Eric: Just like in the stagecraft of making a musical, where you're using lights and costumes and narrative and songs and makeup and set design, all of these things adding up together to produce a certain experience. In Games, you know, he's using the board and the map and the rituals, but also the structures and rules and systems of the game to contribute to this overall experience.

Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. I'm your host, Barry Joseph, and today we finally arrive at the last topic from my book to be addressed in our podcast series: Stephen Sondheim and board games. For that, we'll be hearing from a dear old friend of mine and colleague, Eric Zimmerman. Eric is an arts professor and co-founder of the New York University Game Center, one floor above where I teach actually, and co-author of the seminal book Rules of Play, and more recently, both The Rules We Break: Lessons in Play, Thinking, and Design, and The Green Games Guide, a freely available guide, for making card and board games more sustainably. He has designed board games like Quantum, which my family loves, and the digital game Star Mechanic. He is also one of the three blurb writers on the back of my book. If you haven't read the back of my book recently, he wrote, "Matching Minds accomplishes a truly remarkable feat, reintroducing us to someone we thought we already knew. It's not just a biography of Stephen Sondheim, but a sourcebook and design guide to his creative work. An absolute must-read for any puzzle or game designer." Thank you, Eric. I'm so proud to have his endorsement for this book. When we first met over 20 years ago, he was co-founder and CEO of the influential indie game developer, Gamelab. Their office walls were covered with boards from the games I had grown up with, something I would only learn much later echoed Sondheim's own practices. So when it came time to bring someone to chat with me about Sondheim's board game designs, of course, I turned to Eric. Eric, welcome.

Eric: Thank you, Barry. Really happy to be here

Barry Joseph: So because you wrote one of the blurbs for the book, you got to see an early version of the book. As you were reading it and you were learning about the board games that Stephen Sondheim designed, are there any that you were wishing you were able to see, that maybe I can show you some pieces of today and we can talk about them?

Eric: All of them. I mean, the thing that struck me reading about those board games was that... I was interested in all of the games because I think what's so interesting is that these were not mass-produced games, right? Some of them are modifications of board games we know, like the way he kind of used Scrabble tiles to come up with his own versions of Bananagrams. But, most of them are one-of-a-kind objects that he made. And in that sense, they're less like commercial board games and they're more like unique art pieces. So yeah, I'm dying to know more about them. I've only played them through their descriptions in the book. In my head, so to speak.

Barry Joseph: Eric, I really appreciate you talking about them as art pieces. Can you say more about you using games as forms of art?

Eric: Oh, sure. I work as a game designer now, and I teach game design as a professor of game design. Yes, there is such a thing, at Tisch School of the Arts in New York City. My original training was as an artist. I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting, and I got an MFA in media arts. So really I come from an orientation of making culture. And I got interested in games not only because I had, you know, grown up playing games, video games and board games, but I also was really interested in them as a form of culture. And I have kind of moved around and among, different worlds relating to games throughout my career. I ran commercial studios. And at NYU, as you mentioned, one floor above where you teach, Barry, the NYU Game Center's whole point of view, our whole philosophy, is that games are a form of art and culture, and that we're in a school of the arts. So for us, we are standing side by side with other programs in film and dance and musical theater, actually. And we see games as part of that pantheon of forms of human creative expression. And I think this is what's so interesting about your book, right? That's also, the sense of someone like Sondheim, who is not really caring necessarily for a lot of these distinctions between what's high culture, what's low culture, what's a game , what's not a game, what's a commercial product, what's an artistic product and experience. And I think that, you know, musical theater's a really good example of that. I mean, it's at the same time popular culture, commercial culture. You buy tickets and go. They can be very merchandisable and commercializable intellectual properties. But at the same time, I think that any deep fan of musical theater would not hesitate to call it a form of art, and an important and influential form of art as well. And that's really the lens through which I see games.

