Greenland is an interesting game to discuss. Did I say game? I meant simulation. As a game, it’s much less interesting. I know, I know, that’s just about the most common criticism you can toss at an Eklund design, but it’s a common criticism for a reason. In Greenland‘s particular case, it’s because the game was obviously created first and foremost as an abstract mechanical approximation of the historical events it depicts. But, as a tabletop gaming experience, it struggles to even function. Everything from the overarching game structure, to the flow of a round, to each individual player action is maximally obtuse and filled with all manners of exceptions, edge-cases, and randomizations. Thing is, contrary to most other games plagued by issues such as these, it is perfectly apparent that in Greenland this is intentional. A cursory glance at the ridiculous rulebook for the game betrays this immediately. The deliberateness behind each rule is obvious, but damn there are so many. Eklund, visionary that he is, has tried to include as many aspects and nuances of his chosen theme in the design as possible. In doing so, he has created a chaotic, claustrophobic mess of systems without a shred of attention paid to the game’s rhythm, decision space, or social interactions between players. Okay, maybe that’s not 100% true, but it’s certainly what it feels like.
From a low resolution perspective, I can absolutely see the validity in implementing mechanics that are as representative of your theme as possible and making that your chief design focus to the detriment of everything else. However, therein lies a great problem: board games will never, ever be able to accurately simulate even .01% of the goings on of a 500-year struggle for survival across the icy wastelands of Greenland — or any theme really, if you want to be a stickler about it. But that is not to say that board games don’t simulate anything; they obviously do. If they didn’t, themes would be completely useless and no games would have them. As such, a properly implemented theme (and thus a proper simulation) must make itself clearly apparent in the players’ minds, not just in the game’s rules (or even be apparent in the rules at all — is not the leap of abstraction between the vicissitudes of nature and the rolling of a few dice too vast to comprehend?!). Therefore, to make strict mechanical representation of your theme a central design tenet is a very tricky prospect indeed, I’d say even misguided. But before we get too deep in on that, let’s take things back a step and talk a little more about Greenland and how it’s played.
Greenland is, at its core, a worker placement game. An excessively complicated worker placement game with dice-rolling and re-rolling and negotiations of sorts and tons of admin and all sorts of random events (almost all of them bad), but a worker placement game nevertheless. Okay. It should go without saying that, as a board game enthusiast, I love me some crunchy, satisfying worker placement mechanics as much as the next guy. I consider Caylus and Agricola (amongst others) to be exceptional games, but both would be swallowed alive if you were to bury their systems under the bloat of Greenland. Let’s use Agricola as an example. Pretty complex game, right? Lots of strategy and variability. Now imagine that every round of Agricola started with a random event card that hurt you in some way. Now imagine if it added the ability to negotiate with other players over action spaces. Now imagine that to see if your actions were successful or not you had to roll a handful of dice. Now imagine you had to manage a tableau of cards that determined when you are able to re-roll dice, and sometimes (but not always) give you victory points at the end of the game. Now imagine that the action spaces are split between public action spaces available to everyone and private action spaces available only to you. Now imagine that players have ways to force other players into changing what their victory conditions are (also imagine that this will change what your available private actions are). Now imagine auctions. Now imagine adding the ability to steal other players’ livestock. Now imagine a combat system. Now imagine a marriage system that influences the combat system. Now imagine that the public action spaces aren’t stable and move around and behave differently every round. Are you exhausted yet? I am. All of those things (and many more) are in Greenland.
Listen, my dude. Any one (or maybe two) of those ideas on their own could make for a cool new twist on the worker placement genre and, if leveraged cleverly enough, could make for an excellent game. All together in one game though? No way. It’s exactly what it sounds like it would be, a mess. Which brings me to the point I made above: how can a mechanical mess be expressive of a theme? It can’t. A game’s simulation has to be evident in the mind of its players. Playing as Dracula in Fury Of Dracula needs to feel like being hunted; playing as a starving family in Agricola needs to feel like you are fighting to put food on the table while planning a better future for you and yours. The job of a thematic game’s mechanics is to evoke feelings in its players that befit said theme, or at the very least to craft an interesting social environment between its players. Piling on rules and systems is simply not how you accomplish that, and it’s certainly not how you craft an effective simulation in the context of a board game.
The year after Greenland was published, Eklund followed it up with the very similar Neanderthal, which addressed many of these issues and is a far superior game because of it. More attention was paid to pacing and player agency, and these changes sacrificed virtually none of the depth of simulation. Perhaps that’s because rigid mechanical pedantry is not exactly the best way to achieve a fascinating simulation to begin with. It would seem to me such an approach leaves no room for a design to live and breathe, to create memorable social experiences for its players, to unfold its narrative naturally with surprises and nuances along the way. It turns the art of meaningful design into the science of lackluster representation, and that’s no fun for anyone.
Greenland gets a rating of TWO out of FIVE, indicating it is NOT RECOMMENDED.