I have really enjoyed my plays of several games designed by R. Ben Madison. He has a knack for including elements of the history into the gameplay while placing the events into the framework of his chosen system, which is usually the States of Siege Series…but not always. His newest offering called Gift of the Nile: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt from White Dog Games uses the States of Siege Series System and looks really interesting as it delves into Ancient Egypt and the rule of the Pharaohs.

Grant: First off Ben, thanks for agreeing to the interview. Please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?

Ben: I was born in 1965 and I’ve lived all my life in Milwaukee. My dad was a college professor so I grew up in an intellectual environment, where my main interests are history and religion. I first discovered wargaming in 1980 at the age of 15, when I bought SPI’s World War II: European Theater of Operations. I like to tell people that this is the story of my life: I majored in Soviet Studies, and graduated in 1989 – just in time for the Berlin Wall to come down and my degree to be suddenly useless! So now I drive truck for a chain of home and garden stores here in Wisconsin. Lots of time behind the wheel to think about game design and listening to podcasts. Besides gaming and game design, I used to publish in the field of religious history but haven’t published for quite some time. I suppose my other main hobby is world travel with my wife, if travel is a hobby.

Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed most about the experience thus far?

Ben: From the very moment I started buying wargames, I started tinkering with the rules. My first experience with actual game design was in 1983 after I got back from studying in London, where I was part of a group of gamers who ran a multi-player international political role playing campaign based on early 20th century history, called “The 1898 Campaign.” I brought the rules back to the USA, and organized some sessions of the game before it all collapsed in mutual recriminations.

Grant: Who is your design partner Wes Erni? How long have you two worked together? What does he bring to your design process?

Ben: Wes Erni was one of the first recruits to the 1898 Campaign in 1983 Milwaukee, and that’s how we met. He’s a professional bridge instructor, so analyzing the mathematics of games is his thing. His analytical abilities are mind-boggling, and he has the uncanny ability to “playtest” games without actually playing them – he can just analyze the chances of various events occurring and predict how a game might be well balanced, or unbalanced, just by doing the math. He’s amazing
at pointing out how small rules changes can have ripple effects that seriously damage, or actually improve, a game. Wes and I worked through the 1980’s and 1990’s on a World War II monster game that eventually got published in 2016 as Absolute Victory from Compass Games.

We’ve also worked on many other designs like Mound Builders (2014), Swing States 2012 (2012), and a number of my White Dog Games projects including The First Jihad (2020) where he shares codesigner credit. For most of my projects, Wes serves as Developer – fixing my mistakes and fiddling with the math so the games actually work.

Grant: What is your game Gift of the Nile about?

Ben: Gift of the Nile covers 2,500 years of ancient Egyptian history as a solitaire game. You start with a little statelet around Memphis and grow your empire until you dominate the map; and then enemies start to appear on all your borders and seek to knock you down to size. This same basic pattern was developed from our earlier game Mound Builders, which covered the rise and fall of Native American cultures in Pre-Columbian North America.

Grant: What does the title of the game reference? What should it convey to players about the situation?

Ben: The title “Gift of the Nile” is almost a cliché. It is the verdict of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 450 BC), who referred to Egypt as “the gift of the Nile” because without the Nile flowing through the Sahara Desert, there would be no populated Egypt at all and thus no great Egyptian civilization. The river is key to the game, since the Nile serves both as a strategic superhighway for your naval units, and also you roll dice in the game to determine how the Nile rises and falls, affecting your economy.

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest?

Ben: I was fascinated by ancient Egypt as a kid. I have pictures of me playing with a G.I. Joe set when I was about five, with mummies and sarcophagi. In 1977, we saw King Tut’s mummy when it was on tour in Chicago. Finally, when I studied in London in 1983, I had a flatmate who was a Coptic Egyptian Christian, who taught me way more about Egypt than I had ever known. The Coptics are descended from the ancient Egyptians and still use the ancient Egyptian language in their hymns and prayers. I wanted to create a game that would do justice to the story of this ancient people who still survive today as a minority within Arab-dominated Egypt.

Grant: Why do you believe the States of Siege Series is so suited to tell historical stories?

Ben: The States of Siege System was invented by Darin Leviloff in 2008, in his ground-breaking game Israeli Independence, which I maintain is one of the best wargames ever designed. It is an incredibly simple game engine that is ridiculously flexible; you can apply it to any number of historical scenarios as long as you can visualize a conflict as a literal or metaphorical “siege”. You are defending a position while being assailed from many sides. But we were able to use this model to cover solitaire game topics as wide-ranging as a US presidential election, the rise of Christianity, and the social and economic pressures that led to the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union.

Grant: This game harkens back to your game Mound Builders with some of its systems which are slightly different from a normal States of Siege Series game. Why do you believe that mechanic is well suited to tell the story of Ancient Egypt?

Ben: The term “States of Siege” is actually a trademark, and I wish there were a widely accepted generic term for these games. I have often referred to them as “Leviloff Tower Defense” games. Whatever you call them, the classic model involves you defending a central position from a variety of attackers from all directions. The major advance we made with Mound Builders was that the game starts off with you controlling only the central point on the map, and then you have to expand outward and build your empire. After this expansionist ‘happy time’, then the enemies rise up on your borders and the game starts to resemble Israeli Independence or any other classic States of Siege-style game. Gift of the Nile follows the same approach as Mound Builders, where you build your empire and then defend it later on.

Grant: What is your design goal with the game?

Ben: Given my academic background in history, I put an equal emphasis on players learning history and having fun. One of my favorite aspects of wargaming is that it is rooted in history, and a lot of people playing my games have been grateful for learning about historical events they didn’t know much about before, like ancient Nubia, the Rhodesian Bush War, or the rise of Islam and Christianity. Of course, in today’s snowflake climate of paranoid oversensitivity, if you take the “wrong” view on historical events you often have to pay a price.

