Kurt Vonnegut's Lost Board Game Finally Published

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer? In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut's own notes in the margins. With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ's endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut's GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble -- nearly 70 years after it was created.

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