This War of Mine is not my favorite boardgame, but it's the best I've ever played. Framed by Hemingway's words "In modern war ... you will die like a dog for no reason", it is a war game from the perspective of civilians, loosely inspired by the siege of Sarajevo. The first several times I played, I lost, sometimes for dumb mistakes like trying to salvage a seemingly-dud bomb, but more often due to the cruel, intentionally un-fun nature of the work—more interactive art than game—situations where one character gets shot just for stepping out the front door to look for people to talk to, and others get shot or stabbed looking for bandages for them at night, and everyone dies of infection. Eventually I won with a coldly calculating strategy, sacrificing one character and badly wounding two others in order to win. That felt wrong. It isn't how I would approach such a situation in real life.
So I set out to win while playing compassionately. Over the course of two in-game weeks and most of a real-life day and night, I moved my characters about like real people trying to look out for each other. I was doing decently, but it could have gone either way, when I reached a critical moment: This War of Mine comes with a book of custom "scripts", over a thousand scenarios based on in-game decisions, only a small fraction of which will arise in a single play-through. One in-game night, as I sifted through goods in abandoned homes, I triggered a script that broke the fourth wall. It gave me a massive one-time bonus, if I agreed to read up on the siege of Sarajevo. I already knew a fair bit about Sarajevo, so I made a deal with myself: I had a copy of my father's book Martyrs' Day—a first-hand account of the Gulf War, including Kuwait under Iraqi occupation—and I would read that.
I continued the play-through. Thanks to the bonus and continuing good luck, my characters prospered. On the last day, victory already guaranteed, I had one character step outside, spending one of three precious actions and risking sniper fire, to find someone else to shelter. I ended the game with each character in perfect health in every way. I won. I consulted the scoring rules. I had reached an impossible 30 out of 30, and had succeeded in other ways the scoring didn't even account for. I checked online. Every other person to ever claim a 30, let alone a 30-and-then-some, had gotten one of a few simple rules wrong; I hadn't. I had played, perhaps, the best ever campaign of This War of Mine.
Except I still had a book to read. It sat on my desk for months, and then I and it wound up on opposite coasts for a bit. And so I didn't proclaim victory. And then two journalists named Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra Kuvshynova were killed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and that stirred something in me, so I did something I'd only done once before: I wrote a Wikipedia article, about the two of them and all the other journalists killed in that war. (See previous userpage banner.) And around the time that I wrote about Yevhenii Bal, tortured to death at the age of 78 by men from a country he had defended while in the Soviet Navy, just for having photos of himself with Ukrainian marines, I felt I had finally satisfied the spirit of what the fourth-wall-breaking script had asked of me. I could finally say I had "beaten" This War of Mine, but by then that didn't feel like much of an accomplishment. And that was the point, wasn't it? War isn't a game.
Killing civilians is bad. And if you read that and think I'm only calling out your side or only talking about one conflict, then take a step back and consider what that says about yourself.