Board Game Season

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin.

00:00:21
Speaker 2: In just a few days, it will be Christmas, and in houses around the world there will be thousands upon thousands of long squat boxes covered in wrapping paper. Inside will be little plastic figurines, trains, top hats, empty octagons. There will be cards, spinners, tokens, potty pencils, and dice. They will play money. There will be scorecards. For this, my friends, is the season of the board game. Board games have always fascinated me. I used to play double board risk as a kid with ten players and the games would take minimum twelve hours. Once one took sixteen hours. My friend Terry and I developed our own brand of Monopoly, where we fixed all the problems with the Parker Brothers version, including introducing the use of derivatives. The philosopher Ctun says that games are an art form that work in the medium of agency. Game shape what you want and how you can get it, so every game is a pocket philosophy of life, like the story of the woman who invented Monopoly to promote a socialist idea about how we should tax land, before the Parker Brothers turned it into a game about how fun it is to own a lot of land. Or my personal favorite, class Struggle, the truly tedious board game about communism, invented by an NYU professor and scholar of Karl Marx in the nineteen seventies. You get the picture. Every game lets you try on a way to think about the world. So today on the show we have a story from producer Ben at Alfhaffrey about a family who invented a board game not just to impart some life lessons, but in fact to save their own lives. It's a wild, part comedy, part tragedy, and the love story perfect for the holidays. It begins in the fall of nineteen sixty nine in an apartment living room, started a semester at the University of Colorado.

00:02:24
Speaker 1: Moving there. Yeah, it was two blocks off campus, a little teeny apartment. We flipped coin, who gets the bedroom, who sleeps in the living room? Oil, I slept in the living room.

00:02:38
Speaker 3: That's George Roorbacker, inventor of the farming game, but not yet at this exact moment, He's creating something entirely different.

00:02:46
Speaker 1: I was in the midst of making it a fringe swede jacket. I had done some things for a guy and he owed me some money, didn't have any money, but he does have a couple of pieces of swede that are, you know, right off the col kind of pieces.

00:03:06
Speaker 3: I visited George and Colorado where he lives now, and he got out the jacket.

00:03:10
Speaker 1: Okay, the guy that I got the swayed from had the most outrageous color of swede I'd ever seen or have seen. Since this is like a lurid green, purple, lime green, purple, and orange. I believe it was the fringe zone, this arm that I was cutting.

00:03:30
Speaker 3: There's your timestamp. Nineteen sixty nine, the war in Vietnam, anti war protests on campus, Woodstock, George and the amazing technical or swede jacket, which I should say is got like a tuxedo.

00:03:42
Speaker 1: It's a one of a kind. Let's just put it.

00:03:44
Speaker 3: It's pretty awesome.

00:03:45
Speaker 1: Oh and tails.

00:03:51
Speaker 3: I'm telling you this not only because the jacket is a wormhole to the nineteen sixties, but also because that moment with George in his living room slash bedroom was the moment his life changed. The sewing was hard work, and he'd gotten hungry for a blt. Problem was he had the bacon, but he didn't own a frying pan. He was kind of plating this when all of a sudden he looked out the window and saw a girl walking by on the balcony.

00:04:15
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:04:16
Speaker 3: He thought she was gorgeous. He also thought she might have a frying pan.

00:04:21
Speaker 1: And I was making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and with nothing to do. Well, this is prior to the invention of mica waves, and the only way you cook bacon is in a frying pan. And once you get the taste of bacon in your head, it's.

00:04:38
Speaker 3: Hard to get it.

00:04:39
Speaker 1: It's hard to get it.

00:04:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, George drops the Swede jacket and head's next door.

00:04:45
Speaker 4: I was in the apartment on the phone when there was a knock at the door.

00:04:53
Speaker 3: That's Anne, the girl from the other apartment, also a student at the University of Colorado. She answered the door and he said.

00:05:00
Speaker 4: Can I borrow a frying pan?

00:05:02
Speaker 1: She's on the phone.

00:05:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, And I handed him the frying pan and he said, I'll bring it back.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: She gets back on the phone and closes the door, and I just stand there, just stunned.

00:05:15
Speaker 4: I think I want to get to know that guy.

00:05:18
Speaker 1: Well, first off, she's beautiful, I mean beautiful, and she had this long honey brown hair.

00:05:29
Speaker 4: Had she had long hair down to his shoulders, had a big beard.

00:05:32
Speaker 1: Basically the outside world said, there's a hippie.

