As you know, I do love me a good Card Driven Game….or a game that uses cards….multi-use cards. I love cards because it allows for the designer to keep a game going while using a vehicle that incorporates special rules that fit a historical situation but also to be able to use bits of the history itself to teach the players about the topic. A few months ago, I caught wind that The Dietz Foundation was working again with Yoni Goldstein on his second game called The Nights of King Ludd: The Luddite War on Industry, 1811-? that recently launched on Kickstarter (the game has already funded). The Nights of King Ludd is a 2-4 player game that deals with direct oath-sworn secret societies of English Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the English Midlands. Working together, players will build a secret network of saboteurs, ferry provisions and weapons on the black market, assemble raiding parties, and if all goes as planned, smash those “dark satanic mills” to cinders. I reached out to Yoni to get a bit more information about the design and he was more than willing to share.
If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd
Grant: Yoni welcome back to our blog. What have been your feelings about the reception of your great game Chicago ‘68?
Yoni: I’ve joked that I’ve taught this game now more than I’ve played it (of course this is only true if one just counts the last couple years!). Since 2024, I’ve taught it to a diverse and intergenerational cohort of non gamers, grognards, peace activists, veterans, and even a few spooks. Inevitably players relate the experience they are having on the board to what they see in their neighborhoods: protests and tear gas, troops deployed into cities, election interference, and so on. Those conversations are still ongoing and I’m heartened that Chicago ‘68 is facilitating a space for that.
Grant: What lessons did you learn from that experience that have helped you with your new game?
Yoni: I’m grateful that Joe Dewhurst, who developed both Chicago ‘68 and the upcoming The Nights of King of Ludd, guided me through the design, testing, and development processes. Ludd is my second game and it went through a number of iterations, but this time we had a proper methodology in place. Likewise, The Dietz Foundation was very transparent with the manufacturing and publishing side of things, which gave me a deeper understanding of the timeline and proofing / editing process that accompanies those final stages of production.
Grant: What is your new upcoming game The Nights of King Ludd about?
Yoni: The Nights of King Ludd is a collaborative game for 2-4 players about the Luddite revolts in the English Midlands. Set roughly around 1811, the game tells the story of local workers in the textile industry (“weavers”) forming secret societies and leading armed raids against mills and factories in their communities. Players command an oath-sworn organization of conspirators working with the Luddites to achieve the collective goal of machine wrecking while also attempting to meet their individual motivations (which may include assassinating the local manufacturer, spurring a republican revolution, or just avoiding an Australian exile).
In terms of game mechanics, you are building a dice pool while also maneuvering pieces and collecting multi-use cards to modify your roles. Collectively you are building a tableau and operating it together to mount a series of raids against the three Mills on the map.
Grant: What is the meaning of the title of the game? What should it convey to players about the game and the history it represents?
Yoni: The title of the game is borrowed from a chapter in Gavin Mueller’s book from 2021, Breaking Things at Work. Mueller is among a cohort of authors, including Kirkpatrick Sales (Rebels Against the Future), Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine) and Cory Doctorow, who are working to reconsider the Luddites’ reputation in the age of AI and the gig economy. Rather than seeing them as misguided revolts against the inevitability of technological progress, these writers appraise the Luddites in their historical context as severely desperate labor movements against tech oligarchies. The Luddites’ aims were, ultimately, to raise the minimum wage, cease child labor, and to maintain a higher standard of craftsmanship and quality in the production of textile goods. At every point their appeals to authority were spurned. So they turned to mob justice. “You may call the people a mob,” remarked Lord Byron before Parliament, “but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.”
The subtitle of the game, “The Luddite War on Industry, 1811-?” is also a cheeky nod to Volko’s Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?. While these games don’t share a mechanical similarity, they both explore the ongoing and unpredictable nature of insurgencies.
Grant: Why was this a subject you wanted to focus on?
Yoni: My area of interest in game design, broadly speaking, is movement politics on an operational scale. As with Chicago ‘68, the Luddite war on industry feels an under-explored subject matter in historical gaming. While there are certainly titles about the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of barons and magnates (especially in the Euro game niche), little is mentioned about the social, political, and ecological costs of these endeavors for progress.
