My Time in Versailles
Or What Lies Beneath
It was unexpected. The email I mean. The one Mark (Simonitch) sent me to ask me if I had time to work on a project. I said sure. He said it was with Mark (Herman) and Geoff (Engelstein). I said yes (obvs). I may have fainted.
I need to acknowledge before I really get started that there’s been a trend in these blogs of mine to the Victorian in the setting of the games covered with overtures of Edwardian. This one is different. It’s firmly Edwardian. It’s good to make a clean break with the past. Which, coincidentally, is what the negotiations at Versailles had a chance to do, albeit a very, very small chance. Unfortunately, those involved didn’t see or didn’t care for the chance to change things for the betterment of all, rather they chose to grub around for their own benefit.
Churchill Playtest Map: Art by Mark Simonitch
Versailles 1919 Map.. See the split?
Versailles the game, Mark (S) told me, was going to be an illustration challenge and that challenge was going to be on the right side of the board. He was….. correct. (Sometimes I can take the high road regarding puns.) But it was also a challenge on the left. Like its fellow Statesmen Series game Churchill, the game board is divided into the negotiation area on one side and the ‘world’ situation on the right. The rules are not analogous between the two games in exactly how they function, but they are in what they represent in a broad sense. And the split board - decision on the left, outcome on right - would carry into the Versailles 1919.
This division into 2 parts was the first thing to think about. The division would mean effectively designing two smaller boards that worked together rather than the usual broad canvas of the standard 34” x 22” GMT board. The left side went quickly. I had already figured out how I wanted the cards to read. The cards needed to be a clean, quick read because they are the components the players are engaging with the most. This meant icons for the Issues cards because what they represent is quite wordy. Icons would be an easier read across the game table, so long as they were not busy, definitely not busy. The event cards are a tough read across the table, especially compared to the issue cards. But we found there was enough text on those cards (and playing the game at home with friends showed this) that most players would pick the event cards up to read them. So the range of readability on the different cards meant there was a little more room for ornament. For anyone wondering about the victory icon on the issue cards - that kind of star brooch was very popular at the time, amongst the diamond buying set at the least.
Combining the look of the cards when looking at the board and the flow of play on the left side meant my original idea of using the seating plan from the event as a background fell at the first post. Creamy paper on a creamy paper is a terrible read for the players. The lightness of the cards demand a darker background.
Nice contrast with the right side BUT
them there cards are a hard read.
The backs of the cards could and I felt should be darker and rich. It pushes their presence into the background so they don’t fight with exposed cards. The blue and green of the cards puts them into the middle ground between the card fronts and the map. The players don’t need to see them till they need them which is only occasionally. As for the the color palette in general, I wanted rich dark reds and browns and golds, allowing me to use a post war color range of teal and yellow greens to continue the period feel and just as importantly to lift the tracks off the darker background for the same reasons as the cards. Stained leather also seemed apropos for the setting and it abounds, even on the box art. I resisted the temptation to add cigars and glasses of scotch. I did add the photos around the track on the top right to remind myself, if not everyone else, that it was rich (overwhelmingly white) men in suits who were in the driving seat. No Kodachrome for the photos. I played with (possibly ironically) colorizing them, but it jarred with the theme just enough I took ‘em around back of the barn to be with Old Yeller. Keen eyed owners of the game might notice one of the photos is of part of the Japanese delegation and appearing on the board is more influence than they had in real life.
But it was the forward placement of ‘white men of influence’ in the action of the game that led me to the solution I came to for the right side of the board. The same graphic decisions for color and darkness for the left side needed to be applied to the right, too. My first thought had been to illustrate a frame of participants of the war, styled after the war posters of the various combatants. I did a few pencil sketches (which I won’t share because their really primitive and like many I’m not keen to share my illustration roughs until I’ve worked them up enough to be presentable, which if I ever do, I’ll share then). As I said, I did a few sketches, and I struggled with bringing in enough to be representative but not crowded. And it was at the back of my mind that this approach was going to be a struggle to keep in the color and tone I wanted.
Then it occurred to me as I was making a cup of tea (my work runs on tea) that the overall look was one of a monument in praise of the talks. I realized I was personally uncomfortable with that. The talks to my (historian hat wearing) mind was that they did little but bring about the resumption of hostilities. So my ‘artistic’ solution was less artistic than it was a quiet message to myself about the events of the game setting. I searched at first for photographs to tell this story of how many were affected by the war, but it quickly became obvious that reading what they were, once I had enough to make an impact, would quickly become too difficult to read, even in the spaces not covered by tracks and charts and holding boxes. The posters, however, were visually understandable as war posters to the viewer even at a smallish size. So instead I took the various posters that I had collected and put them together in a very roughly geographic way. I tried to get as much representation in as I could. As well as many of the European nations, Canada and Australia, I found posters for Algeria, the Middle East, French African troops, women, home front, nurses, manufacturing, rationing and a lot more. I wasn’t able to find any usable Indian or other British Empire posters or posters from elsewhere in Asia. So as has been the case for a long time, they didn’t get a look in though they should have.
The posters represent in a very poor fashion the lives of those that experienced the war in a multitude of ways. I darkened the whole thing and put them in the background where the people who were the consumers of those poster were put by the “wise” men in power - guardians in everyone’s name of democracy, or Empire ‘the white man’s burden’. That’s what I intended anyway. As a final note, the carpet is covering a bunch of the posters; that’s just a cheap shot, the old ‘swept under the carpet’ gag.
What lies beneath
It doesn’t matter what was or is my intent of course. This game is a great opportunity to learn about a fascinating moment in history that shaped much of what followed in the 20th century. It’s a great chance to beat your friends in the politest little knife fight of a negotiation game you’re going to see for a long time. It’s an opportunity to laugh at any artsy nonsense I might be peddling here. Whatever the opportunity is for you, don’t pass up on it.
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