Barry Joseph: Dear listeners, I think you can see now why I couldn't imagine jumping into board games without having Eric leading the conversation. And in many ways, that's my frame for this next chunk, Eric. I wanna be here as if I'm walking through a museum with you, and I'm showing you these objects, and I wanna hear how you're responding to them and what you're thinking about them. You experience some of it in the book, but I'm gonna be able to show you things you could not see through the book, 'cause I didn't have the rights to show them. But I can show them to you today, and we can talk about them. So Eric, to get started, why don't we play a trivia game? I'm gonna ask you a question I ask my audiences who have not read the book, so don't worry. I think you'll do just fine.

Eric: Okay.

Barry Joseph: Which line did Sondheim require his players to say at the start of his first board game? I'm gonna read you four. A, "Hello, darling"; B, "Stars, stars shine tonight"; C, "It's a goddamn lie"; and D, "I read in Hedda Hopper, darling, whom you're sleeping with." Do you wanna make a guess? Don't feel bad if you get it wrong.

Eric: Is it all of them for four different games?

Barry Joseph: Oh, that's an interesting answer. So the answer was B, stars, stars shine tonight. But all four of those sentences were required to be said by the players at some point during the game.

Eric: Okay. They're kind of like of a piece, right? Like One of them didn't stand out to me as being like particularly obviously something. You could say they all have the kind of theatrical flair.

Barry Joseph: So at the start of his first board game, people had to roll the die to go first, but they also had to say the phrase, "Stars, stars, shine tonight." And whoever got the highest number and said it in the most campiest way went first. So as we ourselves get started looking at Sondheim's board games, I invite you, Eric, to join me in invoking Sondheim by saying, stars, stars,

Eric: shine tonight.

Barry Joseph: Beautiful. All right, so let's start by looking at this game, this first game, which was called Stardom.

Eric: By the way, Barry, I love that as an introduction because it sort of demonstrates what some of Sondheim's special sauce was. For me, he's a game designer who isn't just about the rules and mechanics and competition, and structures and systems of the game, although those are very important to him. But he's really an experience-forward game designer. Everything is oriented towards the player and the player's experience. So even in this one micro example that you started with, okay, you're rolling a die to see who goes first. Many board games have that. It's necessary, right, if you want to randomly determine a first player. But what he's done is he has made that a ritual by adding to it a thing that you say. And even though it might seem very trivial from a casual listener's or a casual player's point of view, it's actually kind of a brilliant move because suddenly you're doing a kinetic action, rolling the die that also makes a little pip, pip, pip, pip, pip on the board, and he's turning it into a dramatic action, right? He's introducing for everybody the theme of the game. He's asking you to kind of loosen up and be a little goofy with it. And he's creating a kind of opening ritual, right? That's like the curtain parting onto the scene a little bit. So I just wanna highlight that. Like, I think it's no accident that you're sort of choosing that as an entrée, and it's really, it's through these little details that we can come to appreciate, how interesting his design is.

Barry Joseph: I love that. I do think of Sondheim as an experience designer when I think about his puzzles and his games.

Eric: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: And in this game in particular, which is called Stardom, also has a secondary name. It's called Stardom or the Game of Camp, and it's all about camp culture. And at this moment of the game, we're not just invited to look at a game about camp culture, we're invited to enact it, to participate in it as if we were the actors, and as if we are the ones without whom which none of it would exist.

Eric: And just to clarify, Barry, you're not talking about camp like, pitching a tent. You're talking about the kind of kitschy, ironic, self-conscious, campiness..

Barry Joseph: That's right and Most people don't know that Sondheim loved old Hollywood movies, and part of what he loved about them was the things that many gay men loved about these movies, the kinda campy aspects of the Hollywood stars, the women who enacted a certain type of screen presence that they adored. And this campiness factor of the game is about getting to pretend you are going to become one of them. And as we see, as we look at the rules, it is about moving up the Hollywood chain to become that most campiest of Hollywood stars. So let's start by looking at the origins of the game. And to do that, Eric, please look with me at this image. This image shows two things. On the left, we see from 1953, one of those maps you would get on the streets of Los Angeles that would show you the homes of the stars. So you could, as Sondheim wrote on it, look gawkingly as you drive past them. And this is actually the very map in 1953 that inspired the game, which is really remarkable when you consider how ephemeral a map is, that he only sent to a friend of his as a kind of a thank you for putting him up when he drove from New York to LA.

