Russian board games from the 1920s and 1930s

A gallery of lighthearted Russian board games from the 1920s and 1930s. (Via Phillip Torrone)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Notary Sojac

Probably tough to get kids to choose up sides for a neighborhood game of “Chekists and Kulaks” so I can see why board games might have caught on big time.

And – if little Pavlik and his siblings are engrossed in these games, he might not spot Mum and Dad slipping a few grains of collective-farm wheat into the cupboard….
rebdav

The chemwar game is probably close to reality. Anyone who has had any chemical warfare or haz-mat training knows how to use the wind drift templates and a topo map to chart spread and speed of a contamination front. Most of these exercises are just that, a big board game maybe using radios between tables or training rooms to simulate geographic separation.
- Trent Hawkins
  
  Apparently a lot of them are fairly accurate, they might have had military officials involved in their design.
  
  Then again just about everyone was in the military at one point or another so might have just used what they knew in the making of these games.
dwdyer

We can only hope Shepard Fairey doesn’t see this.
Andrew

I saw this game at a flea market a couple of years ago. I wish I had bought it.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/153335/the-sinking-of-the-titanic
gATO

Notice the suspicious absence of “Monopoly”
Nonzealot

There was a Sovietized “monopoly” style board game in the 80s, which was called “KOOPERATIV”. No luck with Google Image Search though, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
jeligula

As always, the Soviet-era screen printing is fascinating and captivating. There was an obvious dearth of acceptable game-design subjects, however. Most of these don’t look playable at all. I wonder what they would have made of Monopoly back then in Soviet Russia? Would it have even made sense to them?
- Lester
  
  In Soviet Russia, game plays you!
  
  Sorry…
  - jeligula
    
    ‘Salright, Lester. Someone had to say it.
- Avram / Moderator
  
  Monopoly started out as The Landlord’s Game, designed by a leftist Quaker women who wanted to show people how property owners enrich themselves and concentrate wealth.
toxonix

Oh my favorites! Hopeless Spiral of Oppression!
I’m certain most of these games are intended to find out which one of a group is the least comradely. It is then just a simple matter of reporting the loser(s) to the nearest NKVD officer.
Lester

I love a good game of Overthrow the Capitalist Running Dogs before They Gas Us.
Anonymous

hmpf 29 Yes, The Arrival is awsome.
Allen

Some of these games look as if they could have been drawn by Chris Ware. (He is lighthearted enough to imagine something like ‘Potemkin Cleanser’ too.)
pinemarten

Fascinating. The game in the picture above is called “Chemical Warfare.”
Cydonia

Oh Soviet Russia, how you make us amused and uncomfortable at the same time.
freshacconci

Notice how crappy the graphics become by 1938? The stuff up until the early 1930s is gorgeous. Damn Stalin.
littlebone

One of the guys on the brown side appears to be playing hockey during that gas attack. And the guy running in front of him looks like he’s heading off for a round of fishing.

“I’ll tell you what this means Norm…no size restrictions and SCREW the limit” – G. Larson
Anonymous

I rolled a backwards R! Go straight to the gulag, don’t pass the food line.
Stefan Jones

One of the games looks war-game-ish. The map of Russia (well, the CCCP) with linked regions. A sort of RISK?
rob1000

Translated:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fbabs71.livejournal.com%2F355037.html&sl=ru&tl=en
T’Pau

“Chemical War” is a lighthearted board game? For kids no less.
mdh

I haven’t played gas the Trotskyite in AGES!
Anonymous

Like most Soviet era movies, almost all these games are war games. Every population has a class of people who are by their nature opposed to war for any reason and turned off by militarism. Can you imagine how screwed up they must have felt with the military every where, the state worshiped as if it were a religion, not even a nice game for the kids to play that does not involve killing someone. Zeeesh! At least here we still have to hide the fact when our helicopters pilots take joy in killing and maiming, I’ll bet that footage would have made “Bremya” if they had it back in Stalin’s time. …. And now … Just in from the Malibar Front !!!!
Boba Fett Diop

Well, who wouldn’t want to play a rousing game of Defeat the Polish Anarchists, Semaphore Bingo, or Path to the Glorious Workers’ Paradise Involving Ascension Through Correct Ideology and Also Pitfalls Laid by Capitalist Serpents?

Anyway, beats Agricola.
Hmpf

That image is *extremely* reminiscent of a scene in Shaun Tan’s wordless (and amazing) comic “The Arrival”.
Rich Keller

He’s gassing them? I thought he was spraying sealant on Warhammer 40K models.
Kieran O’Neill

Now if people had actually bothered to translate the Russian captions (Chrome seems to give you an option to do so automatically), they might realise that most of these are not wargames.

http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/babs71/view/161912/ “Hopeless Spiral of Oppression”, according to toxonix. This is basically trivial pursuit, except that the questions are all about the labour code and trade unions.

http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/babs71/view/161909/ – Like Stefan Jones, I also thought this was Risk. However, it turns out to be a game more like the London Underground game, where each player is given 5 cards with the names of cities, and they have to visit each one. The catch is that all the players are in the same aircraft, and each player in their turn gets to move the plane. Imagine the diplomacy aspect!

A whole bunch are really uplifting – “design the vehicle transmission system”, “build the power grid”, “fly from Moscow to Beijing”.

These were the early days, before Stalin had fully ascended. There was a lot of nastiness already, but I imagine there was also a lot of hope.
Anonymous

the picture shown on the front page reminds me of this mural in the Denver airport:

13th vertical pic from the top
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=58

direct link
http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/p1000395.jpg
dross1260

“Aw, you sank my battleship, Potemkin.”
- retrac13
  
  Yes! (I am at a loss to think of a board game equivalent of “Strike!”)
  
  Also: lol at “lighthearted”
  
  Also, Also: the second one marked 1928 reminds me of Chirs Ware’s illustration style a lot!
Anonymous

In addition to “Chemical Warfare”, the link also shows games called “Revolution”, “Welcome to the Worldwide Revolution”, “Red and White”, “Aerial Battle”, “Marine War”, “Contemporary War”, and “Battle of the Tanks.”

I feel like there’s some kind of theme here.
Trent Hawkins

Geez, these were way before my time. I think the only one of those that I saw was the “You sunk my battle ship” game.

One really messed up part is the paper-craft dice in one of these games.
- dragonfrog
  
  Trent – I went back and looked – those are some screwed up dice. Pairs of opposite sides add up to 4, 6, and 11…
hcovitz

The link he has to the German WWII games is equally fascinating:

http://babs71.livejournal.com/37268.html