Nanty Narking- a (really good) game out of time
Martin Wallace's chirpy re-skin of Ankh Morpork deserves more love- the reasons why it doesn't get it shed interesting light on the state of the hobby.
I will admit to a healthy dose of scepticism when I was first shown Nanty Narking. Firstly, it’s an undeniably naff name, even if it is explained that the phrase is Victorian slang for having ‘rather too much fun’. Second- the dreadful cover art, from which a dead-eyed street girl gazes out against a barely-discernible background.
Thirdly, the designer, Martin Wallace, has been responsible for some of my most frustrating gaming experience- one friendship has never quite recovered from the experience of trying to teach Wallace’s acclaimed A Study in Emerald. But while sharing an interest in Victorian London, Nanty Narking is the polar opposite of Emerald- while the Neil Gaiman adaptation seems to delight in confounding player’s desires, the central loop of Narking couldn’t be simpler.
Basically, each of 2-4 players (but the more the merrier) have a hand of cards. On their turn, a player plays a card, and does what it says on the card. This continues until one player has completed their secret objective, determined by their secret identity. That’s it. The whole thing takes place in a fictionalised version Victorian London, and features a cast of characters from that dark, fascinating era.
Of course, ‘what it says on the card’ conceals a little complication. Each of the 100+ cards are unique, and each has a different combination of effects. These include
Placing an agent on one of London’s boroughs, thus increasing your control over the board.
Placing a building in a borough, thus gaining a special benefit specific to that location, and proportionate to its poshness.
Manipulating the placement and location of ‘trouble markers’- in a rule that amuses me as a born Londoner, any agent moving into a space where there is already someone there causes trouble- we’re an irascible lot.
Killing an opponent’s agent in an area where there’s trouble. Easier to stick the knife in during a rumble, see.
Triggering some delightfully chaotic random events- generally when you think someone else is about to win.
Getting more money or being able to play another card alongside this one.
There are also some nicely thematic character-specific effects. The observant and well-connected Mrs Hudson (yes, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady) allows you to see what secret objectives/identities have been unclaimed by players, while Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde allow you to swap out your current identity and corresponding objective.
These objectives provide both the driving force of the game, and much of its intrigue. The list of potential objectives is finite and prominent in the rulebook, and so the job of guessing your opponents’ objective, and thus thwarting them, is at least in part a question of deduction. Appropriately, one objective/ identity pairing is Sherlock Holmes himself, whose whole object is deducing and preventing the victory conditions of other players until the card deck runs out. Other players may be a financial mogul seeking to control a certain number of boroughs, a criminal mastermind looking to spread his influence across the city, or Fagin, who just loves trouble.
As you can hopefully guess, I came round to the idea that this game is a LOT of fun. The immersion into a fictionalised Victorian London, and into an atmosphere of deception and backstabbing, is achieved with the minimum of rules overhead, and the whole thing clips along beautifully to a (sometimes) satisfying conclusion.
I say sometimes- it is inevitable, in a game of incomplete information about how someone is going to win, that there isn’t perfect balance. Sherlock Holmes is, in our experience, less likely to win that the other player identities. The endgame can be frustrating as it becomes clear that someone is going to win, but fortunately that is only usually clear with a few turns, and minutes, left of a playtime of around an hour.
While I am quibbling: the art inside the box is an improvement on the cover, but it still mistakes murk and flatness for atmosphere- it’s a shame, given the Victorian enthusiasm for art and illustration, that art either drawn from that era, or at least in a more authentic Victorian style, was not employed.
Finally, by including an advanced variant, I am afraid that Wallace has indulged his worst impulses. In the base game, the different moulds for the agent and building pieces (or, in the retail version, the standees) are purely decorative. In the advanced variant, these take on special abilities which significantly increase the amount you need to keep track of, without adding an awful lot strategically. Still, we can always just ignore variants…
The base game of Nanty Narking is a very good, maybe even great, game. So why isn’t it talked about? Why does it languish at 1452 on the BGG game rankings, while the game of which it is a fairly faithful copy, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, flies high at 579? To an extent, rarity has elevated the latter- the estate of Terry Pratchett ceased the licence for Discworld games, so Ankh-Morpork went permanently out of print, and remains a sought-after item for collectors. But I think there’s more to Nanty’s obscurity than that.
First, there’s how it looks. As the grey sage of board games, Mike Dilisio, has pointed out, no area of games has experienced a more sustained and straightforward improvement in the last decade than art, and specifically cover art. It does not help Nanty Narking’s cause that, next to the clean, bright design common in recent games, it looks like a throwback.
But the other way in which this game is a throwback reflects far better on it. Like Concordia, an acknowledged classic published a year after Discworld, Nanty Narking conjures interesting choices and challenges from a simple play loop: play a card, do the thing, repeat. But the fashion for strategic games has moved on- I speak as someone currently struggling on page 9 of current darling Ark Nova’s dense 20 page rulebook. We currently prize complexity over elegance in hobby games- I’m not sure that is progress.
Another perceptive observer of the hobby, Ben Maddox, has advanced the argument that we are therefore in a ‘silver age’ of over-complicated strategic games, following the golden age of which Concordia was a high point. If he is right (and I think he is), then Nanty Narking has suffered, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because it’s just not ‘meaty’ enough. That’s a shame, because this game has a lot to teach today’s bloated multi-phase exercises in complexity.
None of this might bother you if you are one of those psychologically healthy people who don’t worry about where ‘the hobby’ is going, and just want to know if this weird-looking game is worth a go. To which I reply, oh yes, it’s a right Nanty Narking.
Hello! This has taken a while to get round to- life has been a bit of a challenge lately, but you know what would help? Sharing this article, or recommending the substack!
I’m thinking about reviewing Zadie Smith’s The Fraud next, as I can’t decide what I think about it. Let me know if that’s something you would be interested in.