Designer Diary: Persuasion (1)

Necessity, if not always the mother, is at least the brother of invention. With the onset of COVID keeping every

one indoors and afternoons dedicated to homeschooling, I've set aside my mornings for "flex" design time -- that is, I do whatever I can scuttling between the laptop, my notebook, and wherever my kinder happens to be at any particular moment. The advantage is that I've been able to return to earlier designs that I'd set aside over the past year to focus on polishing Re//Generation, Them There Hills, and Jane Austen Dance Party!: Pride & Prejudice.

One such design was an idea for a new module of Jane Austen Dance Party! based on Austen's last completed novel Persuasion, published posthumously in 1817. After Pride & Prejudice, Austen's next best known and most popular novel is probably Emma (1815), and so the latter might seem a more logical choice for the next module of JADP. Nevertheless, I've learned that when a certain muse chooses to perch on your shoulder it's best not to flit it away. Of course, there is an Emma module in the works. I've set it aside for the moment: Anne Eliot has something to say.

I've something of an attachment to Ms. Eliot. Whenever I've taken those "which Austen heroine are you?" quizzes online, I always get Anne. I suppose Elizabeth Bennet is too clever and confident by half, Emma narcissistic near the point of repulsion, and as for Fanny Price, well, maybe the less said the better. [Aside: Austen writing a character like Fanny after the success of Pride & Prejudice is one of the more extraordinary "f*** offs" in the history of literature. Fanny is essentially the anti-Elizabeth].

Then, there's Anne: her life effectively over at the ripe old age of 27 after having been persuaded by her aristocrat godmother 8 years prior not to marry naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Naval officers are beneath the Eliots, you see, and his "prospects" were uncertain. Surely a more eligible member of the upper gentry would eventually come calling. He didn't. When Wentworth finally returns wealthy from his exploits in the Napoleonic Wars, he and Anne must overcome a variety of obstacles, both exterior and interior, to rediscover their romantic connection.

It's a fine novel -- underrated, I think. But what does all this have to do with a board game? Thematically, quite a bit. At the beginning of the novel, Anne is a crestfallen figure. I've described her before as a "grief mop": near mute for much of the first half of the book, Anne simply exists to absorb pain, others' and her own. Over the course of the novel, however, she gradually rebuilds her shattered self and at once reclaims a sense of personal authenticity and romantic partnership.

The idea of players beginning a game in a "weakened" state and competing to end the "strongest" is one of the hallmarks of the deck-building mechanism. Rather than represent wealth, power, magic, military strength or the like, the deck-building in JADP: Persuasion would need to represent Anne's burgeoning sense of self worth.

More to come...