But it was this very map that inspired him to think about, "How can I turn a map of the stars into a game?" And to the right of it, you see, it almost looks like a Scrabble board. It is an abstracted version of the map of LA, and you can look at it if you looked up close. The street names, you know, like Sunset Boulevard, are one-to-one matches. But he's decorated it so that it's a game that you could play, where he's put the names of all these different Hollywood stars at the time at different locations as if you can go visit their homes, which is actually the core mechanic of the game. And one of the amazing things about this board is it was actually designed by his mother, Foxy Sondheim.

Eric: I'm noticing that the different homes are different numbers of stars. Is that right? Some are like one,, two, three, and four star homes. Is that measuring the degree of impressiveness?

Barry Joseph: There are different levels of stars in this game, and you're moving through them, and so you have to start by connecting with the ones that are... I said connecting.. You're supposed to be sleeping with them. You're supposed to be a starlet, and your job is to sleep with the ones that are in your area, in your level. And if you slept with the ones that are in your contract, the ones that you've been assigned to, without anyone else figuring it out, then you move to the next level. Then you go and you visit their homes, and you keep moving through those levels. What you're seeing is the different levels of stardom till you get to the top level, which is Norma Desmond. You sleep with Norma Desmond, you win the game ..

Eric: I guess I would ask you, Barry, How much do you think this is a critique of Hollywood politics and system. You know, this kind of social climbing through, bed surfing or however we wanna term it, versus, like, a weird kind of perverse celebration of Hollywood culture?

Barry Joseph: Eric, you know I learned from you when we started working together when you were at Gamelab, that one of the things I'm always gonna focus on when I look at games is how they represent real world systems, and that the game at times is about how to play with those systems. I do not think, though, that this is a representation of the Hollywood system at the time. Right? One could think about the realities of sexism in Hollywood and how women were being abused if they wanted to move up in the system. And, you know, couch culture. This game is not about that. This game, is about his fantasy world of camp culture and what it would be like to live in it. So again, in this game, you are a young starlet who's moved out to LA. We haven't gotten to the rules yet, but that's who you are, and you are moving through the system where everyone is female. You are female, your character's female, the stars you're meeting with are female, and yet you are a man who is playing it. It's Stephen Sondheim and his friends, most likely, I think we can presume, gay men playing it at the time in LA. And so you have a group of men pretending to be women, pretending to be sleeping with women to move through the system, and in doing that, exploring all sorts of catty, witty comments about those real actresses and what they were like. So I think this is his homage to that world that he loves, and then creating a way to kinda move through it, but making up his own fantasy system for how to explore that.

Eric: Oh yeah, that's so interesting. So it's really not so simple as a woman sleeping with men or even, a man sleeping with women starlets, but it's really taking sort of hyper-gendered world of traditional Hollywood culture, right? Like if we think about the male and female leads and it's, you know, all about the Hollywood ending where the nuclear family is reinstated, right? It's really a hyper-gendered world and kind of turning it topsy-turvy. I like the way that you put that.

Barry Joseph: And to add to that, I'll read what Sondheim wrote in the instructions are the objective of the game, 'cause there is an economics in it. He says, "The objective of the game," quote, "as in real life," which is a kind of a jokey comment here, "to become a great star by getting the highest salary, the most contracts, the most divorces, and sleeping with the most stars." In the context of the game, the contract is the name that you were given of the star at your level who you need to go visit their home and sleep with.

Eric: Got it.

Barry Joseph: But he's calling it a contract, right? 'Cause it's like a movie contract. All right, so let's take a look at the game itself. So Eric, let's take a look at the rule set. Here's the documents that Stephen Sondheim typed up for some reason, and we'll talk about what that reason might be in, in a few moments, that detail exactly how the game was supposed to work, its equipment, its instructions, and just let me know if there's anything that jumps out at you, you think is interesting and worth commenting on.

Eric: I mean, on first glance, it seems like a very simple roll and move game, right? It's like roll the die, move your piece. Okay, there's not everyone on a single track. It's a little bit more like Clue, where people can go where they wish on the board. But, , you know, it, seems almost facile, at the beginning, but I think there's a lot of interesting things in the design of this game. And what's the date of this game, by the way?

Barry Joseph: 1953

Eric: '53. So I think what's interesting is that as early as this game is, we're actually seeing some fairly contemporary feeling, like contemporary meaning 21st century feeling kinds of mechanics, right? Like for example, hidden goals. So everyone gets a bid card. You have a contract with a certain celebrity that you have to visit or sleep with, but that's hidden from the other players, right? So part of the game is I have goals and schemes that the other players don't know about. In a game like chess, of course, I might have goals and schemes, like we're both playing chess, and I might have a strategy that you're not fully aware of. But it's a game of perfect information, meaning everything is out on the table. Poker, we have hands of cards, and my cards are hidden from you, but we still have the same goal, right? Like we're still trying to get the best hand and win. But it's in contemporary board games where you often see hidden goals or secret goals, sort of personal goals. My goal is different than your goal. I'm trying to visit this house over here. You're trying to visit another place on the other side of the board because you randomly drew a different celebrity, from your bid deck. Not only that, but there's a lot of interplay between the players, right? So, why does that matter? Well, there are certain items that let me kind of accuse you of wanting to sleep with or having intentions of visiting a particular starlet's house. And if you do that, then, you know, I can accuse you. And there's even a ritual to that. I think that if I get it right, you have to say something like, "Too true, dear. Too true." Right? So there's all of this kind of wonderful catty rituals that continue beyond that initial die rolling. "Stars, stars shine tonight," right? Beyond that initial first roll, there's a lot of other kind of language that's kind of sprinkled throughout the game. And it's funny, Barry, because you also mentioned that for you, this is not a simulation of the star system in Hollywood, but it is a simulation in the sense that it is kind of a detailed representation, not of reality, but of this kind of cartoon version of reality, right?

Of this campy stylized version of the star system that this game is all about. And that's a sense in which it is a simulation. There's actually different levels of success, right? So you start as a career girl. Then you become a bit player and a starlet, and then eventually a star, and then there's sort of requirements to become a great star and win the game. But for example, to become a starlet, I'm just looking at requirement number four: "Buy dark glasses and earrings, unless you have received them on the way. You must have dark glasses and earrings before entering the home on your bid. Costs 4,000 for the 6,000 for the earrings." So , that's such a weird, lovely kind of little detail, right? That's just one requirement out of, let's see, about six of them for up from a bit player to become a starlet, right? So that's where simulation lies, right? Not necessarily in its accurateness to reality, because you can have a simulation of a fantasy world of dragons or of aliens invading the Earth, right? So simulation doesn't necessarily mean that it is based in scientific fact. It's just that it's using, in a game, rules and mechanics to represent the reality, right? So that's what I love about this. Yes, there's a map of the stars' homes. Yes, there are catty things that you say. But Sondheim is also using the rules themselves to express his subject matter, right? Just like in the stagecraft of making a musical, where you're using lights and costumes and narrative and songs and makeup and set design, all of these things adding up together to produce a certain experience. In Games, you know, he's using the board and the map and the rituals, but also the structures and rules and systems of the game. To contribute to this overall experience. And like I said, it's kind of striking because one would not expect this kind of simulation, these hidden goals, this kind of interesting combination of systemic gameplay with narrative gameplay, with kind of social backstabbing, all in one design in 1953. So that's kind of amazing.

Barry Joseph: And to get back to what we mentioned earlier about the immersive, interactive, performative aspect, when you mention those glasses and those earrings, these aren't tiny objects you put in front of you. These are actually sunglasses and earrings you have to put on.

Eric: They're actual props!

Barry Joseph: Later in the game, you're putting stars on your forehead, you're putting on real mink stoles on your shoulders.

Eric: Wow.

Barry Joseph: You're camping it up.

Eric: Oh I love that!

Barry Joseph: Right?

Eric: I love that. I love that. And again, even though that seems very oddball, contemporary game publishers, I'm thinking of like the Exploding Kittens folks, right? They're including weird props like burrito kittens you throw at other people or the claw gloves that you put on for their lobster game. So,, even though it's much harder to do that in a mass market situation, you know, he's getting the theatricality of a modern escape room in there

Barry Joseph: Nice. Now there's much more we can say about this game, but I know we wanna address some others. But before we move on from Stardom, the last thing I wanna look at is a letter. Might I ask you, Eric, as if we're at a Passover table, to read from To Whom It May Concern?

Eric: Hmm. To whom it may concern, this letter is to notify you I, Stephen J. Sondheim, have have this day, Tuesday, November 17th, 1953, registered with the United States Post Office the rules, regulations, description of equipment, and necessary diagrams of the game tentatively called which is my own invention and the product of my sole imagination. I herewith state that I intend to market this game commercially. I intend to submit it to a manufacturer of games or to manufacture it myself with the aid of interested parties, with with the explicit purpose of making a financial profit thereby from the manufacture and/or selling to the general public of said game. I am this day registering this letter with the United States Post Office. Signed, Stephen J. Sondheim.

Barry Joseph: Thank you, Eric. So this is an answer to your question, did he have any commercial intent? Well, the reason why this was all typed up was to go with this letter.

Eric: That's so interesting. By modern board game standards, it's not feasible to think that, you know, you need to include forming stoles inside your board game. But it's super interesting that he was, you know, also thinking about some version of this very bespoke game as a commercial game as well. I love that.

Barry Joseph: And along with this letter, this was just the first page, are his suggestions of what it would be like if it was all about men. What it would be like if it was not about the world of Hollywood, but the world of television or books. He started thinking about how the mechanics could be laid into all these other ways, which changed his original cultural goal, no longer about camp, but around other industries

Eric: Right, I see. And he was suggesting these reskinnings as alternate versions of the product or?-

Barry Joseph: I don't know if he meant as expansions or to say maybe it would work better this way, but he wanted to establish that he was aware that it wasn't just a specific thing. Right. Again,

Eric: Again, 1953 was pre-expansions as we know them in contemporary board design.

Barry Joseph: Yes, that's true.

Eric: So he probably was thinking, "Okay I'm not stuck with this, necessary narrative topic of starlets in Hollywood. It could be men or it could be, yeah, the television networking world. It's also interesting that he so clearly saw that in board games you can actually detach the rules from the content, right?, And in a sense re-skin the game. And if it's done well, it's possible to transpose the same set of mechanics to different kinds of narrative worlds.

Now, we spent so much time on Stardom, in part because it's the board game he spoke about the most across his life, and also because remarkably, after he passed away, this letter was discovered. So we have the most details around it. We have his rules around it. We have the image of the board. So we're gonna spend just a few minutes now looking at some of his other games, but we just don't have a lot of material from it.

Barry Joseph: These games go way back. This game was from the early '50s. The next game we'll look at is from the late '50s, and we'll look at one more game from the late '60s. So the next game we're gonna look at was sometimes called The Game of Hal Prince or sometimes just referred to as Producer. This was designed as a birthday present for his friend, the producer Hal Prince.

So it's a birthday present for a friend that says, "This is your world. You produce Broadway shows. I'm gonna make for you a game in which your job as a player is to go through an entire season on Broadway and produce a successful Broadway show." And at the time, he used actors and directors on cards that were real people, and just like with Stardom, he would make kind of catty, witty comments about them.

But it also would have headlines from all the major New York newspapers and the theater critics at the time. And it was definitely an economic game. This was a system. And in fact, Sondheim said if you could play the game, you would know how to actually produce a Broadway show.

