what idea of place do the game mechanics persuade the players into feeling? A notable example is Emily Blair’s analysis of Uranium Rush, where the real-world issues of radioactive sicknesses, exploitation of Indigenous lands, and other controversies with uranium deposits are obscured by the game’s sanitized portrayal of building uranium mines. A great many of the essays look at games produced in twentieth-century America through a similar lens, examining how the construction of a physical board and the mechanics for moving across it reinforce heteronormative, racialized, colonial, and capitalist values common to the time and place the game was produced in.

While a broad portion of the anthology critiques play as a tool for reinforcing dominant notions of place, the anthology also includes essays on play as a form of resistance against dominant cultural narratives. Lasansky’s “Encountering Central and South American Cultures,” for instance, offers a compelling cross-comparison of the Aztec Empire as depicted in building games, looking at games that alternate the Aztecs as both conquered and conquerors. While many of the games examined in the anthology are commercial games, this lens of resistance also invites scholarship on more independent projects. Elizabeth LaPensée’s essay on reinterpreting resource management games through an Indigenous lens and Kenechukwu Ogbuagu’s essay on corruption in Nigerian road infrastructure are both case studies that examine play as a method for resisting exploitative ideas of place in their respective lands. Indeed, one of the strengths of Playing Place is the sheer variety of games given to readers as examples of how place is built, portrayed, and interpreted through play.

The concluding essays in this volume focus on play as a rhetoric similar to Michel de Certeau’s rhetoric around walking: How does physically playing through a space change our view of it? Merging the anthology’s argument that the “board” of a board game is as much a built environment as an urban neighborhood is, these essays look at both how play is utilized in urban planning and, alternatively, how urban infrastructure is critiqued through its abstraction into a game board. An example of the former is Quilian Riano’s collaborative community game in which participants moved life-sized pieces to reflect their fears about urban development and whose play outcomes could be incorporated into more equitable community planning. An example of the latter is Taudis-Poly, which Samia Henni explains is a Monopoly satire that critiques unfit housing developments in Marseille using not just a board game depiction of the city but real artifacts and media about the crisis. These essays most strongly align with Randl and Lasansky’s argument that board games are “where games and the physical world intersect,” as these games muddy the line between what is a board and what is a space, and what is a leisure activity and what is a serious form of play (182).

In short, this anthology is a useful introduction for students unfamiliar with games as a medium for understanding spatial politics and place-based rhetoric. The ideas of Tuan, Certeau, Huizinga, and other scholars at the intersection of play, place, and culture are made accessible to new researchers throughout each essay. The unique games showcased in each section offer excellent case studies for both disciplines and, like many case studies, would be best read alongside in-depth critical theory. The volume achieves its intended goal of acting as a “jumping-off” point for new scholars and would make an excellent addition to any collection in the burgeoning field of games and place.

—Michaela Morrow, University of Alberta