Moreover, the story of the Luddites and their “secret societies” is about the tensions of modernity. New technologies combined with extensive wars abroad drove a rise in food costs and detonated an affordability crisis in the imperial homeland. Communication media (handbills, newspaper editorials, and pseudonymous letters) was an instrument of persuasion, vitriol, and threats. Suspected Luddites and their sympathizers were surveilled by the state, which increasingly saw its interests entwined with industrial capital. We’ve seen this all before!
Grant: What are the unique features with the system used for the game?
Yoni: The Nights of King Ludd has a unique framework for collaborative engine building. Initially, players draw from “The Commons” (a shifting card pool) where each card has the same “trade cost.” On your turn, you may activate a Conspirator (spending an action point) to draw a card into one of the columns in your tableau. Each column upgrades your actions with a permanent ability. If you specialize your actions, you can harmonize a collective strategy between players and hone in on the steps you need to take to sabotage the mills.
In the Commons we are evoking the notion of a shared economy. But this may shift dramatically when decreasing wages and increasing productivity converge. Then, the Commons transforms into the “Common Market.” Now, players are building their tableaux with an increasing cost, similar to the Pax Series (for example, Pax Pamir or Pax Renaissance). Each player is now facing a decision: overwork their cabal of conspirators or draw on the labor power of the workers in the textile industry (which drains their militant power on the map).
Grant: What does the collaborative portion of the subtitle mean for the game? How do the players cooperate?
Yoni: I choose “collaborative” not “cooperative” as a descriptor to emphasize the multi-victor nature of the game. In The Nights of King Ludd, each player chooses not only their persona and their role in the Luddite struggle (with asymmetric abilities and effects), they also put forward a “Motivation.” Motivations are personal victory conditions that unlock if the collective win condition (destroying all three mills on the map) is met. This gives shape to the degree of player friction in the game. For example, Lord Byron’s motivation is to turn down the heat from the ruling Regency. His motivation is in conflict with George Mellor’s, the famed assassin, whose attempts at the Manufacturer’s life will ratchet up the crown’s crackdown. But pair John Baines, a republican agitator, with the Molyneux sisters, two young women destined to labor in the mills, and the gameplay will tilt more toward cooperation. In this case, Baines is working to regulate the industriousness of the mill (keeping productivity low and wages high) while the Sisters are interested in keeping workers employed. So the degree of cooperation is up to the players, and as often happens, someone may have to make a noble sacrifice for the collective good.
Grant: What did you need to model regarding the English Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution?
Yoni: As EP Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) notes, the history of the Luddites is, at best, “opaque.” We are grappling with a story about secret societies in an era where workers associations were illegal and damaging weaving frames was a capital offence. As such, we have dubious claims from government spies, confessions before “hanging judges,” and pseudonymous letters and handbills. Consequently, the model had to be expansive enough to capture the granular nature of these conspiratorial operations, but also open enough to allow for the plausibility of a broad range of player actions.
For example, one of the core actions is to “rally local weavers,” which is a form of recruitment. In game terms, this means moving one of the Employed Weaver cubes into an Enclosure where they can contribute to your force strength. This action may represent members of your secret society swearing in sympathetic workers in local pubs, or calling a clandestine meeting in the nearby woods. We don’t know precisely how the Luddites organized themselves, so the language has to be inclusive of these possibilities. Players then “assemble a raiding party”, which is to move the cubes from the enclosure into a nearby Mill. Each cube in the Mill space adds a die to the Sabotage roll (which is the primary means of wrecking machines). So here is a group of raiders hiding in the hedge and awaiting the signal from King Ludd. They are spurred on by the Mobs who have surrounded the site, represented by these Mob tiles. Matching a die roll to the symbol on the Mob Tile is how you roll a “hit.” The intention is to shape a series of amorphous and difficult to historicize chain of events into a familiar wargaming mechanism: rolling a handful of dice representing an “attack” and applying modifiers to the results.
Grant: What is your design goal with the game?
Yoni: My overall aim was to develop a system that could express a relationship between an abstract economic system, worker uprisings, and the coming together of industry and aristocracy to form a ruling class. But on a purely design level, I wanted to work within the framework of a Pax Series style market that you encounter in games like Pax Pamir and Pax Renaissance. That is, a shifting market of cards that players can purchase and place into their tableau. It’s an evocative description of history as a bazaar of possibilities and counterfactuals. The Nights of King Ludd tweaks this vision of history as somewhere between a commons (a gift economy) and a market (which costs worker power as in-game resources).