So, in the artifact section of the podcast, what we have now in the artifacts we can look at were some photographs from the cards that were produced to play the game that have witty comments about the actors you might use or the directors, names of made-up shows that might be the ones you're putting money into that you get from your backers. What kind of reviews you got week to week, and we can get a sense of not the whole game, but a good chunk of it. So looking through that, Eric, without the rules, we don't have the rules, just curious if anything comes to mind.

Eric: I mean, the first thing that occurs to me is that in a funny way, there's a lot of similarities between this and Start Up, right? Because this is also kind of a send-up of a world that Sondheim knew well, the world of entertainment, and personalities, and making deals, and all of the weird, kind of messy mixture of people working with each other, and the ups and downs of you know, success. I mean, I'm looking at some of these cards. There's some close-ups in these images. Like, know, I'm just gonna read to you one of cards. cards.

Barry Joseph: Please.

Eric: This one says, "One of your authors is dying. Lucky for you, because you can now get any director, except for the top ones, you want. Take one immediately for 2,000." So it's making light of the fact that if an author is alive, they're gonna have an undue influence on which director gets selected for their show. But now that they're dead, suddenly that's a bonus, right? So it's just, like, the kind of bitter, humor Let me read another card from the Gossip Along the Rialto deck. This one says, "Elia Kazan has to go to Washington to name a few more people. His employer has to get a new director, unless the show is already running." Can you explain that card to me, Barry, that one might be going over my head.

Barry Joseph: Oh, sure. So Elia Kazan was someone who, during the 1950s, was called to Washington, DC and gave up names, and wrote an entire movie about how important it might be to give up names. On The Waterfront.

Eric: Right. No, no. Now, yeah, out of context I didn't recognize the name, but you're totally right. And so the narrative that's all inside this card is that, yeah, because Elia Kazan is going to Washington to name a few more people, then you have to get a new director.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

Eric: Right, 'cause you've lost someone because someone's been blacklisted.

Barry Joseph: That's right.

Eric: And can no longer work

Barry Joseph: And another card, Jerome Robbins, is the director you have to replace because he leaves in the middle of a rehearsal to spend a few weeks with his analyst, right? So it's making fun of their friends and poking at their enemies, right?

Eric: But I do wanna point out that all these cards that we're reading, these are hand-typed cards, right? So..

Barry Joseph: Yeah.

Eric: One of the lovely things about looking at the documentation of this game is that you know, is not, again, a commercially produced prototype. You can see that these are hand-typed on a typewriter. The cards are old. They've kind of got, like, faded color along the edges. And yeah, this is sort of lovely when you think about this as a birthday present. This was, like, a huge effort to put into a present for one person. But I think it also kind of is in keeping with, Sondheim's just, you know, voracious appetite for expressing himself through these puzzles and games and experiences that he would make for others.

Barry Joseph: I think that's right, Eric. And as we move on to our third and last game for today, I wanna highlight what we just did by looking at two games from the '50s, is we saw the arc that Sondheim went through from maybe when he was a teenager having some economic aspirations for designing puzzles and getting paid, or making board games and being successful through that, to saying, "You know what? Maybe it's really just for my friends. I'm gonna make presents." And our next game was a present for a friend. But it was the present of all presents. If he made only one board game for Hal Prince, that wasn't gonna be enough for his friend Leonard Bernstein.

