Ways to Play in the Middle Ages: An Overview of Neomedieval Board Gaming

The past decade has seen a tremendous outpouring of scholarly work on medievalism in digital gaming, an unabating tide of academic interest that would be justifiable even if only because of the prodigious number of neomedieval games released each year. Under the influence of Tolkienian fantasy and its gamified iterations in Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing settings, a genericized version of the medieval West has become a favorite setting for a number of different gaming genres, electronic and otherwise.There are video games based on particular medieval narratives and settings, such as Ubisoft’s 2007 movie tie-in title Beowulf: The Game, but also innumerable fantasy role-playing games (World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls), as well as real-time strategy games (Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings), and even first-person shooters and stealth games (Chivalry and Assassin’s Creed, respectively). In large part because of the fascinating complexity of the social dynamics that can arise in role-playing games, many scholars have focused particular intensity on the various medieval MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) both predating and postdating the byzantine exercise in fantastic neomedievalism that is World of Warcraft, still the most popular MMORPG in the world.Our understanding of the social dynamics and cultural work of medievalist gaming, however, can be deepened significantly by broadening our ludological inquiry to encompass also the conventional tabletop board game. Just as digital gaming has become increasingly popular – and indeed an increasingly popular vehicle for neomedievalism – so too has the board-game industry experienced significant growth and diversification in the past twenty or so years, most visibly in Europe and the US. The 1990s witnessed a kind of renaissance in hobby board gaming epitomized by the unexpected international popularity of so-called “German-style board games” or “eurogames” such as Settlers of Catan (1995) and then Carcassonne (2000), as well as later hits such as the deck-building card game Dominion (2008). Is it a coincidence that all three of these games, among the best-selling titles in contemporary hobby gaming, have neomedieval themes, themes that are additionally emphasized in some of the subsequent expansions to each base game?