Five Games for Doomsday is one of Berlin’s most successful and long-running English-language podcasts, but unless you know your Eurogames from your Ameritrash, you’ve probably never never heard of it. The brainchild of English actor and long-time Berlin resident, Ben Maddox, Five Games for Doomsday, or FGfD, is a podcast aimed at board game fans – and boy, are they legion.
“What people outside of board gaming don’t realise is that Germany is the world capital of board games,” says Maddox. “Later today, I’m going to the biggest board game fair of the year, which brings 150,000 people to Essen.” Berlin, he says, is an underappreciated hub. “You could get a game with completely new people in Berlin every night for a year … [Board games] are one of those things Berlin doesn’t talk about because it’s not techno or interpretative dance.”
The organising principle of FGfD is simple. Every fortnight, Maddox hops on a call with one of the great and the good of the board game world – designers, publishers, journalists – and asks which five board games they’d bring to a bunker in the event of an apocalypse, zombie or otherwise.
Board games became an intrinsic part of a German upbringing in a way they didn’t in, say, Britain or America.
For board games fans, FGfD is a trove of information, insight, good jokes and likeable banter (Maddox’s friend, Steve Syrek sometimes co-presents). For the uninitiated, stumbling on the podcast is like finding a door in your apartment you’d never bothered opening before: there’s a party inside, it’s a rager, but you don’t understand the first thing anyone is saying.
It’s a feeling Ben Maddox understands, because until his pursuit of acting work brought him from Vienna to Berlin in 2011 (“Britain is basically Mad Max and I didn’t want to go back”) he too knew nothing about “this whole arcane, frankly bizarre world of the hobby board game”. At that point, he was in his mid-30s and thinking he needed a change from his “rather dissolute life”. He bought a board game called Pandemic in which players work together to stop the spread of global viruses.
Unexpectedly, he was blown away. “I was used to games like Monopoly, frustrating and frankly boring games you play at Christmas. Pandemic opened my eyes to this whole entire world,” he says, noting that Matt Leacock, the designer, was interviewed about the game’s prescience by the New York Times during the pandemic.
“I don’t want to sound pompous, but I’m going to,” says Maddox “[These games] are legitimate works of art that you come out of feeling every bit as exhilarated and satisfied and curious and energetic as you would coming out of a movie or finishing a novel.”
Convinced he was living through the golden age of a new-ish medium, Maddox started Five Games for Doomsday in 2018 to document the creativity in real-time. “How astonishing would it be if a recording of Shakespeare turned up tomorrow? Playing these games felt like witnessing an artistic explosion, yet all of these pioneers are still here. I thought it would be great to chronicle their process and the evolution of this art form.”
Six years later, Maddox’s show racks up 10,000-15,000 monthly listeners, and thanks to an amalgamation of Patreon subscribers, sponsorship, paid podcasting and ad revenue, it provides an income to supplement his voiceover and acting work. That places him in a very exclusive club of people who are semi-professional podcasters. It also qualifies him as an expert in a global industry estimated to be worth some 13 billion US dollars: he is regularly flown to participate in board games conferences in the US, and is currently writing a book.
So why is Germany the board gaming capital? “As with everything here, it goes back to the war,” Maddox says. In the aftermath of World War II, German audiences found traditional board games, many centred around military-style battles, distasteful. That was the springboard for a new kind of game – now referred to as Eurogames – which Maddox describes as “wilfully non-militaristic” and which are generally concerned with building or growing (Ameritrash came much later, and is used to describe games, usually American-made, which are more aggressive, complex and reliant on chance). “These games were perfect for families, because you don’t have to sit at a table with your kids and kill them on the Eastern Front. You’re building a farm. You’re growing turnips. So board games became an intrinsic part of a German upbringing in a way they didn’t in, say, Britain or America.”
Although the wild international success of Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan from 1995 (now known as simply Catan) kick-started the industry elsewhere, Germany had a head start, and games are still taken more seriously here than elsewhere: “In Britain and America, the people who come up with ideas for games are called designers. In Germany, they’re called authors, and I think that’s a very interesting distinction,” says Maddox.
“I have a very broad definition of art, which is basically that art is something that tells us about ourselves,” he adds. “There are games out there which treat the human condition in such an innovative and clever way that you come away thinking about who we are as animals in a more profound way.”
Listen to Five Games for Doomsday wherever you get your podcasts.
The podcasts we’re is listening to…
No Worries If Not! Cartoonist Lily O’Farrell takes a look at internet culture (think trad wives, the Facebook group ‘Are We Dating the Same Guy’, Gamergate) with a particular focus on how it affects women and non-binary people.
Slow Burn: The Rise of Fox News There’s no way to understand the rise of Donald Trump without understanding Fox News. Check out the tenth series of Slate’s Slow Burn for a primer.
Split Screen: Thrill Seekers There’s a couple of great mic-drop moments and surprise twists in this podcast about a group of early reality-TV candidates who signed up for, well, what exactly did they sign up for?
