Sphinx

One of my favourite passages in classical literature comes from the sixth-century CE historian and poet Agathias Scholasticus; it’s a poem preserved in the Greek Anthology (11.365), in which the farmer Calligenes goes to the house of Aristophanes the Astrologer and begs him to say whether he’ll get a good harvest.

Taking his counters and spreading them out on a tray, and then extending his fingers, Aristophanes said to Calligenes: “If your bit of land receives sufficient rain, and grows no crop of wild weeds; if frost does not break the furrows; if hail does not nip off the tops of the sprouting ears; if no deer grazes down the crops and if it meets with no other disaster from air or earth, I prophesy that your harvest will be excellent and you will cut the ears with success — only beware the locusts.”

Obviously the joke is that such a prophecy is utterly useless – if nothing goes wrong, then things will probably be okay – but it does sum up the uncertain, risk-dominated world of pre-modern agriculture (hell, going by the downbeat, phlegmatic moroseness of my Norfolk tenant farmer forebears, probably agriculture in general) rather well. So it was very much in this spirit that I attempted to produce a quick ‘Ancient Greek Subsistence Farming’ game for my Greek History students, to help break up the two hours (see here for context).

As it happened, I couldn’t get the technology to cooperate (exporting files from the Twine webpage turns out to be much trickier in Safari), and I had WAY too much material to get through in the lecture in any case – but, having got halfway through creating the game, I thought I might as well finish it and make it available:

https://nevillemorley.itch.io/the-agroikos-version-1

Now, I would be the first to admit that this isn’t remotely the right format for such a game, but it’s the technology I know and had to hand. Really this ought to be a ‘roll and move’ board game, with a board a bit like a Monopoly board in which most squares show the success of the harvests for barley and wheat (players have to decide which crop to sow before they roll the dice for each turn) and a few have events like ‘plague of locusts’ and ‘Spartan invasion’ that affect everyone equally; players have tokens to show their grain stocks, their money and their social credit, which then set limits on how they can get out of trouble.

Obviously barley harvests would fail much less frequently than wheat, but bring fewer rewards, and there are several clear strategies: profit maximisation versus risk minimisation, accumulation of cash or stores or social credit. It’s a death match between the Garnseyist risk-shy subsistence peasant and the Oberite entrepreneurial farmer… And if I could programme this as an electronic game, it could incorporate additional features like the chance to expand one’s land holdings or buy an ox or slave (increasing productivity – but eating into the food supplies).

What I could try to do with the Twine format is introduce more randomness (at the moment there are only a couple of points where the outcome isn’t determined by your choices) or more conditional moves (“if social credit > 2 then neighbours help out, if not then GOTO ‘starve'”). Should be reasonably straightforward; it is simply, as ever, a question of the trade-off between spare time (none) and potential benefit (erm)…

Update: well, I’ve had a first try at devising the board game! (No, YOU have got far better things to do with your time…).

Here are the files for the Agroikos Rules and the Agroikos Board, in case anyone wants to give this a try. A couple of remarks from the initial play-testing. For tokens, I used draughts pieces as that’s all I had to hand, but even for a two-player game you’re likely to need more than that (I had to start counting white as 1s and black as 2s), preferably a bit slimmer and easier to handle. The main thing I have revised so far is the balance of penalties and rewards and between subsistence and market strategies, as the first time I played it everyone was dead from starvation before the end of the first turn, while later attempts saw both players becoming too rich to worry about any of the penalty squares.

I’ve also introduced more interaction between players, so that they sometimes take tokens off one another, whereas in the original version they were affected by the same things but not by one another’s actions. This does mean that I may need to go back and tweak the rules for a solo game, which was quite straightforward in the original version.

Anyway, I’d be very interested in feedback. The normal result should, I think, be that cautious, subsistence-focused players generally get along all right if they can avoid too many harvest failures and the spiral of debt, while those growing wheat for the market will either take over everything or crash and burn. If not, I may need to adjust the rules further…

Update 11/12: It’s belatedly occurred to me that, while I’ve play-tested a market-orientated wheat strategy and a subsistence-orientated barley strategy (in the absence of anyone else to play with), I really need to evaluate the approach of sowing a mixture of crops as the best of both worlds. Also, I will simply acknowledge the obvious point that ancient Greek farming involved far more than this binary choice between two crops – there are of course pulses (my Doktorvater, Peter Garnsey, would be muttering darkly if he knew I’d left those out), miscellaneous vegetables grown around the homestead, and of course the exploitation of the uplands with sheep, goats and hunting – but I really, really don’t have time. And in any case, expanding complexity inevitably undercuts the clarity of the pedagogic message…