Pax |
Welcome to my Pax Britannica web site. This is a much-overlooked game.
Developed for face-to-face play, it lends itself perfectly to PBeM
game. The game's like Dipolmacy except it's global, there's Japanese, dice are involved, and war is the failure of dipolmacy not the norm. |
It's not often we wargamers find a lot to read about our games. It is less frequent to come across anything about Pax Britannica. I found this in an obscure tome:
In a changing world, some things do not change. It may be fashionable to decry the simple Virtues, but we still like to find them in our friends. Loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity - these are the hallmarks of the good friend, the good husband and father, the nice guy we all hope our daughters will marry.
In the amoral world of (Pax Britannica), however, they are the hallmarks of the born loser. If a fallen enemy reaches out a hand for assistance, the wise man lops it off. If a friend does you a good turn when you're down, wait until he's down, then beat him to death. If an ally asks for your help in planning the next season's moves, give it freely and copiously, then do the reverse of what you agreed and let him take the counter-attack. Try to surround yourself with people who trust you, then let them down; find an ally who will gladly die for you and see that he does just that.
In short, (Pax Britannica) is not a nice game; to win, it is necessary to behave like a complete cad. Some people adopt a tone of moral outrage at the philosophy of the game, and refuse to play it at all. although it is already unfashionable, and will soon no doubt be illegal, to acknowledge any difference between the sexes, this attitude is particularly common among women - a cynic might say that (Pax Britannica) threatens to erode the natural advantage their innate duplicity gives them over men in real life. At any event, this moral posture is quite untenable. We all have these anti-social tendencies somewhere within us, and it may be better to give them free rein in a harmless game, suppressing them where they could do real damage.
Not a nice game, as I said; but a marvelously entertaining one...a game of pure skill for seven pedigree rats with time on their hands.
Intriguing piece but it was not written about Pax Britannica but rather Diplomacy (Richard Sharp, The Game of Diplomacy, 1978). Regardless, it addresses the very nature of the game. The two games share much: the intrigue, the diplomacy, the military posturing, the fatal alliances needed to win and ultimate backstab in the homestretch to win. It is not a matter of suspecting the betrayal but timing it to fit your needs.
In months to come, look for these topics:
[Brief Overview]
[Playing the Game]
[Playing the Game to Win] [Diplomacy and the Knife]
[England] [France]
[German] [United States] [Japanese]
[Russia] [Italy]
[Ethics] [Scams]
[Cheats]