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Tax Day Games · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
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  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
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  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out and the breeze is
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  cool. It's in the mid seventies or low seventies. I guess it feels
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  like a nice day in mid May. Instead it's a nice day in mid
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  April. But I'm enjoying my walk home. It's sunny. I hope I
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  won't get sunburned. It's also April fifteenth, which means it's tax Day,
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  I guess in honor of that, I was thinking I haven't done a board
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  game Somalier in a while, so I thought, why not today, let's
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  do a tax day board game Samoier. For those of you who haven't heard
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  one of these, it's been a while since I've done one. A board
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  game Somalier episode involved me suggesting a theme and suggesting some games to go with
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  it. Sometimes I'll also offer like movies to go with the different elements of
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  the theme. I may do that if I can think of it, But
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  honestly, at this point, I'm just interested in talking about games that have
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  these different themes around taxes. If you're outside the US, hopefully your tax
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  day is not April fifteenth as well, but ours is all right. So
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  to start with, I thought I would mention the classic model of actually just
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  economically paying taxes. There are a number of different games that involve taxes.
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  The earliest one I had was the first game that helped me understand how percentages
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  work in taxes, and that was Monopoly. In Monopoly, of course,
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  if you draw the wrong community Chess card, you get poor tax and you
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  have to pay I think fifteen percent of your cash to the bank, which
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  is funny. Now. I feel like if I were to make a game
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  today and put in a thing where it says, calculate fifteen percent of your
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  cash and turn that in, people would say that's too hard. But that
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  was a standard thing. It expected you to do fifteen percent of your cash.
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  As I recall, I might be misremembering it, but I'm pretty sure
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  that's what it was. I wonder what it is now. Is it still
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  that? I doubt it. I bet it's just a flat fee. But
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  I was trying to think of other games that also involve paying taxes. The
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  one I could find for sure is Orleans and Orleans. There are these event
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  tiles. There are I think twenty one of them, maybe or maybe eighteen,
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  and each round you're going to reveal one event tile, and then at
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  the end of the round that event tile happens. Some of the event tiles
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  are good, some of them are bad, and there's three of each.
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  Notably, the black Plague tile is the worst because you lose one of your
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  you lose one of your tokens. It's always a bummer to lose the token
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  you just bought. I've had that happen to me before. But hopefully what
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  you do is you pull one of your four colored tokens that come with the
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  game, because you don't have to use those at all. But one of
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  the tiles that appears three times in the deck is the taxes tile, and
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  when that comes up, you have to pay one coin for each I think
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  one coin for each trade house that you have, so no fifteen percent calculation.
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  There also two games that I haven't played that have taxes. I did
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  look up. Apparently there's an expansion for Power Grid called Power grid taxes,
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  and the game Hegemony, which is about running an economy, also has a
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  taxes function. Of course, in that game, you either play as the
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  government, the wealthy class, the middle class, or the working class,
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  and you're trying to make things best for your group without destroying everything, and
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  of course taxes are a crucial part of that game. So those are the
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  games that I think of that have a classic idea of taxes in them.
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  If you're going to watch a movie that would go with it, I would
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  say my favorite movie that has to do with doing taxes is the Ben Affleck
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  movie The Accountant. Now, I recognize that that movie is apparently problematic,
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  particularly because ben Affleck's character is depicted as being autistic, and the methods by
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  which he evades or eludes his autism are particularly grueling. I'm not sure.
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  I don't know enough about the depiction of autism in the film to know how
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  it's received by autistic communities. I think it's meant to be positive, but
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  I don't know that it comes off that way or succeeded. Nonetheless, it's
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  about an accountant who likes doing account who likes doing accounting, and also is
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  an assassin, So if you like that sort of thing. Anyway, Forensic
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  accounting is a key part of the movie, and that seems like it's related
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  to taxes, So onto our second a second thing related to taxes, and
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  I would say part of the reason that governments collect taxes is to redistribute wealth
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  to if you have I mean, nominally, the reason governments collect taxes is
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  to do the business of government that everything costs an amount. But if you
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  have a graduated income tax where wealthier people pay a higher rate than poor people,
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  then part of the goal there is also to redistribute wealth, which means
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  that you're trying to address the question of poverty. And how can one talk
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  about poverty and games without talking about London. London's second edition is one of
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  my favorite Martin Wallace games. It is an excellent little engine builder, although
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  I mean, it's weird to call it an engine builder because many times when
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  you run the engine, the pieces of your engine disappear, so you only
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  get to use them once, so I'm not sure engine builder is the right.
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  It's definitely a tableaux builder, but again, every time you run your
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  engine, your tableau dissembles itself, so it's a bit idiosyncratic in that way.
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  But there are a couple of cards in the game and a couple elements
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  in the game that function like taxes. The first off is there are actually
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  or that have to do with poverty. Every time you play around in the
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  game, you gain poverty cubes, and part of the goal of the game
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  is to not have too many poverty cubes. But then you also have an
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  element of there are actually cards that levy taxes. It depends on how much
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  property you own determines how much you have to pay. There are paupers in
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  the game that are constantly giving in the way. And then your goal is
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  to build a city that alleviates the poverty without generating more. But of course
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  the more stuff you build, the more poverty gets generated because it's capitalism.