00:05:36
Speaker 4: And he had on overalls and he drove a sort of old purple pickup.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: Truck and not not only beautiful face, but one of these people. After talking to him, where you realize the heart inside is every bit or more beautiful than the outside. I mean you could just or I could just feel it immediately.

00:06:02
Speaker 4: And the joke is I always say I had to marry him to get my friend Pam back.

00:06:07
Speaker 3: And Roerbucker, creator of the Farming game. First thing George told me the story of that game is a love story. Ann went George a frying pan, he made his blt, and then later that night he went back over to Anne's apartment.

00:06:22
Speaker 4: So George came over and it was my roommate and I and George proceeded to get really high and tell the entire movie of King Kong.

00:06:35
Speaker 1: How it was made, and you know, just all of the nuances of where it fit in society.

00:06:41
Speaker 4: And I was like, oh my god, this guy is nuts. I mean he literally told the entire movie. If you ask him a story, he has to go back to the very beginning, until every detail from the very beginning.

00:06:53
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's a strange it's a strange topic to spend the evening talking about with the woman that you're gonna ask to marry you. What a week and a half, but it must have worked.

00:07:10
Speaker 3: That's Wednesday. Thursday, George walks in to class and writes her a poem. Friday, they get on a plane to Seattle to meet Anne's parents. Saturday, George gets in a long argument with her dad, a businessman and veteran, about Vietnam. A week later, George and Ann decide to get engaged.

00:07:26
Speaker 1: This is where I want to be, this is who I want to be with. It was instantaneous.

00:07:31
Speaker 4: It was just a knowing that he's my partner, he should be my partner, and we should do life together.

00:07:39
Speaker 3: Just before Christmas, the square that kicks off play on the game board. They tell Anne's parents they're getting married.

00:07:45
Speaker 4: They were not overly excited about George.

00:07:50
Speaker 1: Her parents were horrified.

00:07:52
Speaker 3: But George and Ann won't change their minds. Sometimes you just know. The weeks passed by in a haze. Lucky Roles, only sixes classes missed, exams, taken papers, and poems written. Ringing round the board till it's June, George graduates and he and Anne get married. It's theme of nineteen seventy. They decided to take a trip around the country just to see where and who they wanted to be. George comes from a family of doctors and academics and always figured he'd be a professor, but plans change, and had been working as a cleaner, and they had saved up one thousand dollars. They loaded up George's purple Dodge pickup truck and set off. They drove through thirty seven states over the course of ten months. As they wandered, they got fascinated by a new movement of going back to the land.

00:08:40
Speaker 1: We had gotten interested in the dream to the degree that we decided, well, neither one of us has ever lived in the country, maybe we want to do that.

00:08:55
Speaker 3: In the nineteen seventies, the environmental movement was coming of age. The First Earth Day, the founding of the EPA, the most substantial legislation to protect our natural environment, came all in a rush. People weren't just worried about what we put into our rivers in air, though they were worried about what we put into our bodies.

00:09:14
Speaker 5: I think that a very great, great deal of sickness is because of the refined foods.

00:09:19
Speaker 1: I think we're literally at the.

00:09:20
Speaker 5: Mercy of the people who take all the minerals and vittems out of the sugar, out of the flower.

00:09:26
Speaker 3: The organic food movement took off. Between that and the mounting feeling that we were killing the earth, a lot of people, especially young white college students, started looking for a way to reconnect in.

00:09:38
Speaker 4: Our uncertain nuclear future. The homesteading movement is once again gaining ground.

00:09:44
Speaker 3: They wanted to be self sufficient. They read magazines like Mother Earth News and Whole Earth catalog books like Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Adele Davis's Let's Get Well. They ate vegetables raw from their gardens and cook Gypsy soup from the Moosewood Cookbook. They sang songs like Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, I'm going.

00:10:03
Speaker 6: To camboat on the line, I'm gonna try and get me.

00:10:13
Speaker 3: Americans have been going back to the land since the nineteenth century, but those early movements were typically a response to economic crises. The settlers were romantic, but also practical living off the land, subsistence farming. That was one way to be sure you wouldn't starve when the next panic came. Also, it made for a lot of good books, movies, and of course old timey radio shows like The Grand Bees, Green Acres.

00:10:38
Speaker 7: Martha Martha. Let's face it, the price of food wouldn't be any problem to us if we'd done what I wanted to do five years ago and bought a farm.

