What if I were to tell you that Conspiracy doesn't exist? That, in fact, Milton Bradley has denied it ever existing, and that those who have looked into the game, trying to determine its legitimacy, have suddenly and mysteriously gone missing. Would you believe me? Of course not, because that's ridiculous. But that's what conspiracies are, absolutely ridiculous things that nobody should believe. Then again, there was a period of time where conspiracies were much more fun. When they were more along the lines of "I think there's a giant sea monster living in a lake and the government is hiding its existence because they're afraid of mass public reaction" and less along the lines of "the government is inserting chips into our children to brainwash them into the queer agenda." One is plausible, one is ridiculous.
And, in case you for some reason had to ask, the plausible one is the sea monster. I figured that went without clarification, but in these times, you can never be too sure.
Contrary to the bullshit I just espoused at the top, Conspiracy, the board game, actually does exist. Released in 1973 board game made by Milton Bradley. It can be played by 3 or 4 people, and the main goal is to bring a suitcase to their own headquarters through the use of spies. It was developed by British game-designer Eric Solomon, and is recommended that the game best be played with 4 players. The game takes approximately 90 minutes to play and is for ages 8 and up. Conspiracy requires three skills in order to win: betting/wagering, bluffing, and memory. Board Game Geek describes the gameplay as such:
There are four capitals, four bankbooks, one top secret briefcase and eight greedy spies that anyone can control. The object is to move the briefcase to your headquarters. Players can either secretly pay off or openly move a spy one space on their turn. Each player has an account of $10,000 and can bribe spies in increments of at least $100. If you move a spy, another player may challenge the move. The two players then slowly reveal how much money they each have on the spy in question. If the challenger wins, the move is rescinded. If the defender wins, the move stays and the challenger loses his next turn. Players need to cooperate against whichever player is closest to victory. You can conspire openly to swipe the case or murder a spy and turn the tables on a player who is a mere one space away from winning. No dice, no cards, no luck involved. Learn to work together or games will end in a hurry.
All in all, a pretty good middle ground between simplistic enough to understand, yet complex enough to be interesting.
But really, where the game truly shines, is in its design. While it sounds like a relatively enjoyable way to spend an hour and a half, its design choices are where the magic really is. The player tokens are head busts, the tiny top secret briefcase design is downright adorable, and the board itself is wonderful. And that's honestly great, because there's nothing worse to me than a board game with bad art direction. The worst thing you can do isn't make a boring game, but a boring looking game.
Thankfully, Conspiracy is not a boring looking game, and if anything, it's almost too well designed, and by that I mean it's a goddamn eyesore. Instead of the usual bare bones design styling most board games seem to fall under, and instead of the middle ground design some tend to straddle where they're interesting without being incomprehensible, Conspiracy instead decides to go whole hog on its design elements, creating a board that is almost as confusing as an actual conspiracy. But at least it's not boring!
Here we have an overhead shot of everything included inside the box (which, for the record, has wonderful art direction and coloring to it, since I didn't state that at the beginning). This board is, and I say this with the upmost sort of respect, one of the ugliest things I've ever seen laid out in one of the most beautiful ways imaginable. Like, visually, nothing about this makes sense, but it's so pretty that I have to admire it. I love the little character designs at the four corners, I love the bank booklets, I love the differing flags in each slot. It's got a lot of fantastic elements, none of which work together. Instead of taking all these things and creating something unique that makes sense of the eye, they just crammed them all into one space and hoped nobody would notice. Again, the artwork and the coloring is top notch, some of the best we've seen even, but that doesn't save it from the fact that I can't tell what goddamn direction you're meant to go in.
And don't even get me started on this fucking monstrosity of a design, apparently featured in either a later or alternate version of this game.
Taking a cue from other games, perhaps, with a topdown style city view, it seems as though they wanted to update their image from one of "wacky" to "outright incomprehensible". The first is goofy, but this one straight up gives me a headache. But, like I said, neither are boring at least, and that counts for something. Though I am starting to wonder whether that hour and a half runtime is somewhat dependent on simply figuring out how to use the board. Overall, Conspiracy isn't a badly designed game. It's just an ugly one. It's actually very cool looking, if you don't look at it as a board game.
And one final note, the back of the box.
Comments
Post a Comment