Once Christmas is over and the good cheer—and expectation of free stuff—that got you through some of the coldest and darkest months of the year is gone, what are you supposed to do? It’s still cold, it’s still dark, and no one is holding the door open for you anymore or participating in any random acts of kindness in the hopes they can make a last-ditch effort to get off the naughty list. Plus your credit card is probably maxed out, so it’s not like you can go anywhere. This seems like a great time for a board game.

 

Board games are perfect social events, especially in the winter. You play inside where it’s warm, your friends are all invited, you can drink beer and eat pizza, and—best of all—there is something for you and everyone you’ve invited to focus on and talk about, without resorting to the kind of hackneyed, weather-based conversation that seems to accompany a Canadian winter.

 

Before you reach for your trusted Trivial Pursuit pies or your Scattergories pencils, however, you should know that some of your fellow winter-braving Edmontonians have been creating games and game boards of their own in the interests of delighting you and making your life a little less boring.

 

Adam Waldron-Blain is a visual artist and a member of local collective Institute Parachute. After being frustrated with the media coverage and general reception of the Edmonton Arts Council’s Art of Living report, which outlined how to best secure the future of the arts in Edmonton—including how to keep artists from moving away from our fair burg—Waldron-Blain created a game called Leaving Edmonton, which includes cheeky hat-tips to the real reasons that artists leave Edmonton, rather than what was outlined in the report.

 

“The objective is to move away from Edmonton, and the game attempts to simulate that by modelling circumstances that would cause one to move from Edmonton. So to move away you have to have the right things to move away—a job, airplane tickets, apartment, etc, and you also have to build up resentment points. You have to be a little upset before you can do it, instead of just talking about it,” he says. “What gives you resentment points in the game are the little things that actually make you upset about Edmonton: poor transportation service, unnecessary jaywalking tickets. There’s a card to represent Khz the dance club that was open for a few months but closed down—when it opens everyone loses resentment points but when it closes everyone gets more than they started with. All those little things that actually matter to people more than mentorship opportunities or God knows what else.”

 

A lot of thinking went into Waldron-Blain’s game; it was based on a card game called Dvorak which is open source and open-ended—winning the game and playing the game is based partially on general rules of Dvorak, but also on specific rules agreed upon by the players—because Waldron-Blain wanted to make a game that reflected the politics within the game itself. Unimpressed by the majority of games out there, he set out to create something that was based on a fresh idea, but that was also fun.

 

“It’s no good to make something not fun, and that’s what the politics of the game are about too—why do people leave Edmonton? Because things are really lame sometimes here,” he laments. “I don’t think they’re always lame here, but I feel like a lot of people do things in Edmonton because they feel they ought to, or they want to but they do a half-assed version of it because they think they can get away with it. I wanted to make sure it was really good.”

 

Artist and man-about-town Raymond Biesinger drew on his considerable visual arts work as well as his history degree to create a Risk game board called Risk 1919, which accurately documents Europe just after the First World War—and then allows you to conquer it. Having made crude games as a kid, Biesinger set about creating something that would rival any other version of Risk out there.

 

“I had my history degree so I could make it historically accurate, and I chose an era that I felt was appropriate for the kind of chaotic and even playing field that Risk plays, because Europe after WWI, all the major powers were spent. Germany was on the verge of revolution, Russia was in revolution, Béla Kun in Hungary threatening the others with his little bolshevik revolution—it was really a very decentralized time in Europe,” he says. “As you can see I spent a little more time thinking about this than I did when I was a kid.”

 

The game board—which is in Biesinger’s singular style—is nearly a work of art in and of itself, which is one reaction he received quite a bit when he started selling it at the last Royal Bison Art and Craft Fair, though he received a number of different reactions.

 

“There were a lot of people who bought it just because it’s an interesting-looking thing, and there’s everything from that to people who say, ‘Holy shit it’s a Risk board! I made tons of these when I was a kid!’ to old guys who come up and go, ‘This map is innacurate!’ and they don’t see it as any different than some stupid kid making a map that’s bad,” he laughs. “So the reactions are mixed, but people are very excited by it and very happy that they can take a copy home.”

 

Having been a life-long fan of board games—at one time, he even guilted his mom into playing Monopoly with him when none of his friends would, and later kept detailed Axis & Allies statistics among his game-playing friends in high school—Biesinger was enthused to find so many people willing and able to play Risk 1919 .