Even Kurt Vonnegut needed a day job.
After releasing his first novel, “Player Piano,” in 1952, to positive reviews and poor sales, he needed other streams of income to support his growing family. Of all his endeavors — which included public relations, a car dealership and a very brief stint at Sports Illustrated — he was most passionate about designing a board game called General Headquarters.
Now, nearly 70 years after it was rejected by major publishers, the game is for sale at Barnes &Noble. Vonnegut’s son Mark, 77, said it was exciting to watch his father’s lost dream turn into a reality.
“I was thrilled that they actually found the original rules and his drawings and stuff,” Mark Vonnegut said. “I think they’re so precious. I mean, that’s the thrill of the game: You can just sort of watch his mind at work with his corrections and his drawings of the pieces.”
GHQ is a fast-paced two-player battle game in which each player maneuvers military units — infantry, armored vehicles, artillery and an airborne regiment — to capture the other player’s headquarters. As in chess, there are restrictions on where and how GHQ’s geometric game pieces can move.
“It is similar in mood to chess, and it is played on a standard checkerboard,” the elder Vonnegut wrote in his pitch to one game company. “It has enough dignity and interest, I think, to become the third popular checkerboard game.”
For many decades, Mark Vonnegut was the only other person who played GHQ. He recalled seeing how his father lit up when he was working on the game.
“It’s pretty much purely happy memories of playing the game and sort of sharing his enthusiasm that it might really work,” the younger Vonnegut said. “It was sort of a break from the grim realities of trying to get novels published.”
“Looking back now at the time and energy it took a young guy to do all that stuff, it’s really impressive that he had that kind of faith and belief in what he was doing,” he added.
Although selling the game proved even more difficult than selling a novel, the elder Vonnegut seemed to have more faith in GHQ than in most of his writing.
“He had great hopes that GHQ was going to rescue him,” his son said. “In retrospect, it seems so childish.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s notes and sketches were shepherded posthumously by Geoff Engelstein, a tabletop game designer who first learned about GHQ more than a decade ago, when it was briefly mentioned in an article.
“I tried to find out more about it online, and there was like no other information at all,” Engelstein recalled.
In 2012, Engelstein reached out to Indiana University, which houses Vonnegut’s papers, but the school could not release anything about the game without permission from his estate. Engelstein eventually got in contact with Donald Farber, who represented Vonnegut’s works and estate, and got his blessing.
The university library located a box labeled “board game materials,” and soon enough, Engelstein received about 40 pages of the author’s ideas and drawings. Although curiosity had compelled him to look for the papers, Engelstein was moved by how much effort and time went into the game.
“It’s just very cool, because it’s all his handwritten notes,” Engelstein said. “It’s all his scribbles and doodles and you can just kind of see the way he was working on it. There’s like five different versions of the rules, there’s his letters that he sent to publishers to try to get them to accept it, the rejection letters that came back.”
Engelstein played the game many times. For the Barnes &Noble version, he made changes only where things were unclear, eventually ironing out issues and reconciling some of the rules.
But placing the game in the context of Vonnegut’s life was challenging in several ways.
“It’s interesting because it’s a World War II game, and there’s tanks and infantry and paratroopers, and you’re trying to capture the enemy headquarters,” Engelstein said. “But we also didn’t want it to glorify war and just have a picture on the cover of people shooting each other, or armies fighting.”
Vonnegut, a World War II veteran, became vehemently anti-war, criticizing and satirizing wars and militaries in many of his novels, including “Cat’s Cradle” (1963) and “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969). Yet, he designed GHQ during the 1950s, in the early phases of processing the trauma that he endured in the military.
“Here’s a war game invented by a pacifist,” his son said. “Frankly, he had horrible PTSD, and I think his writing in general was a way of turning a nightmare into something that he hoped would make people less lonely.”
In that sense, GHQ allows the public to see Vonnegut’s life and work through a new, sobering lens. The game seems to lack the signature dark sense of humor that runs through Vonnegut’s writing, and his pitch letters to game companies earnestly suggested that GHQ could be used to train cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
“And yet, at the same time, he’s writing ‘The Sirens of Titan,’ where the whole army is completely a waste of time,” Engelstein said. “It’s an interesting dichotomy.”
As GHQ hits the shelves, Mark Vonnegut is interested to see what other people make of his father’s game.
“He’d think it was great fun that this was coming to pass,” the younger Vonnegut said. “He would probably say, ‘I could have used the money back then.’”
“It’s not going to beat chess,” he added. “But it’s a good game.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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