On his 50th birthday, Bernstein had announced that he'd be stepping down after many decades as the conductor at the New York Philharmonic. So for his 50th birthday, Sondheim made not one, but three board games, all completely different, but worked together as a unit called The Great Conductor Hunt, with the narrative being, are you gonna be one of the people in competition to replace Bernstein, and will you get selected? And each of the games takes you through each of those beats. So the games has a narrative. Will you be able to get that conductor baton from Leonard Bernstein? And what are the three things you have to go through to do that? And what role does Leonard Bernstein play as a character in the game? So each of those games has a name. So this first game was called Diploma, which was a word game. You would move around the board picking up letters, and what you were trying to do was graduate from a conservatory, and different conservatories would obviously have different names, so different letters are needed, but you also got different points. And you can see there, Eric, the list of the schools. The one that was worth the least, only one diploma point, was Curtis, which, yes, only has six letters, but it was also the school that Bernstein graduated from, so it's a dig at his friend. While Juilliard, which has, yeah, some more letters, is at the top of the list and is worth nine diplomas, right? So the game is constantly making fun of Bernstein, talking about his foibles, and the things that he loves about him. And so the first game is moving around and collecting those letters, and what's most interesting about it is that he wanted to have a type of chance card that might be an opportunity to either lose one of your letters or get a letter, but rather than do it as a card, he recorded a bespoke album, and he interviewed Helen Coates, who was Leonard Bernstein's piano teacher when he was a child, who then became his personal secretary. And, Sondheim wrote these ridiculous things for her to say, that she would then say as if she was now between you and the Leonard Bernstein character who you need to help you in the game. And so you would get to a chance card, and you're supposed to go to the record, and then play it and listen to her telling you if you could go through or not. So,

Eric: Wow

Barry Joseph: Why don't we listen to one of those?

Helen Coates: Lenny feels it's a serious defect that you can't do the puzzles in The Nation. Zubin Mehta can, but of course he can do anything. Lenny insists upon another letter. Give him this one.

Barry Joseph: And so that one, of course, is an example of the fact that they both love doing cryptic crossword puzzles and bringing their shared interest into this witty kind of, Monopoly style chance card.

Eric: Wow. There is so much going on with this game, it's hard to even know where to start. First of all, that it's telling a story through multiple board games that you have to play, right? I mean, this is, like, so weird and interesting. You know, there's a handful of contemporary games that come to mind where it's like there's multiple games that are kind of strung together, but it is such a weird and unusual structure to take for a board game. And there's the idea that instead of a deck of chance cards or rolling a die for randomness, that you are, randomly putting a needle down on a record... so that to me is such an inventive form of media jamming or hacking or just, like, expressively using a phonograph record. The only thing that, that reminds me of it, in the back of a Mad Magazine, I think they had published a record, and the record had, like, multiple endings. And so you would put the needle down, and then you would kind of listen to a song, but there were different versions of the song. But that must have been later in the 1970s that, that I, that I got that. So again, just super interesting, that, what in contemporary video games we'd call his RND, his randomness function, he's using, an unexpected track on a phonograph record. That is just so delightful and interesting. And it's not just, like, a weird use of media, it's also experiential. In so doing, he suddenly is having the actual recorded voice of someone that is, you know, important to Bernstein and just somehow also completing the experiential loop. So yeah, that's a lovely detail that I knew nothing about before this conversation, Barry, so thanks for that.

Barry Joseph: You're very welcome. And just to thread some more beads on that chain. That was the same year that he had a record playing on a loop in his 1968 Halloween treasure hunt that he designed with Anthony Perkins, where you had to figure out what the song was, to figure out a number. And then the 1980s, he had people calling a fax machine, when fax machines were new, from America to London to get something faxed back, and he was continually using technology in new and interesting and unexpected ways. As you said, like, with that randomness factor. I love that. So let me briefly summarize the other two, and give one more extra piece of interesting information about who did the graphic design before we move on. So the first game is Diploma. You then get your diploma, I presume, to let you go to Itinerary. You now are able to conduct, but you can't get in front of Bernstein 'cause he's traveling all over the world. So you have to chase him all over the world. And as you travel around the world, you're somehow getting cards that represent the program you're gonna use for your audition. But the mechanic is, and also the joke, is that the person who has the shortest audition will win. Because, why? Bernstein had a short attention span, Sondheim is saying. Again, jiving his friend. So you have to somehow get the best cards that give you the smallest audition. And then you get past that level, and you get to the third game, which is called Podium, which is now completely different. It's a Lucite maze, which could change every time it was played, and in the middle of it, on a podium, apparently, I've never seen this, but I'm told was a little miniature Leonard Bernstein kind of at the podium, and that's where you wanna get to get the conductor baton from him. But as you move through the maze, which represents, an abstracted version of the Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, are all the people from his life: Adolph Green, Richard Avedon, Betty Comden, who are either helping you move forward or slowing you down. So there's all these obstacles along the maze. And two of the board games, , this Lucite game called Podium, and I also believe the layout for Diploma as well, were designed by Milton Glaser. Milton Glaser would become a legend in his own right. And Eric, I see your mouth's dropping open, right? For designing, among other things, the famous 1977 I Heart New York logo. He also was a co-founder of New York Magazine, where Sondheim, for a time, was the founding puzzle editor. That's how they knew each other, and that's how Milton Glaser designed these two board games.

