Detailed History

Empire has a long his­to­ry, includ­ing an ear­ly ver­sion devel­oped in 1938 devel­oped by a group of col­lege friends from the University of California at Berkeley, which formed the basis for fur­ther devel­op­ment in the ear­ly 1960s by the son of one of the orig­i­nal inven­tors with his friends at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. It then under­went ongo­ing devel­op­ment at Reed into the 1970s, but was played only occa­sion­al­ly after the mid-80s.

The orig­i­nal “Empire” game in 1938 was cre­at­ed by a group of bud­dies who had gone to col­lege togeth­er at UC Berkeley, and then formed a sort of study group sev­er­al years lat­er. The group includ­ed Stillman Drake (grad­u­at­ed Berkeley in 1932), Mark Wrede Eudey, Dan Belmont and Henry “Bip” Ralston. Eudey report­ed­ly wrote up those rules, but the full rules have appar­ent­ly been lost (Eudey died in 2009, and his daugh­ter Lynn reports that she has found noth­ing that old in his remain­ing papers).

Dan Drake tells us:

Yes, they were all in the Bay Area, work­ing at what­ev­er there was to work at in the 30s. Oddly, in those dis­mal times, finance seems to have been a bit of a growth indus­try for very bright young men. Eudey, a math­e­mati­cian, got into some finan­cial ana­lyst work and dis­cov­ered that there were no good sources for finan­cial infor­ma­tion on local gov­ern­ments in California, mak­ing it hard to pre­pare the offer­ing doc­u­ments that might con­vince Eastern bankers that there real­ly was such a place with eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty that could even­tu­al­ly pay off bonds. (I recall from 1960, when I did a sum­mer stint at a muni bank­ing house, sto­ries of the ongo­ing dif­fi­cul­ties of the East Coast in believ­ing that California was good for its oblig­a­tions due to huge growth) So he start­ed his own lit­tle com­pa­ny to com­pile such data for sale to the busi­ness, and my father took a job there, which is how he got into the finance biz. I believe Belmont was in some finan­cial work for a long time. Ralston wound up in what’s now called bio­med­ical research.

So they were all con­ve­nient­ly placed to go to week­ly meet­ings at some­body’s house. And if one was on the wrong side of the Bay, one could always get there on the com­muter light rail sys­tem that occu­pied half the low­er deck of the Bridge.

Empire was revived and meta­mor­phosed at Reed College in the fall of 1960, with main game devel­op­ment by Dan Drake (grad­u­at­ed 1964), J.D. Eveland (also 1964), Alan Arey and Jim Trosper. Eveland had brought with him to Reed a copy of the then-new game Diplomacy, and talked sev­er­al peo­ple into play­ing it at his dorm. Dan Drake and Jim Borders (1963) hap­pened to wan­der by. Dan men­tioned that “his father [Stillman Drake] had played a game on a map some­thing like that that they called Empire back in the 1930s. He told us a lit­tle bit about this and we thought this sound­ed inter­est­ing enough that it might be worth exper­i­ment­ing with,” recalls Eveland. “So we agreed that I think it was the fol­low­ing week­end or some­thing we would sort of try to tack­le a ver­sion of this, rec­og­niz­ing that we were going to sort of make up the rules as we went along. And Dan remem­bered some things about this that his father had told him and we made up some oth­ers.”

Dan’s rec­ol­lec­tion is sim­i­lar, but includes his father’s writ­ten sum­ma­ry (which sur­vives today) of the 1938 rules:

So, in ’59–60, my fresh­man year, I encoun­tered Avalon Hill games, or rather Tactics II, which I think was the only one avail­able. That sum­mer I got a copy. (Try to imag­ine a time when one could go down­town to the city’s big depart­ment store and go to its books depart­ment, which also car­ried games, and pick up the lat­est (or only) Avalon Hill game, and that in a time when there was no inter­na­tion­al cult of war gamers, and this thing was pret­ty obscure. For $5, by the way, IIRC, but it was worth all that mon­ey.)

