Board game enthusiast and NYU Game Center teacher Geoff Engelstein was stunned to find, while trawling the archives of celebrated author Kurt Vonnegut at Indiana University, evidence that in 1956 Vonnegut developed, and spent a year pitching, a board wargame to publishers.
Alongside the letters, Engelstein found an original, complete set of rules for GHQ: General Headquarters, Vonnegut’s simple board wargame. It was never published, but Vonnegut of course went on to incredible fame, particularly for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein went on to tweak GHQ into a publishable state, give it some appropriate graphic design, and get it published after 70 years sitting in obscurity. It promptly sold out.
Now it’s back in stock at retailer Barnes & Noble, where you can find a nicely realized edition of GHQ using simple wooden pieces. It’s also accompanied by a 24-page booklet that shows off Vonnegut’s design notes so you can get some quite rare insight into his game design process.
GHQ is a fast-playing strategy game using an 8×8 checkerboard grid, where you place and maneuver your units of infantry, armored vehicles, artillery, and your potent airborne unit in order to capture the enemy’s headquarters unit. It’s a simple-yet-interesting combination of rules that require you to utilize real-world combined arms tactics in order to win—no single unit can really succeed in taking an enemy piece on its own.
Players over at industry-faithful bellwether BoardGameGeek have so far rated GHQ a pretty dang good 7.9—with many posts citing the quality of the components. As a board gamer and amateur game historian myself it’s a very interesting game just because it’s a wargame before there were standards of what a wargame should look like—this is the same era as seminal strategy genre-definers like Risk, Diplomacy, and Tactics, after all. Perhaps even more interesting, GHQ is made by someone whose literature and works paint a portrait of someone who is firmly in the opinion that war is very bad.
You can get Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game exclusively via Barnes & Noble in the United States.