But really, I want this to be a “raiding party game.” Beneath the heady layers of history and theory is a brisk experience featuring dice odds, clever combos, and cooperation with your friends (while slyly pushing your own agenda!).
Grant: What other games did you use as inspiration?
Yoni: John Company from Wehrlegig Games is certainly one of the biggest inspirations, taking place in a similar era of British imperial economic imperialism (Ludd is at the tail end of JoCo’s later scenarios) and drawing on the satirical printworks of the time. Like John Company, players are asked to intervene in an existing ecosystem. In both games, player actions accelerate a system that will simultaneously reward and punish everyone at the table. How this is doled out is uneven, so players have to weave and dodge to make best of a collapsing infrastructure.
Grant: What sources did you consult about the history?
Yoni: An invaluable resource for all things Luddite is the Luddite Bicentenary curated by Richard Holland. This is a comprehensive digital archive of historical ephemera devoted to Luddism, including handbills, court transcripts, and other images and texts. I also quote extensively from Rebels Against the Future by Kilpatrick Sale and The Risings of the Luddites: Chartists and Plug-Drawers by Frank Peel, E.P. Thompson, as well as The Making of the English Working Class also by E.P. Thompson.
Other reference texts include:
Writings of the Luddites edited by Kevin Binfield
Ben o’ Bill’s, The Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale by Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes, George Henry Walker
Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller
The Luddite Rebellion by Brian Bailey
Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
Women in Protests 1800-1850 by Malcolm Thomis
Convict Lives at the Launceston Female Factory (A swing rioter: Elizabeth Studham by Keryn Rivett), edited by Lucy Frost & Meredith Hodgson,
Grant: What is the dice pool building mechanic and how does it work in the design?
Yoni: At the core of the game is a fairly straightforward dice mechanic for resolving raids against the three mills on the map. Throughout the course of the round, players add “saboteur dice” to the dice pool, representing the Luddite’s militant capacity. These are D6’s with the following icons: gun, hammer, and torch (matching the “mobs tiles” – armed rabble surrounding the mill). The remaining three sides are blank and always result in a miss.
When a sabotage operation is initiated, the number of dice rolled is determined by the number of raiders you’ve positioned at the mill and what constitutes a possible hit is determined by the matching icons on the nearby mob tiles (again; gun, hammer, or torch). All misses are returned to supply but if at least one hit is rolled, you may push on and carry out multiple raids, striking at other mills as well.
As your readers can deduce, the purpose of the tableau building and the card engine is to modify the odds of the roll in your favor, i.e. the more raiders you assemble the more dice you will roll, and the more mobs you’ve fomented the more likely you are to roll a hit.
Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?
Yoni: As neighboring societies of Luddites, you have three rounds before the Crown musters its army and crushes the revolts. Each round is structured the same:
- Dawn: Industry Operates – at the beginning of the second and third round your adversaries in London will take actions against you, sending the militia on patrols and accelerating industrial production.
- Day: The Manufacturer Speculates – during this phase, the local manufacturer will take an action, depleting the Commons of its resources.
- Night: The Luddites Conspire – this is the main phase of the game, where each player takes turns resolving a Conspiracy action by spending a Ready Conspirator cube on their boards. Each player takes a primary Conspiracy Action and resolves any secondary effects on Cards tucked into the Column of that Conspiracy on their Player Boards. In this phase, players can attempt a sabotage roll to destroy the Mills.
- Round’s End – when there are no Ready Conspirators (or all players pass) players reset the components for the next round.
Thank you for your time in answering our questions Yoni! I am very much interested in this game and its efforts to tell this very interesting story of resistance. While this is not a traditional wargame, in my opinion it certainly merits a serious look from wargamers who are interested in CDG’s and games that use cards and that are interested in seeing these type of non-traditional historical subjects represented. I have backed the project and look forward to getting my copy next year!
If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd
In Part II of the interview, we will dive more into the makeup and uses of the card, concepts of Breaking the Oath, profit and market manipulation.
-Grant
The Players' Aid 