One evening, my father was vis­it­ing, and he saw a Risk posi­tion spread out on the card table, and remarked that it remind­ed him of Empire. Of what? So he described the game that he and his friends had invent­ed in the 1930s some­time. A bit of an anti-mil­i­tary game, in which armies were expen­sive and slow and clum­sy and com­plete­ly destruc­tive. A few days after that, he typed up the rules from mem­o­ry.…

So, when I got back for fall semes­ter 1960, I was look­ing for Risk play­ers or what­ev­er, to try to set up an Empire game. Walking past Chittick one evening, I saw some peo­ple hud­dled around some­thing that turned out to be Diplomacy (which I’d nev­er heard of). That was my intro­duc­tion to JD, Al Wood, and I for­get who else.

So, we put these rules to use one Sunday after­noon, and played a few games, a few hours each, over a num­ber of weeks, and things sort of [grew].

There were not a lot of oth­er strat­e­gy and wargames for grown-ups avail­able at the time, but the stu­dents bor­rowed ideas from a num­ber of oth­er sources. The ini­tial com­bat results table and much of the com­bat sys­tem was bor­rowed from Tactics II (mak­ing com­bat sig­nif­i­cant­ly less oblit­er­a­tive than the 1938 game, but still bloody enough that it was usu­al­ly avoid­ed), while the nego­ti­a­tions and lack of for­mal rules on diplo­ma­cy and agree­ments owed much to Diplomacy and Risk. A unique fea­ture of the game, lost in some lat­er ver­sions, was that in addi­tion to the nation­al gov­ern­ments that were more-or-less syn­ony­mous with the play­ers, there could be cor­po­ra­tions with inde­pen­dent exis­tence, and the players/​governments could own stock in those cor­po­ra­tions. This last con­cept was bor­rowed from a Monopoly vari­ant invent­ed by Eveland, known as “Corporation Monopoly.”

Also unique to Empire was the free­wheel­ing nature of the game itself, and the fact that while com­bat was pos­si­ble and detailed, it was nei­ther nec­es­sary nor the focus of the game. Eveland com­ments:

I go out of my way to avoid being in com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tions. I don’t like win/​lose sit­u­a­tions and I have a vis­cer­al aver­sion to that. And so I tend—when I tend­ed to cre­ate games and to arrange games I tend­ed to find games that didn’t lend them­selves to win­ning and los­ing.

The nice thing about Empire was it would go on long enough that you couldn’t fig­ure out who was win­ning or who’s lost (laughs) and I sort of always when I was think­ing of ways to expand the game I was always think­ing of ways to make it less like­ly that you could tell when any­one was win­ning or los­ing. Not that peo­ple didn’t go up or down or not that there weren’t plays that you scored off of oth­er peo­ple, but that the game itself became an exer­cise in art rather than the out­come.

And it was the process of the game that—at the end of the term there was usu­al­ly a debate of a cou­ple hours as to who was in bet­ter posi­tion and who was going to do what, but sel­dom any— there was nev­er any need to come to a par­tic­u­lar con­sen­sus. And I think this is one of the things that I—at least this last­ed as phi­los­o­phy of the game as long as I was involved with it. I have no idea if that changed lat­er on but I was able to impose in a sense I think my ethos of non-com­pe­ti­tion into this. It’s not non-com­pe­ti­tion pre­cise­ly.  It’s de-empha­sis on win­ning if you will….

In a sense the game was about telling a sto­ry. It was about devel­op­ing a much—well, everything’s about sto­ries ulti­mate­ly, but this was real­ly a game in which the sto­ry was the impor­tant part. You devel­oped your sto­ry and every­body would cre­ate their own coun­try with its own iden­ti­ty. And part of the plea­sure of the game was cre­at­ing the back sto­ry for your coun­tries and why they would be inter­est­ing and why they were doing the things that they were doing. And peo­ple spent a great deal of time try­ing to fig­ure out appro­pri­ate back sto­ries that would rein­force these.  And again points were award­ed for cre­ativ­i­ty if you will.

