Up Against the Wall, Boardgamers!

A few days ago I was browsing around Play This Thing, looking to find a present for a friend, when I stumbled across something else entirely: a review for Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!, a board game made in 1969 in honor of the Columbia riots. According to Play This Thing’s review, the game is a fun, maybe even thought-provoking, but has roughly zero replay value.

Last night I brought it to Sprout’s Project Night, and we gave it a go.

(You can print out the board, playing cards and rules online. We improvised the rest, making a die out of modeling clay and using a handful of tiny switches from Sprout’s collection as playing pieces.)

Play This Thing summarizes the gameplay pretty well:

In Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! you play either as Columbia University’s administration, or as the radicals who have seized control of Fayerweather Hall. You are attempting to influence the opinions of various stakeholders in the university — students of different sorts, the alumni, and so on. Random event cards influence play. Ultimately, the side that gains the greatest sympathy on the part of university stakeholders wins.

We found the review to be pretty spot on. The game is designed to evoke the experience of the Columbia riots, and does a good job capturing political dynamics in the gameplay. At the beginning of each of the twelve rounds, the administration player and the radical player are given new pieces to add to the board. The proportion shifts each round such that the radicals are favored early on, while in the last few rounds, the administration are given 14-16 new pieces to the radicals’ 1. This pushes the radical player to be very aggressive early on - wasting time in a détente with the administration player guarantees their loss. By the end of the game, the radicals will likely find themselves completely outnumbered and unable to attack at all (the rules require you to have at least half the pieces your opponent has before you can attack). The radicals end up waiting helplessly, hoping the administration will somehow destroy themselves.

There are a couple of minor issues with the game - a contradictory rule for figuring odds, non-gender neutral instructions (yeah, 1960s, but you call yourselves radicals!) - but the real problem is that there is only one strategy for each player. You can play around with the timing, but in the end the radical player has to strike hard first, and the administration has to bide their time until they can overwhelm their opponent with their greater numbers. There’s little replay value because the game is pretty much the same each time. Not even getting to shout “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” at your friends can make up for that.

Shouting “Up against the wall, motherfucker!” *is* pretty fun.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to try to rewrite the game and release it back onto the wilds of the internet. One avenue for increasing variability - and therefore playability - is in the game’s fight mechanism. It’s spartan both in function and in flavor: a die roll & odds chart consult called simply an “attack”. It might be interesting to distinguish kinds of attacks: public opinion (flyers and student talk radio, op eds and administration press releases), economic (boycotts and fines), physical (sit ins, property destruction, arrests). I think we’re also going to change the way momentum is determined, so that players can gather or destroy their own momentum without there being an inevitable swing from radicals to administration.

We’re also toying with the idea of modernizing the flavor, although setting a riot-themed game on a modern day campus seems kind of laughable.

Anyway, if you’re in the Boston area you’re welcome to come help us work on this! If you’re not - well, I’ll post the new game once we’ve finished it.