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  So London second edition really focuses and explores the question of poverty. Now,
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  if you're going to watch a movie that has to do with poverty, I
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  mean there are a lot of them, I would how about So I'm just
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  thinking about movies that I have actually seen, rather than ones I would want
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  to talk about. How about The Commitments. The Commitments is an interesting film
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  about a group of aspirational musicians putting together a band in nineteen eighties Ireland which
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  was desperately poor and trying to make the most out of what little they have
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  and enjoying music. It's not really about poverty so much as that's the backdrop
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  of the movie. But it's a great movie, and it's what I think
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  of or what I thought of in this moment here. So London second Edition
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  and the commitments, perhaps you could point to Irish poverty as having something to
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  do with London being built. It seems like there's some cause and effect there.
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  The next theme that I wanted to mention in regard to taxes is the
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  idea of kids. If you have children and you're filing taxes in America,
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  you get a dependent credit. You get to reduce the amount that you pay
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  your taxes by a certain amount for each child that you have that's dependent on
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  you. Thus having more kids reduces your tax burden. Of course, you
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  have to pay money for the kid, which is why they give you the
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  tax discount. But whatever. So I was thinking about games where having kids
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  changes the economic outcome, and of course the classic of this is Agricola,
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  along with all sorts of other workerplace mcgrams. But Agricola is kind of the
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  key one there because it's a crucial question as you're playing how much you want
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  to gain children to leverage the ability of more people to do more work.
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  But then of course you have to secure more food for those workers at the
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  same time, and it eats up some of your resources to build the extra
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  room in your house and then to have the child, and they're eating food
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  before they're producing things for you. So it's an interesting development, and of
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  course Agricola being the foundational space that creates the more workers, more food element,
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  then you see a variety of other games that do this. Another one
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  that comes to mind is stone Age. Of course stone Age is interesting because
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  one of the strategies sometimes people use, it's called the starvation strategy, where
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  they get children and then just don't get enough to feed them. That sounds
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  pretty horrible. When I think about a text that you might watch go with
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  this, I'll suggest the twenty four horror movie The Witch, or it's spelled
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  the vich vvch. This is about a family of subsistence farmers in colonial England,
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  New England who are bewitched and be deviled by the devil and a bunch
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  of witches in the woods who are luring their children away and killing them.
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  It's a really moody, dramatic movie with excellent acting and really creepy setting,
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  but also reminds me of Agricoli. It's this family. They're trying to make
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  food, get food out of the ground, and they have just nothing.
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  It's an excellent kind of depiction of what the people in rurald Germany would have
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  been doing at the same time that the people and colonial New England we're doing
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  it. So that's Agricola. Next up, back to the sort of ideal
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  of taxes is the notion that taxes are supporting society. That is a collaborative
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  effort that keeps society afloat, and of course if it is under supported,
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  then society collapses. I'm going to point to two games that have this idea
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  of like a collaborative effort and then a seesaw toward negative things if people aren't
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  contributing. The first of these is Brian Borux. This is the game I've
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  talked about recently, and Brian Borux, everybody needs to work together to fight
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  off the Vikings. If all of the Viking attacks have been defended at the
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  end of the round, then nobody loses any cities. If some of the
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  Viking cities have not been if some of the Viking attacks have not been fended
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  off in staid, somebody loses cities, and that can be a dramatic swing
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  in point, especially because cities are kind of hard to get. They're almost
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  impossible to recover once you've lost them. Really strong penalty to lose a city.
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  The other game I would point to is Australia, which is the Martin
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  Wallace follow up to a study in Emerald. This takes place in Australia where
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  Cuthulhu and his minions have been ravaging things as human as Westerners are building farms.
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  Cuthulhu wakes up and starts destroying them, and if the Westerners don't all
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  work together to fight off Cuthulhu, then Cthulhu wins. So there is again
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  this idea. But if you spend a lot of energy fighting off Cthulhu,
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  then you're not spending energy developing your farms and minds, and you might lose
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  because you spent too much of your time fighting the monsters. A lot of
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  post apocalyptic movies play with the question of how much effort someone should put together
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  put forward to protect themselves versus protecting the group, you know, not a
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  living dead. The original Georgia Merrow movie has that crucial question built in and
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  makes a lot makes a good meal of it. So I would say any
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  post apocalyptic movie that involves people trying to serve against the odds would probably work
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  here to go along with the supporting the group, just the same society question.
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  The final element of taxes I wanted to bring up is actually the literal
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  adding up of numbers. A lot of people find taxes intimidating because the numbers
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  are complicated. In fact, that's the point I think, But there are
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  games that people don't like to play or sometimes find intimidating because the numbers are
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  so complicated. There are a lot of games that come with a score sheet
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  that involves adding up lots of numbers from lots of different categories. But I
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  wanted to point to three different games in particular that involve a fair amount of
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  arithmetic. Seven Wonders involves adding up a bunch of different categories, and the
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  science category is confusing enough that it's really helpful to have someone who has memorized
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  how it works and explains it to help everyone calculate their science score. And
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  then I will point to Transatlantic or Crossing Oceans, but Transatlantic more dramatically as
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  a game that involves lots of multiplication and careful consideration of a variety of different
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  factors to determine how many points somebody has scored. And then the grand Pappy
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  of them all is Bunny Kingdom. Bunny Kingdom involves a dramatic itallying at the
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  end involving multiplication such that they've included a table in the game, also offer
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  an honorable mention to a choir which features a fair amount of arithmetic when players
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  are getting shares and losing shairs and so on. This is of course true
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  Night of eighteen x X games as well, but I don't really play those.
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  So that's my board game, somolier for tax season. What games and
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  movies do you recommend for this terrible day? Head over to board game ge
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  Guild three two sixty nine and let me know otherwise I'll see you next time
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  when you listen to you pick up and deliver. Thanks for joining me.
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  I hope your next walk is this is mine was but by brought to you
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  by rattle Box