00:10:47
Speaker 3: But the nineteen seventies back to the Land movement was different. It wasn't a response to an economic crisis like the Great Depression. It was the expression of an ideal. The back to the landers wanted to make things and live in sustainable communities. Some people just wanted to live in nature. But George and Anne wanted to farm, and all of a sudden an opportunity fell into their laps. A friend of Anne's parents bought a duck hunting club in Washington State. They needed a caretaker, the club, not the ducks.

00:11:17
Speaker 4: Basically, it was four rooms, a bathroom, a bedroom, a living room in the kitchen opened the door the place. It was full of dead bugs and mosquitoes.

00:11:27
Speaker 1: The house and the duck club was a shithole.

00:11:30
Speaker 4: And it was hot, and it was miserable.

00:11:32
Speaker 1: There's really no other way to describe it.

00:11:36
Speaker 4: What the hell, We'll take it.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: The club was in a town called Toppin'ish in the Yakima Valley. The Yakima is some of the most fertile farmland in the United States. It can grow asparagus, apples, hay, corn, wheat, barley, mint, grapes, peaches, pears, and cherries. The kind of land it takes eons to make warm by day and cool in the evening with plentiful sunshine. An American Eden, George and Anne started a garden off the shack near the creek and got jobs in town. George is a teacher and is a bank teller on the weekends. George helped out to cattle ranch and learned about taking care of livestock and riding horses.

00:12:13
Speaker 1: There was something that struck a cord inside me that said, this makes sense. Well, it's like you eat something new and it just oh, that was really good.

00:12:25
Speaker 3: He left his teaching job to work more with the farmers in the valley, learning all he could about farming, and stayed on at the bank. They got cattle and ate the food they grew from their garden.

00:12:36
Speaker 1: We not only like it, but we're doing well at it. I think this is how we want to live.

00:12:43
Speaker 4: I came home one day from work and George said, I found a farm.

00:12:49
Speaker 3: It was twenty seven acres in the Yakima Valley on sale from an improbably named widow.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: Her name was Leifa Fields.

00:12:58
Speaker 3: They bought Leifa's place, and over the years their farm did so well. They got bigger and expanded. They had walnut trees and apricots in their garden, mint and alfalfa in the field. Their conquered grapes went to Welch's Juice and their sweet corn to del Monte's. They worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week at the farm, at the bank, at the feed lot. They were rediscovering a whole way of life that was new for them but old hat to a lot of their neighbors, and the community helped them find their way. They had their first child, a baby boy named Blake, and they were happy.

00:13:32
Speaker 1: And basically since we left the Duck Club, we had been on a roll where things were getting better and better and better.

00:13:41
Speaker 3: The early nineteen seventies, those back to the Land years were amazing for American farmers.

00:13:47
Speaker 1: I didn't know any farmer who had gone broke. Gone broke is back in the dust bowl era.

00:13:54
Speaker 3: That stretch of farming prosperity. It happened under one man, in particular, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Rusty Butts, Indiana born, raised on a farm in the nineteen tens. Here's Butts.

00:14:08
Speaker 1: I don't want to go back to good old days.

00:14:10
Speaker 7: I only want to go forward.

00:14:12
Speaker 3: Whether Butts was really taking the country forward or backwards was something people would come to argue about. He was a friend to big agribusiness, also to Republicans. He kept a wood carving of two elephants having sex in his office. Why because he said he was trying to make Republican voters multiply, and he had a terrible sense of humor. In the post war decades, increasing farm productivity had already driven down the number of farms and increased their average size. Now Butts wanted to take the trend even further. He wanted to supersize American agriculture, and he got the chance in the early nineteen seventies, just as George and Anne were buying their first farms. The Soviet Union had just gone through a patch of terrible weather. If they were going to eat, they needed to import crops. The Soviets bought up a quarter of the American harvest, billions of dollars in US grain and soybeans. Wheat prices rose enormously, farm income hidden all time high. Butts had found a glos mobile market for American crops. He told farmers to get big or get out. Agribusinesses thrilled to the spike in demand for their new herbicides, machines and fertilizers. Bigger, modernized farms meant bigger sales.

00:15:23
Speaker 7: Our challenge is not to go back to more innffacient ways. Our challenge is not to put more people back on the land. Our challenge is to adapt to the change in situation which we find ourselves.

00:15:38
Speaker 3: Butts's vision was part of the reason farming knowledge began to ebb away. The emphasis on efficiency of growing as much as you possibly could came at the cost of older, more sustainable practices like crop rotation and plant diversity. Instead of small amounts of several crops, you got thousands of acres of just soybeans. Another farm all corn. Butts's vision was not exactly the back to the land dream, but George and Ann still benefited. A lot of farmers did. At least at first, the value of farmland skyrocketed. Farmers were living well, The family farm was becoming more like a factory, and the family farmer took out loan after loan on easy credit to expand, which is why when George saw a thousand acre ranch for sale, he thought, why.

00:16:26
Speaker 1: Not fourteen miles out of town, four miles from the next door in Ahror and you can see the Milky Way, and it just felt just absolutely right.

00:16:39
Speaker 4: And we said, this is where we want to raise our kids.

00:16:44
Speaker 3: The thousand acre ranch was surrounded by canyons ninety five miles away from their old farm, across the Sadus Pass, fringed by timber, off the Cascades Mountains, at the breaks of the clickatat river where the rocky land pulls away from the water. They called it the Break's Ranch. The day they saw it, they made an offer. The next day they got a call.

00:17:07
Speaker 4: So the house burned down.

00:17:09
Speaker 3: It is one hundred percent gone electrical fire. Consider that this place is ten times the farm. George and Ann have ever worked. Consider that the farmer's selling it or doing so because they've fallen on hard times, and consider that the house is now burned down. This I think was a sign from the universe about what was to come. George and Ann had the chance to fold up the board and walk away, but that's no way to play a game.

00:17:37
Speaker 1: And we've been rolling fives and sixes since today. We got off the bus. I said, Uh, well, hell, let's let's go for the place and we'll build a house.

00:17:49
Speaker 3: They negotiated the price down and bought the land and also fifty head of cattle. A neighbor lent them a trailer to live in, and George started to solve the whole house situation in a very George way.

00:18:00
Speaker 1: Well, it's like the fringe jacket, you know. And there was a contractor in Yakima who was actually building two geodesic dome at the top.

00:18:11
Speaker 3: For the uninitiated. A geodesic dome is a structure popular in the sixties counterculture, involving lots of triangles fit together in the shape of a dome.

00:18:20
Speaker 1: And you can put the walls in tior anywhere you want them because they're not holding up the roof. The roof is holding up the roof.

00:18:28
Speaker 4: George was a dreamer. He believed everything could be done, and he was right. He was right most of the time.

00:18:36
Speaker 3: They bought the dome Easter weekend of nineteen seventy six, with their one year old looking on. George and Anne put up the forty five foot structure triangle by triangle. With a bunch of friends. They moved into the basement, plywood ceiling, concrete floors, with a drain in the middle, a hose to draw water from the spring, and absolutely no heat.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: You talk about back to the land, we're.

00:19:01
Speaker 3: Back only six years earlier. They'd never farmed in their lives. Now they own one thousand acres miles from the nearest person, surrounded by mountains. Spiritually, geographically, financially, they were way out there. The trouble with games of chance is when they go your way. You think it's all about you. You're lucky, or you're special, you've got the hot hand or the midas touch. But if you roll the dice often enough, your average moves towards the middle, and if you've started high, you're gonna get laid low.

00:19:42
Speaker 1: Well, all of a sudden, a place that normally gets twenty five to thirty inches of rain. We got four inches of rain.

00:19:52
Speaker 3: There wasn't enough hay to feed the cows, and instead of thirty five bushels of wheat per acre, they made ten. It was nineteen seventy seven. Something like this was happening to farmers across America. Prices were down, costamerizing with inflation, and farmers were having to take on more and more debt just to survive.

00:20:12
Speaker 1: And the pitomized stomach, the bottom is falling out.

00:20:17
Speaker 3: They had their second child, a boy named David.

00:20:20
Speaker 1: And so year seventy nine kicks in, we get two and a half inches of rain.

00:20:28
Speaker 3: Disaster, The crop failed, the farm was failing, and took a job far out from the ranch, and things were going badly for everyone. George could sense it in the local store at the feed lot.

00:20:42
Speaker 1: About the middle of May, and she gets out of the car and I've just come in for dinner, and she lets the kids loose in their room and she comes up to me and she says, honey, I'm pregnant again.

00:21:02
Speaker 4: We both knew that it was a slim chance. We were staying that this we were gonna have to mith the experiment failed and we were going to have to give it up.

00:21:14
Speaker 3: Anne and George owed more in interest on their debts than they could make in a year. They were living in an unfinished house with two kids and a third on the way. The spring turned to summer and it was time to cut the hay. George bailed by moonlight when the dew came up and the dried out crop had a chance of sticking together. On July seventh, nineteen seventy nine, he got up at three am and stepped outside.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: There's no other lights other than starlight above and the lights of my tractor. And I'm as a lone as a man can be, crushing pressures, no way out kind of pressures. I am at fault for this disaster. What can I do? And for some strange reason, I have no idea how or why this blanked into my head. This problem I'm in would make the hell of a subject for a board game.

00:22:24
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. It's nineteen seventy nine. Family farms across America are in trouble. One farmer in particular is taking it pretty hard.

00:22:37
Speaker 1: Crop prices are just total shit.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: George Robrocker, farmer in trouble crushing debt, failing farm baby on the way. It's three am and he's out in the field, not asleep, but still dreaming about a board game.

00:22:54
Speaker 1: I finally get done, baileyen Hey, eat breakfast, go down in the basement, get a scrap of sheet rock and a framing square, and drawn myself a game board picture.

00:23:06
Speaker 3: George alone in the basement of his geodesic dome, surrounded by thousands of acres of failing farmland, scratching out a board game on a loose piece of sheet rock. Here's a fine line between genius and insanity, or sometimes no line at all.

00:23:22
Speaker 1: And it occurs to me that those four sides could be the seasons. Okay, that makes sense.

00:23:31
Speaker 3: The sun is high overhead now sapping the last moisture from the alfalfa. There are cows to feed, work to do, but George is riding the lightning. He can't stop inventing farmer figurines, debt from the bank the Yakima Valley at the center, a board game about how miserable it is to be a farmer.

00:23:51
Speaker 1: I didn't go back out to the field, I didn't eat lunch, and comes home and it's pretty warm, the kids are fried, and she walks in the door and I just literally can't wait for the kids to get out of the way to tell her I've just discovered the trapdoor the way out of this mess.

00:24:14
Speaker 4: It had just come like full out of his head. Here was this game, and we got to do this, yo. This is what's what's gonna save us.

00:24:25
Speaker 1: And she gave me a look like, are you frigging crazy? A board game?

00:24:31
Speaker 4: One crazy thing that's goo to see the other crazy thing.

00:24:35
Speaker 3: The game works a bit like Monopoly. It starts when you inherit land from your grandfather ten acres of hay and ten acres of wheat, each represented by a little vinyl stamp with a bale of hay or a wheatstock on it. There are six farms in the center of the board, each named after a real place in the Yakima Valley, and you've got one of them. Around the edge of the board is the calendar year, blocked off by harvest times, your hay cuttings, cherry harvest, livestock sales, and so on. You begin with five thousand dollars in debt with a fifty thousand dollars line of credit. The goal is to make enough on your farm that you can quit your job in town, which at the start is the only way you're staying afloat. It is a punishing game. Typically, your debt only gets worse in the winter. You can buy more seed or livestock or equipment, but it almost always costs more than the cash you have on hand, so you have to borrow and eventually either pay it back or declare bankruptcy.

00:25:33
Speaker 4: But that was farming. Had to have the debt. It is spanishing. It's not fun all the time, so we had to do balance make it be possible.

00:25:42
Speaker 3: They spent every night working out the mechanism of the game, playing it again and again. They put everything they'd learned about farming into it. In harvest seasons, you roll the dice to see how good your crop is, check the harvest rate chart for prices per acre, and then pull an operating expense card that tells you how much it's going to cost to harvest that crop. Sometimes you land on a farmer's fate square and you have to draw a card to see how you're lux breaking. Often something bad happens tractor malfunction, grain embargo, irs, garnishing your wages, Mount Saint Helen's erupting. All these things that could happen to you in the game, all of them had happened to George, Ann or one of their friends at some point. It's a perfect model of the family farm. It's also the story of their lives. But just like when they got into farming, George and Ann had absolutely no idea how to manufacture a board game.

00:26:36
Speaker 4: And at the time we just thought we needed a printer. We just thought we needed a box maker.

00:26:43
Speaker 3: It turned out nearly every part of the game needed to be manufactured by a specialist. The folding cardboard came from Los Angeles, the acreage stamps from New Jersey, the dice from Rhode Island. One company prints the money, a different one makes the game board art, and another makes the board backing. And the family still had to cut out each individual play dollar in their basement.

00:27:04
Speaker 4: And our four year old would put a a rubber band around for us.

00:27:10
Speaker 3: It's August nineteen seventy nine. As George worked on piecing the game's supply chain together, farmers around the country were sounding the alarm about a coming crisis in agriculture.