It became a very engag­ing kind of thing. It became cer­tain­ly a major com­po­nent of iden­ti­ty for myself and sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple for a cou­ple of years and it was regard­ed by the greater cam­pus as a phe­nom­e­non.

At first the game was only played syn­chro­nous­ly, which is to say when every­one was present at once. But after a year and a half, they start­ed hav­ing more extend­ed games, in which the board would be left set up in the mid­dle of the Winch (dorm/​residence) social room, and they’d come back to play more. At this point it rapid­ly became an asyn­chro­nous game, in which peo­ple would indi­vid­u­al­ly come to play their turns one at a time. When some­body fin­ished their turn, they would take the drag­on turn mark­er fig­ure and leave it on the map­board on the coun­try of the next play­er, to indi­cate it was their turn.

Reed College Empire play­ers of the ear­ly 1960s includ­ed Jim Kahan (’64), Ron Hanks (’64), T. Nicolaus “Nick” Tideman (’65), Tony Wannier (’66?), Peter Clark (’67), Lynne O’Connor (’67), Emerson Mitchell and Heather Rohde. Because the Winch social room was a major cen­ter of cam­pus activ­i­ty, and high­ly vis­i­ble (from a major cam­pus walk­way artery), dur­ing the year or two it was host­ed there, the game itself became well known on cam­pus. “it was impos­si­ble not to know we exist­ed,” writes Emerson Mitchell. Indeed, that same promi­nence helped draw him in:

The first few times I saw Empire I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the view thru the win­dow into the end of the old dorm block as I walked to Elliot Hall from Foster/​Schultz.

I observed it when­ev­er I could, and hung around that dorm room when­ev­er I could. Since the game itself lasts at least a semes­ter, I had to wait and ask to get into a game as it start­ed.

Empire even helped him meet his future wife, as he explains:

My wife learned my name watch­ing us play in Foster/​Scholz social hall.  I had noticed her watch­ing but when she said “Emerson, you are beau­ti­ful” I was strid­ing down the hill with my cape and long hair blow­ing in the wind, I decid­ed I had to get a date with this girl!  I did, and by the next june we were recit­ing wed­ding vows.  40th anniver­sary is June 12! [2011—ed.]

Over the sum­mer of 1962, while work­ing a sum­mer job at the University of Michigan, J.D. Eveland built a set of sev­er­al thou­sand cus­tom pieces for the game, cut from a soft wood, glued togeth­er, and paint­ed in var­i­ous play­er col­ors. The cus­tom pieces includ­ed con­struc­tion machines, planes, mul­ti­ple ship types, and tanks. Eveland housed these in a sim­i­lar­ly cus­tom-built wood­en shelf unit with small plas­tic draw­ers. Besides the cus­tom pieces, the game made use of stock cer­tifi­cates bor­rowed from some oth­er game, ¹⁄₇₂ scale plas­tic sol­diers, small toy vehi­cles and oth­er bits. The cus­tom box and some of the pieces still sur­vive in the Reed College archives, hav­ing recent­ly been res­cued from the base­ment of one of the dorms.

Not all the home­made pieces were suc­cess­ful. Mitchell says “One of the types was small cubes from a kind of eras­er that tend­ed to stick togeth­er and even­tu­al­ly dis­solved the draw­er they belonged in!”

Resource allo­ca­tions on the first map were done based on real-world resources at the time. Interestingly, this gave a huge edge to play­ers start­ing in North America. For the sec­ond game, play­ers were pro­hib­it­ed from start­ing in North America prop­er, but this just became a race to take over North America instead. This led to the cre­ation of the first game map­board to use a map of an imag­i­nary world.

The 1960 game map­board used a sim­ple square grid, like chess or Tactics II (or the 1938 ver­sion), but with more squares. This was replaced by a map using hexa­gons (“hex­es”), but that was hard to draw. Further maps used rows of off­set squares, equiv­a­lent to hex­es but much eas­i­er to draw. This off­set-squares approach, with 1″ squares and a 42″ x 72″ board, was in use by 1964 and remained the stan­dard there­after.

Even by the end of Drake and Eveland’s time at Reed in the sum­mer of 1964, the rules had not yet been writ­ten up as a sin­gle coher­ent doc­u­ment, there were just the com­bat results table (bor­rowed from Tactics II) and a sin­gle page of revised eco­nom­ic rules they had come up with part-way through their time at Reed. “The rules were just sort of known,” says Jim Kahan, one of the orig­i­nal play­ers. “It wasn’t writ­ten down, it wasn’t dis­cussed. There was no arbi­tra­tor. There was no per­son. Any con­tentious deci­sion had to be nego­ti­at­ed. If there was a bat­tle, it had to be pub­licly wit­nessed because the tac­tics, the out­comes of bat­tles were deter­mined by the roll of [the] dice.”

Empire was active­ly devel­oped through the 1960s and 1970s, and the rules were fur­ther for­mal­ized. Andrew Nisbet (’73) was the long-time head of the “Empire Association,” even after he was no longer a stu­dent, and orga­nized the game for years. He played when he arrived at Reed in 1967, assem­bled the first real rule­book for the game almost from scratch in 1969, and went through sev­er­al fur­ther rewrites and expan­sions of the writ­ten rules until his last com­plet­ed ver­sion in 1976 (with minor addi­tions there­after).

[Note: This sec­tion needs a lot of work yet. Ideally cov­er­age of the ’67–80s peri­od could have the same rich­ness as the ear­ly ’60s.]

My own (Thomas Phinney’s) rem­i­nis­cences:

I nev­er saw Empire being played while I was a stu­dent at Reed, in the fall of 1983, but some­body in the gam­ing club gave me a copy of Nisbet’s 1976 rules and record sheets. In par­tic­u­lar I nev­er saw a board, which would have giv­en me guid­ance on some impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions such as den­si­ty and place­ment of resource spaces on the board.

Years lat­er (1990−91) I retyped the rules and record sheets in Microsoft Word. I made minor changes to the game, most­ly a few clar­i­fi­ca­tions and adding a glos­sary of terms, as well as a more ques­tion­able intro­duc­to­ry sec­tion. This ver­sion of the rules still exists in hard copy and as a rea­son­ably “clean” dig­i­tal ver­sion (an OCR’d scan to PDF). I also cre­at­ed one or two maps from scratch.

I played twice with friends in mul­ti-month games. Even with­out know­ing the game’s lore, phi­los­o­phy and his­to­ry, some­thing about it, and per­haps us, pro­mot­ed the sto­ry-telling aspect of the game. I still have sev­er­al issues of the “nation­al news­pa­per” I cre­at­ed for the coun­try I was play­ing in one of our games.

I lat­er restruc­tured my vari­ant of the rules, and start­ed adding a few option­al rules. Since get­ting in touch with orig­i­nal Empire play­ers in 2011, and learn­ing more about the game, I have embarked on fur­ther revi­sion and tweak­ing, and am work­ing on incor­po­rat­ing all the sur­viv­ing rules change peti­tions, and bring­ing the rules back a bit clos­er to their ori­gins.

Empire Artifacts

At one point the game maps, pieces and acces­sories were held at a Reed stu­dent house known as “The Consulate” (so named for its con­cen­tra­tion of Empire play­ers, we are told). After that house stopped being a cen­ter of Empire activism, Nisbet and friends res­cued the Empire mate­ri­als from the base­ment, and car­ried them, table and all, to the Foster-Scholz dor­mi­to­ry, where they remained for sev­er­al years.

Over time, the usage of pieces ver­sus records in Empire changed sig­nif­i­cant­ly. In the late 1960s, there were pieces for every­thing in Empire, includ­ing even some immo­bile things such as fac­to­ries. Of course, a city held too many things to keep them all in one space on the board, so play­ers used a set of egg car­tons to con­tain the con­tents of all the cities. You could take them out as need­ed dur­ing the turn, and at the end of the turn you would dump all your city con­tents back into them.

