Magazine Madness 31: Senet Issue 11

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

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Senet—named for the Ancient Egyptian board game, Senet—is a print magazine about the craft, creativity, and community of board gaming. Bearing the tagline of “Board games are beautiful”, it is about the play and the experience of board games, it is about the creative thoughts and processes which go into each and every board game, and it is about board games as both artistry and art form. Published by Senet Magazine Limited, each issue promises previews of forthcoming, interesting titles, features which explore how and why we play, interviews with those involved in the process of creating a game, and reviews of the latest and most interesting releases. Senet is also one of the very few magazines about games to actually be available for sale on the high street.

Senet Issue 11 was published in the summer of 2023. It opens with the editorial noting the death of Klaus Teuber, the designer of one of the world’s most successful board games, Settlers of Catan, and that he had hoped to interview him in the future. Of course, that is not to be, but perhaps a tribute may appear in a future issue? After that, the issue gets down to business with ‘Behold’. This is the regular preview of some of the then-forthcoming board game titles. As ever, there are some interesting titles previewed here, including Crumbs!, a mini-card game about making sandwiches and Empire’s End, a board game in which the players’ empires are beset by plagues, floods, barbarian hordes, and more. Players bid to win the least worst of the disasters, their empires suffering the effects, but also learning and growing hardier from the experience. This sounds like a fascinatingly different game from the usual treatment of empires in board games.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters, contains a mix of praise for the magazine and a discussion of gaming culture, including representation in the hobby and the appeal of co-operative games. Just four letters, so it does not seem enough. As with the previous issue, Senet Issue 10, there is scope here for expansion of this letters page to give space to more voices and readers of Senet. One way of doing that is perhaps to expand it when ‘For Love of the Game’ comes to end. This regular column continues the journey of the designer Tristian Hall towards the completion and publication of his Gloom of Kilforth. In this entry in the series, he wanders off on a tangent about game designs which could have been, including one which appeared to the designer in a dream! Just how much this is useful to anyone interested in the design process is really up for debate.

Definitely more interesting is ‘Bez in Show’ by Alexandra Sonechkina. This is the first of the two interviews in the issue and with the designer and publisher Bez Shahriari, best known for the games Yogi and the ELL deck. This gives a little of her history and goes into more detail about her design process. The process for each designer differs, more obvious perhaps if you have read the interviews with other designers in previous issues and so can compare, but as an independent designer, hers differs perhaps more than most, focusing as it does on titles and subjects that are not necessarily as commercial, but still interesting and playable. Senet always includes two interviews, one with with a designer and one with an artist. Dan Jolin’s interview with the artist in this issue is with Adrian Smith. He has created art for publishers such as CMON and Games Workshop, specialising in Science Fiction and Horror. ‘Gods and Monsters’ showcases Smith’s artwork for Zombicide, Cthulhu: Death May Die, Rising Sun, and many more. Each piece is accompanied by a commentary from the artist to enjoyable effect.

In addition to the interview with an artist and a designer, each issue of Senet also includes one article examining a theme and a mechanic. Senet Issue 11 is no exception. ‘Sowing the Seeds’ is both an examination of a mechanic and an exploration of the proliferation and spread of a particular. The mechanic is ‘count and capture’ or ‘sow and harvest’ in which a player picks up seeds from one of his pits and sows them one at a time in the adjacent pits, aiming for certain objectives. The objectives will vary according to the different game variations, but they are all based upon Mancala. This is said to have originated in either Africa or Southeast Asia, but has subsequently spread around the world via various trade routes. It is perhaps one of the oldest of games and one of the oldest mechanics, but has been revisited by designers in more recent years. Most well known is Five Tribes, in which players manipulate the placement of the members of five different Arabian tribes and Trajan, an area control and set collection game set in Rome which uses a rondel (a mechanic previously examined in Senet Issue 5). More recent designs have used the mechanic for gunslinging duels as in A Fistful of Meeples and even improving links to attract supplicants to English abbeys in Pilgrim. This is a fascinating article which puts Mancala under the spotlight and engagingly explores its more modern applications.

Equally as interesting is ‘Power Play’. Written by Matt Thrower, this is the theme article in the issue, which is politics. It begins with The Landlord Game, which has today been transmogrified into Monopoly and its many variants, before coming up to date with SHASN, an Indian design which explores ideology in general elections and even Brexit: The Board Game of Second Chances, which examines the absurdities of that vote. In between, looks at political games with focuses big and small, the latter including games around the Suffragette movement, including the more recent Votes for Women, whilst the former includes Twilight Struggle, a game which covers the whole of the Cold War. Parodies and polemics are also covered, such as the less than serious Kremlin and the more then serious designs from Brenda Romero, such as Train, though it is as much an art piece and thought exercise rather than actual game. Both ‘Power Play’ and ‘Sowing the Seeds’ explore fascinating aspects of the gaming hobby, but in both cases do feel as if there is much more to be said about both. Especially political games. One sub-genre of the political game is only touched upon briefly here with 1960: The Making of the President and that is games about the U.S. election. The repetitive nature of the American election cycle means that designers often return to the subject. Not necessarily every election, but certainly often enough to warrant a whole article of its own.

‘Unboxed’, Senet’s reviews section covers a wide range of games. This incudes Verdant, a drafting and placement game about houseplants; Till The Last Gasp, a two-player skirmish game which involves elements of roleplaying; and even a reissue with Cranium 25th Anniversary Edition. ‘Senet’s top choice’ is Frosthaven, a sequel to Gloomhaven, which offers even more game play. Of course, Senet cannot cover every board game being released, but this is a good selection.

As is traditional, Senet Issue 11 comes to a close with the regular end columns, ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For ‘Confessions of a bad board gamer’, James Lewis explains why it does not matter that he is not a good player when it comes to board games. What he means is that he is not a good player at winning games, rather than being a poor player in social terms. He even points out that games need losers as well as winners. At the same time, he makes clear that when not winning, he is actually learning about the game and how it can be won. All very obvious, but it is still an entertaining enough piece. Danielle Standring, takes Mechs vs Minions off her ‘Shelf of Shame’ and discovers that she enjoys it enough to want to play again, and so brings the issue to a close.

Physically, Senet Issue 11 is very professionally presented. However, it does need an edit in places, but otherwise looks and feels as good as previous issues of the magazine. Oddly, the cover with Lady Liberty rolling dice does suggest that issue include some roleplaying content, since the dice are polyhedral dice more associated with that hobby rather than board games. There is no roleplaying content in the issue though.

Senet Issue 11 is an enjoyable read, made all the better for two excellent articles. These are ‘Sowing the Seeds’ on the influence of Mancala and ‘Power Play’ on politics in games. The latter though, does feel as if it barely scratches the surface and could have been much, much longer. Together they are worth the price of picking up Senet Issue 11, whilst everything else in the issue is a bonus.