Grant: What elements from the Pharaonic Dynasties is most important to include in the design?

Ben: Egypt was such an amazingly complex and innovative society. I wanted to be able to include in the game all the “cool stuff” that everyone with a casual interest in Egypt finds interesting, like the Nile, pyramids, hieroglyphics, and a huge variety of gods. On top of that, I wanted to shine a light on aspects that are more familiar to specialists, like the evolution of Egyptian writing, Egypt’s reliance on mercenary armies, the pattern of the rise and fall of ruling dynasties, reliance on Nubian gold, and how centralized art, culture, and literature were all part of the government’s drive to maintain control over the empire at all times.

Grant: How do you go about deciding what historical bits to include and what not to?

Ben: A lot of it is just whether or not I can find some relevant game mechanic that I can plausibly identify with the historical bits. An example of this might be the “Literacy” rule in Gift of the Nile, where you need to invest in Egypt’s written language. This represents the development of Egyptian culture over time, and each higher step unlocks certain abilities that you can then use to win the game.

Grant: How do players focus change in the different Dynastic periods?

Ben: The key change comes when the Old Kingdom ends and is replaced by the Middle Kingdom. During the Old Kingdom, it’s your “happy time” and you’re fighting against weak chiefdoms, expanding your control all over the map. Once the Middle Kingdom starts, now you have to rally your forces to protect Egypt from foreign barbarians like the Nubians, Persians, Libyans, Hittites, and Assyrians. It’s almost like two different games.

Grant: What new threats appear to vex them?

Ben: You face five different “paths” which converge on Men-Nefer (“Memphis”), your giant capital city. One path represents the Libyans (Berbers), who remain fairly stable through the whole game. Other Berbers, known as the Meshwesh, attack you on a different path but are replaced over time with Greek colonists who are actually less of a threat. To your south, the Nubians are represented by three successive empires: Kerma, Kush, and Meroë. Each one has advantages and disadvantages. On your eastern flank there are generic Semitic peoples, who menace you in the resource-rich Sinai. Finally, the main threat always comes from the northeast – what is now Israel, Syria, and Turkey. Here, the principal empires like Persia, Assyria, the Hittites, and finally the Seleucids and the Romans are usually your strongest foes.

Grant: How do players achieve victory in the game?

Ben: The way you win is just to survive! You can lose the game outright if Men-Nefer is conquered and you can’t recover. If you survive to the end, even if you succumb to Roman rule Egyptian culture can survive and be ready for its next leap, into the Coptic identity that survives to this day. How well you’ve survived is a matter of totaling victory points at the end of the game.

Grant: The game is fairly difficult to actually do well. How do you have to balance difficulty in your games with playability?

Ben: One of the biggest differences between Gift of the Nile and other States of Siege-style games is that in GOTN, enemy forces don’t just move one area closer to you and then wait for you to attack them; in GOTN, enemy forces just keep advancing until you are actually able to defeat them militarily which is the only way to stop their movement. This was a design choice that I had to make in order to speed up history and make the game more challenging. In this case, it applies familiar game mechanics in a new way. I wanted to keep this an easy game to play, where the main difficulty is in trying to plan for the future and lock down every path, just in case an unexpected foe might attack you there.

Grant: How can players revive their dynasties after being sacked by invaders? What does this represent?

Ben: A key element in the game is building cultural monuments like pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, and the Temple complex at Ipet-Isut (“the Temple of Karnak”). Each time you do this, you get two “Revival Chits” that you can play if foreign armies overrun Men-Nefer. Egypt’s ability to “come back from the dead” is a direct application of history to game play, since in reality Egypt actually was conquered several times and each time managed to raise up a new Dynasty that threw out the conquerors and revived the empire. In the game, these cultural monuments endow Egypt with a sense of its own greatness, visible reminders that the new Dynasty can point to as it rallies people to ‘make Egypt great again’.

Grant: What do you feel the game design excels at?

Ben: Nobody ever really did a game like this before, so the goal was to give players a good feel for the problems and challenges facing the actual rulers of ancient Egypt. I think a lot of people see Egypt as a static, unchanging, conservative society, when in fact there were a lot of innovations and cultural and economic adaptations over the centuries. The game makes these adaptations a vital part of strengthening your military and cultural defenses, to preserve Egypt’s ethnic and religious identity as well as its army, navy, and Pharaonic state. Always with an eye to history!

Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?

Ben: My next project is Sword of Orthodoxy, a States of Siege-style game on the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire. This uses some unique variations on the game system that I pioneered in Kaiserkrieg! (my grand strategic World War I game) and in Global War (my grand strategic World War II game, developed by Wes Erni). Overall, it resembles the game system developed in those two games, with a few more nods to older games in the series such as my game on Nubia.

After that, I know I’ll be doing a game on the Chinese Civil War that brought Chairman Mao to power after World War II. There the game system isn’t States of Siege at all, but an adaptation of a uniquely Ben system I created for The White Tribe, my game on the Rhodesian Bush War of the 1960’s and 1970’s. And as I said, these systems can be easily adapted for other types of conflict. Who knows what comes after that?

Thank you so much for your time in answering our questions Ben. I really appreciate your games and enjoy playing them. In fact, I am actually always looking forward to the next one as I just love them so much so I am very much anticipating Sword of Orthodoxy and your Chinese Civil War/Chairman Mao game.

If you are interested in Gift of the Nile: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, you can order a copy for $56.00 from the White Dog Games website at the following link: https://www.whitedoggames.com/gift-of-the-nile

-Grant