Forget About Winning
Tower of Silence revolves around hope. The shipwrecked souls that wash ashore at the beginning of every turn only have a limited amount left. And with every effort they make, with every new hex they crawl into, it dwindles further. Worse still, it all depends on the roll of a die. You may have delighted in taking control of a demented child, a catatonic lookout, or a suicidal captain, only to roll poorly and discover that they do not have enough hope to make it to the top of the tower. And then what do you do?
A key design goal in the Trilogy of Lost Hope was to stack the odds firmly against the players. Not just by making the games hard. But by making them impossible. A soul with too little hope in Tower of Silence, a shadow causing too many tremors in Iron Mountain, a hemorrhaging villager unable to carry corpses in Pesta. Neither is going to make it for long. And certainly not to the end. Yet still they can take meaningful actions and become memorable characters in your game. If only you allow them to.
As board gamers we are used to being motivated primarily by quantifiable outcomes. If an action does not generate resources or victory points, push ourselves further up the ladder or our opponents further down, we are reluctant to take it. What is the point of doing something just for the sake of doing it, we might ask. Though that largely depends on the context in which we do it. And most board games lack that context. That incentive to act simply to deepen our shared experience. As if anything else really mattered. Let alone winning or losing.
The implicit premise of our games is that you have already lost. Whatever your situation, there is no way that you are getting out of it more alive than dead. You may have a sense of direction to guide you in your actions, but that too shall pass. So why not simply enjoy the best of times on the worst of days. Why not play as if the parts of the game mattered more than their sum. Not that they do, but at least they are there. Like branches breaking while you fall.
Returning now to the initial question: what do you do when the hand you are dealt is so bad that you are not even in the race. Do you turn away in disgust? Do you patiently wait for another chance? Or do you lean into the fact that the game you are playing is no more balanced than the world around you?
In Tower of Silence, souls bereft of hope tend to become either selfless or vindictive. Some will spend their last hope breaking through the barrier that holds back their fellow souls. Others will bury a rusty knife deep in the chest of a childhood friend more hopeful than themselves. As if there were no middle ground. And maybe there is not. At least not in a game that challenges you to act in the face of something truly insurmountable.
