Swords Against: Beginner's Box (1979 Replica Edition)

Mechanics (from transcript analysis)

• Board game within a game — Features a fictional board game that players must figure out how to play and win to solve some of the puzzles.
• Ephemera — Includes personal effects from the fictional owner, such as a letter, photocopied book pages, and a code wheel, adding to the in-game narrative and experience.
• Narrative deduction — Players must piece together a central mystery and character stories by sifting through various narrative threads and personal effects.
• Puzzle solving — The game includes numerous puzzles that are integral to progressing through the adventure and understanding the mystery.
• Role-playing game module — Presented as a replica of an incomplete RPG adventure module, with descriptions of locations, items, and enemies.

Video topics + discussion points

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Quotes (from this video)

• So, um, you know, it it is all a fiction, but I you know, I I do I have spent time engaging with other RPGs for this you know, for this purpose and for a lot of other older things from the period.
• The front cover of the adventure book implores the the reader or the player or or or whatever you'd call it to um Hang on, I have it here. I do to figure out the truth of this queer mystery and I used the word queer, you know, in two ways, one of which is is a very strange kind of thing going on within the fiction. And the other, of course, is you know, as a queer person who grew up in the '80s and '90s and had to try to figure herself out not entirely successfully during that time.
• Because for the most part writing in board games especially is quite bad. Like the the quality of of of the flavor of the literary writing is quite abysmal almost across the board. Here's the thing. I'm good at it. I know I'm good at it. I know I'm probably a better writer than most people working in board games and I'm fine with that.
• And then on top of all that, there's all these annotations of the person who owned it. And so, you also have to piece together like parts of the life of the author of the module and the person who owned that and the way that this book then interacts with these other personal effects.
• And so, each of those things led into another thing. And while I was doing that video, um, and a big part of that story involves his time at Parker Brothers uh during a time when Parker Brothers was expanding to also do video games and children's books and records. And and then they ended up, you know, destroying their company doing that and that's how they were sold to Hasbro eventually.

References (from this video)

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