Eric: Right. Wow, that's amazing. In terms of game design, just the variety of like, one you're collecting letters and listening to a record, another you're navigating an architectural maze, right? The kind of inventiveness. So interesting. And all towards a representation of, Leonard Bernstein and, this kind of the overarching narrative of getting your diploma and traveling the world and eventually kind of stealing the baton from him, right? It's sort of like casting the person to whom these are present as the antagonist or as the brass ring, that you're grasping for in this game. There's a lot to love in these delightful designs.

Barry Joseph: And now imagine this. This was a birthday present to be played by Leonard Bernstein with Stephen Sondheim. You are now neither of them, sitting at the table playing a game where you're pretending that you're interacting with a game version of Bernstein, sometimes hearing about Sondheim as well, 'cause he wrote himself into the game, with Leonard Bernstein also playing against you and Sondheim also at the table

Eric: Right, right.

Barry Joseph: Mind-blowing. Before we move on from talking about the board games, I'm wondering, Eric, if there's anything that you've learned here that's reframed how you understand what role Sondheim might have played in pulling from the world of board games, or how they might have impacted him and what he was doing in his designs?

Eric: Well, I guess I'll just say that I think that they're very prescient in a lot of ways. , In the 1990s and, 2000s, we saw,, like, a huge renaissance in board game design, right? In the 20th century, board games were very much kind of commercialized. You can think of everything from, you know, Monopoly and Scrabble. Even though many of them were based in traditional games like Parcheesi, there were many that were invented. But I think that that part of the renaissance, a lot of it coming out of Germany and European board game design, has given rise to a much more diverse space. And in some ways, Sondheim's unique and interesting bespoke objects remind me of Brenda Romero's work. Brenda Romero's a famous video game designer, but she also did a series of, tabletop games that are also kind of art installations. Her most famous one is Train, which, you know, unbeknownst to the players, is kind of simulating packing prisoners onto a cargo car, headed for a concentration camp. During World War II. So not that that kind of much darker and moodier content is echoed in Sondheim's more kind of playful and lighthearted tabletop themes. But the idea of making unique games that can express things about culture, I think, is something that we're seeing echoed throughout the board game world today. So it's really interesting to look at these games and think of them as some of the wellsprings or origins, , of our more contemporary experience of card and board games.

Barry Joseph: I love that, Eric. I always treasure spending time with you, if even with an audience. As you know, I wouldn't be where I am in my professional life without you, and I always have deep love and appreciation for you. So yeah, again, thank you.

Eric: Feeling is a 100% Barry. Thank you so much

Barry Joseph: Eric, is there anything the listeners should be watching out coming from you later in this year?

Eric: I don't think I have anything on the immediate horizon coming out, but I guess I would encourage people to keep an eye on gamecenter.nyu.edu. That's where we list our events. You can get on our mailing list. And throughout the academic year, September through May, we have lectures, workshops, talks, and I would encourage any of your listeners that are more interested in game design to come join us if you're here in the New York City area.

Barry Joseph: And thank you listeners for joining us for Matching Minds with Sondheim, the podcast. I also would like to thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, our line producer Dennis Caouki, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along.

Normally, I now say, "Until next time, remember, someone is on your side," especially when Matching Minds with Sondheim. However, instead, I wanna invite everyone to join me to end the way we began:

Eric: stars,

Barry Joseph: stars

Eric: shine tonight.

stars,

Barry Joseph: stars

Eric: shine tonight.

That was horrible.