Geoff’s guides to gaming
Geoffrey Engelstein is perhaps one of the more recognizable personalities in the hobby boardgaming world. Recently, Engelstein was named the Series Editor for the CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design. The series advertises itself thusly:
This series features tightly focused looks at topics relating to game design.
The history of games goes back at least 5,000 years, and game materials are routinely found in archeological digs around the world. They are an integral part of what makes us human. Yet the scholarly study of games as a craft, tabletop games in particular, is a relatively recent development. Their study has gone hand in hand with an explosion of creativity in tabletop games, and increasing cultural penetration and acceptance in all their forms.
Because of their centrality to the human experience, it is unsurprising that the study of games touches on many spheres. Art, science, philosophy, storytelling, psychology, math, social dynamics, and system engineering are just some of the disciplines that inform and guide the design of games, and our reaction to them.
The goal of this book series is for each volume to do a deep dive into a single topic within this spectrum, authored by an expert in the field. The diversity of topics demands a diverse set of authors, each of whom brings their particular knowledge, experience, and perspective to the realm of game design.
For more resources about Tabletop Game Design, please visit the website of the Tabletop Game Designers Association at https://www.ttgda.org.
All in all the series sounds like a serious study of tabletop boardgame design. At the time of this post the series consists of five books; three published and two more forthcoming. I recently picked up Cardboard Ghosts Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems by Amabel Holland (1st Edition, January 2025).
Ghost writings
The ad copy for Cardboard Ghosts describes the key argument in the book this way:
Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Two major approaches are considered and contrasted: one, built around immersion and identification, creates empathy. The other, applying the Verfremdungseffekt to distance the player from the game, creating space for reflection. Uncomfortable questions of player roles and complicity when modelling oppressive systems are examined.
A house of card(board)
Part of the reason I purchased Cardboard Ghosts was my interest in the key features from the ad copy:
Key Features:
- Surveys the history of commercial board games as a polemical and persuasive form
- Explores games existing at the edges of the industry that push the boundaries of what games can do and be
- Grapples with the ethical and moral considerations of simulating real-world horrors
- Provides a case study of the author’s influential game This Guilty Land
- Lively prose and personal anecdotes makes complicated theory digestible for a wide audience
What I did not expect was just how much the personal viewpoints in that last bullet from the author forms this study. Admittedly, the reader is warned in other parts of the ad copy:
Throughout this book, board game designer Amabel Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential. Anyone interested in that potential, or in the value of political art in today’s world, will find many provocative and enriching ideas within.
Let me be clear here: I do not oppose the viewpoints Holland expresses in Cardboard Ghosts, I am just surprised as to how much of this book that markets itself as a serious academic study devotes to those personal parts. Coming in at nine chapters and only 113 pages, Cardboard Ghosts is already a “thin” book. Seeing that both the paperback and e-book versions retail for $64.99 (discounts are available but new copies can still run northward of $50) Cardboard Ghosts is also not a “cheap” read. Thus, I was frankly taken a bit back by the amount of text that reads more as a personal political manifesto or game designers blog (previously seen elsewhere but not as comprehensively complied as this book) than an academic study. Maybe my expectations were off, but there it is.
This is not to say that Cardboard Ghosts does not contain any worthy content. It does, but simply not to the extent I expected. An example is the very first chapter, “Stories and Systems” which is six pages plus another for endnotes. Of those six pages of text, what I see as “personal” is four while the “academic” is but two.
As a wargamer, I admit that “Chapter 3: The Paper Time Machine” and “Chapter 4: Wargaming as a Technique” of Cardboard Ghosts are the most interesting to me. For instance, Holland writes:
One feature of the more popular “crossover” wargames of the last decade is an emphasis on political subjects over supposedly “apolitical” kinetic ones. Anecdotal evidence suggest some of the hostility expressed toward these newer games by some of the old guard has at least as much to do with this emphasis as it does the influx of new mechanisms borrowed from euro-style games.
Holland, p. 32
What follows is a good discussion that wargamers—hobby and practitioners alike—should read and digest.
If I take a small exception to anything in chapters 3 and 4 of Cardboard Ghosts it is perhaps Holland’s use of “professional wargaming” as a distinct group from “hobby wargaming.” I believe that hobby wargamers can too be “professional” and that not all “professional wargamers” are indeed qualified enough to be considered “professional.” I prefer to use, like above, the term “wargame practitioner” to describe that group of non-commercial wargamers that often design wargames in support of non-hobbyist clients.
Recommendation: CONDITIONAL yes. Worthy thoughts are present, but find this at the best discount price you can.
Bibliography
Holland, Amabel (2025) Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Feature image courtesy RMN
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Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
Holland has always made opinionated games with a message, which is fine, it’s a personal publishing house. For an academic contribution, it’s disappointing to see Holland unable or unwilling to separate the personal from the professional. Perhaps he can’t, but the Editors should have exercised some content control of the manuscript and perhaps suggested to publish via Amazon.
He /she has become a very political figure. It’s not surprising a book dressed up as an academic study would in fact be a personal manifesto of sorts.