Eventually records reduced the need for hav­ing quite so many pieces, and keep­ing so many on the board. City sheets tracked every­thing in a city at the end of the turn, and so did away with the egg car­tons. Had-Used-Produced (HUP) sheets allowed you to track what you built. That being said, there were still pieces being used all the way up to the end of the clas­sic Empire peri­od (the mid-1980s), but by then play­ers just pulled pieces out of a box, used them dur­ing their turn to fig­ure out their moves, and then put them away after updat­ing their record sheets at the end of the turn.

One of the lim­it­ing fac­tors with­in the game was the avail­abil­i­ty of work­er units (known as “coolies”) to move key resources from their pro­duc­tion sites to fac­to­ries and between fac­to­ries. The intri­cate move­ments with work­ers mov­ing things from one place to anoth­er and free work­ers com­ing back to replace them became known as “coolie shuf­fles.” Whether because of com­plex­i­ty or temp­ta­tion to cheat (in the face of lim­it­ed numbers/​locations of work­ers), some play­ers would end up doing shuf­fles that were not in fact pos­si­ble with­in the rules. “Checking peo­ple’s coolie shuf­fles became a rit­u­al pas­time,” says Nisbet. If look­ing at anoth­er player’s records revealed a shuf­fle that seemed implau­si­ble, if you were not your­self a vet­er­an play­er, doing such check­ing involved get­ting an expe­ri­enced play­er to see if they could come up with a way to repli­cate the same change from start­ing posi­tion to an end­ing posi­tion for the turn. If not, a chal­lenge might be made to the play­er’s records for them to demon­strate how they got from their start­ing point to their end­ing point for that turn.

Where are they now?

Currently, the sur­viv­ing orig­i­nal maps (scans of most are avail­able) are held less than a block from the Reed cam­pus, at the home/​office of McCullough Research, by Empire play­er and Reedie Robert McCullough. He, Nisbet and oth­ers occa­sion­al­ly use the Empire maps to play a game they call Tac 5, which is based on the com­bat por­tion of the Empire rules. They usu­al­ly use reprint­ed ver­sions of the 1970s maps rather than the orig­i­nals, along with the 1970s pieces.

The tat­tered green binder is still held by Andrew Nisbet. What is left of the orig­i­nal 1960s pieces are held at the Reed College archives, in the base­ment of the library. The table from the Winch social room some­how got com­man­deered and stayed with the game, wher­ev­er it migrat­ed, and is cur­rent­ly held by the Association of Reed Gamers (ARG), in the Old Dorm Block base­ment “dun­geon.”

Beside and below are pho­tos of Tac 5 being set up for a game at the GameStorm con­ven­tion, in March 2011, in Vancouver, Washington (which is essen­tial­ly a large sub­urb of Portland, Oregon).

Stillman Drake (1910−93) quit his suc­cess­ful career in finance in favor of a sec­ond career as a sci­ence his­to­ri­an (start­ing in 1967), and was best known as the world’s great­est expert on Galileo, who won numer­ous awards.

Mark Wrede Eudey (1912−2009) got a PhD in math­e­mat­ics from UC Berkeley, and worked for Cal Municipal Statistics for many years. Serving with the US Air Force in World War 2, he took a spe­cial assign­ment that required some­one who could both para­chute and knew sta­tis­tics: he was dropped behind ene­my lines and did sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of the effec­tive­ness of high alti­tude bomb­ing in Germany (not as effec­tive as the Allies had hoped). Eudey and Bip Ralson were avid chess play­ers, who co-found­ed (with Guthrie McClain) the California Chess Reporter pub­li­ca­tion in the sum­mer of 1951.

Henry James “Bip” Ralston was a research phys­i­ol­o­gist, whose “research on the phys­i­ol­o­gy and the mechan­ics of human walk­ing led to major improve­ments in arti­fi­cial limbs for amputees.” He died at home in San Francisco in 1993.

J.D Eveland lives in Los Angeles, where he teach­es busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion and infor­ma­tion sys­tems at TUI University.