Playing Nazis? Ethics, Historical Accuracy, and Personal Comfort in Games with Loaded Topics

Earlier this year, I’ve written a post about my most anticipated games to be released this year. Among them was Weimar: The Fight for Democracy (Matthias Cramer, Compass Games), which deals with the interwar Weimar Republic that was toppled by the Nazis. My fellow blogger Dave (check out his blog!) had asked me a year ago how I felt about the Nazis being a playable side in such a game – as this one does not feature them as such, but The Weimar Republic: Political Struggle in Germany, 1919—1933 (Gunnar Holmbäck, GMT Games) does. I’ve been coming back to that question, as it touches on some important matters: Most importantly, one of ethics, which will form the main part of this post. However, there are also questions of historical accuracy, and of personal comfort, with which we will deal in turn. While this post is focused on the two Weimar games, it’ll also take the wider matter into account.

Farewell 2020 – Historical Board Games

The year is almost over, and once more, it has come with quite a few excellent historical board games played. These are the three I enjoyed most this year:

BoardGameGeek War Game Top 60: #60-51

The best ideas are often those of others. For example, Dave from the Dude! Take Your Turn blog came up with this neat series to write about the top 100 games on BoardGameGeek – just some thoughts what the game is about, if he has played it and if so, what that was like, and if not, if he would give it a shot. You can find the starting post for the games #100-91 here. If you want to go straight for the crème de la crème, here are the top ten games on BGG, and if you still don’t have enough after 100 games, Dave has already started diving into the games #200-101, which I also read religiously.
These posts have been tremendous conversation starters about a variety of board games. Therefore, I asked Dave if I could borrow his idea and apply it to the BoardGameGeek war games list. He graciously agreed, and here we are! Here are the ground rules of this series: