Buckets of Blood and Showers of... Other... Bodily... Fluids

WARNING: This review contains concepts of a graphic nature which may be unsuitable for younger readers. It also contains unfettered waxing philosophical. Reader discretion advised.

Chaos in the Old World, far from being a game about monkeys running the European Union (*rimshot*), is a area-influence / mild wargame with variable player powers, card-based spells / effects and an action point (in this case "power point") mechanic. Underneath the blood-spattered chrome, this is actually a pretty clever little game.

I don't have time for a thorough review of mechanics and play - I'll leave that to the esteemed Agent Easy should he so wish, but I did want to record for posterity my thoughts on the theme and feel of this thing.

I'm not a squeamish person - I've attended (and remained entirely lucid through) two drug-free births and treated a few pretty bloody wounds in my time. I've watched my share of Tarantino films and various splatter-filled gorefests of movies. One would think I'd be "desensitized" by this point. Be that as it may, Chaos in the Old World makes me feel like I should be handling it with latex gloves and a haz-mat suit to avoid the ichor dripping out of its suppurating infectious wounds.

Once again, the game itself is not bad - I want to be clear - but the idea of drenching an entire continent in blood, pestilence, dark magics and perverted sexual frenzy as a game theme somehow turns my stomach in a way that playing wargames (which, to be quite honest, depict similar, if not quite as exaggerated, forms and degrees of pain and suffering) doesn't.

Board games and video games are, for me, ways of exploring alternate realities and possibilities of existence which (for a multitude of reasons) are impractical, impossible, undesirable, unachievable or sometimes just inconvenient. Quite aside from their mental challenge (and their sense of competition) - the theme of games allow me to stretch my imagination and play with perception and reality.

It's fun to imagine oneself a fighter pilot, business tycoon or even a lowly pre-industrial German farmer. To play at being a god dedicated to chaos and destruction... well, it just feels... wrong to me.

To simultaneously invoke Godwin's Law (yes, yes, I automatically lose) and use gobs of mega-hyperbole, I have a icky sense about this game that I'd imagine I'd feel playing a game about rounding up hidden Jews in France, playing a serial killer in1977 New York, scheduling various sexual escapades in a Caligula-esque court, or distributing smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans.

This is a game where the theme specifically invokes (and revels in) rape, murder, disease, torture, slaughter of peasants, blood sacrifice, insanity, corruption and a host of other unpleasant concepts.

"But it's just a game," you say.

True. Completely true.

Playing Devil's Advocate (almost literally, in this case), I've often felt that understanding what is attractive about evil helps one to know how to combat it. The concept of unbridled lust, wrath, violence, manipulation, random change and the like, represents for me a kind of personal freedom which is incredibly seductive. The idea of giving into all of these impulses of a carnal nature - to kill and torture without remorse, to have frequent and consequence-free sex, to scheme to give oneself power by trickery lies and deceit - appeals to the primeval urges of the amygdala and the crocodile-brain cerebellum and medulla oblongata.

To live as a god - without sin or fear of retribution - is attractive. It's certainly one of the appeals of Existentialism. I'm sure Shemp and I could have all sorts of interesting debate on its ramifications for society and individuals given his and my opposing views on religion and selflessness. In any case, I can see why some people might enjoy the sense of power and freedom that one might derive from playing this game (theme-wise)... I guess I just want to say that I'm a wee bit uncomfortable with it.

We're being evil in this game, kids, and it's not the usual hand-wringing, mad-scientist cackling cartoony-evil. We are trying to literally corrupt and reduce to ruin an entire continent. Capital "E" evil. Is that different that being a cutesy imp-commanding overlord in Dungeon Lords or corrupt government officials keeping down the populace in Junta? Or playing SS troops in Squad Leader? (I love those games, by the way).

Yeah, it's a game. No, I'm not asking that it be banned or people run screaming for the hills or shout "for Heaven's sakem won't someone think of the children?!". I'm not thumping a Bible and saying this offends God.

I do think that people should occasionally stop and think about what's going on in this game, what it says about the fictional world it represents and the real world it... parodies? satirizes?

What we think about good and evil, in short.

Heaven knows there's enough suffering in this world - in Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Phillipines - to want to invent more in our fantasies.

Play this game, if you're interested in it. It's pretty good. But like reading Lolita, The Story of O or Blood Meridian, there are imagined acts and events contained within which are pretty unsettling and world-view challenging.

To quote the internet meme "What is seen cannot be unseen."

Or you can just shrug it off and say "It's just a game."