00:27:22
Speaker 8: The tractors are traveling in a caravan, honking horns, waving flags, and sporting posters in an attempt to gather more support for farmers across the country.

00:27:33
Speaker 3: Farmers drove their tractors to Washington, DC that year to protest falling prices and rising costs. They called it a tractorcade. Most farmers were facing a version of George's problem. They were over leveraged, underpaid, and unable to explain the complexities of their situation to voters who mainly cared about keeping the price of groceries down. The situation was only getting worse all the while George was building his own lifeboat. It's September. If George and Ann were going to make any money, they needed to go big, so they sold half their cows, took out a loan in order to run of ten thousand games.

00:28:12
Speaker 4: When we say we bet the ranch on it, we did.

00:28:15
Speaker 3: Board games sell best at Christmas. December was only three months away and was due at the end of November.

00:28:22
Speaker 1: The middle of September turns into the end of September, and the end of September turns into October.

00:28:29
Speaker 3: But making the game is only half the work. Sewing without reaping one.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: Of the questions, of course, when you're producing ten thousand copies of a board game, is how do you sell the damn thing?

00:28:42
Speaker 3: In case you hadn't noticed, George is a born salesman. He sent a letter pitching the game to President Jimmy Carter.

00:28:49
Speaker 1: Three weeks after I sent the letter, I got a mimeograph letter from underling of an underling saying, essentially, thank you for whatever you said to the White House.

00:29:00
Speaker 3: Have a nice day, a bum roll. But meanwhile, George had started writing ads for farm magazines with information about how to order the game, and the order started to trickle in, And then George had an idea for a Hail Mary.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: Hello Americans, This is Paul Harvey, stand bype on yous.

00:29:20
Speaker 3: Paul Harvey was a radio broadcaster who is especially popular among farmers. Everybody listened to him on tractors, trucks, and bus radios. Probably there is no radio program American cattle have heard more of. George dashed off a letter to Harvey and slipped in a copy of an article about the game from a local newspaper. The days passed, and then miraculously, Paul Harvey talked about it on his show Harvey's archives are a bit of a shambles, so I couldn't find the broadcast to confirm for myself. George and Ann didn't hear it directly either. They found out about it, they said, because all of a sudden their games started to sell.

00:30:00
Speaker 4: Dolors, and Western Farmers said that Paul Harvey spoke about it, and so they all want one in their store.

00:30:07
Speaker 3: Western Farmers Association was a big chain of farm stores. It was late November and the game was moving. George hitched a horse trailer to his pickup and loaded it up with games to bring to the stores that Saturday. An went into labor.

00:30:22
Speaker 1: Well, Laura had the good sense and the courtesy to hold up until we got the lid on the box, and Laura was born at.

00:30:32
Speaker 3: Home Sunday night at one thirty am. Meanwhile, word of the game had begun to spread through the Grange Halls farm magazines, even a story in the Washington Post just weeks later.

00:30:43
Speaker 1: Wellin six weeks, we had sold seven thousand, up to ten thousand copies.

00:30:48
Speaker 3: In the nick of time, it looked like George and Ann were going to save their farm. But that's after the break in January of nineteen eighty, the farming game was starting to take off. People magazine wrote it up, and in George started a company called the Weekend Farmer Company to manage it. But they needed this game to be more than a passing fad. They needed it to pay for itself and help them save their farm. So George worked up a new sales strategy.

00:31:24
Speaker 1: In the wintertime, there are farm supply shows all over the United States where farmers go to kick the tires on the new tractor whatnot.

00:31:36
Speaker 3: He decided to tour the farm shows selling the game. They bought an old fifteen passenger Dodge van and took out all the seats. If you packed it to the roof, it held twelve hundred games. George hit the road.

00:31:49
Speaker 1: And so what I would do is, I'm headed to Missoula, Montana, and I stop in every little town on the way there. In little towns, the people that manage the stores or did at that time, or the people that own the stores, and you could walk in the front door and within a minute and a half be talking to the owner and find out if you could sell the game to the guy or not, and if not, you're back on the road. Five minutes later.

00:32:19
Speaker 3: This was how the farming Game found its true audience, the diehards. Somebody would play with a friend and then that friend would order a copy. Eventually, George and Ann set up an eight hundred number. Soon a ups driver was coming out to the farm most days, passed the sign reading Primitive Road to pick up shipments of the Farming Game. In the summer, he'd bring the kids popsicles. The eight hundred number patched straight into the house and the phone rang off the hook.

00:32:44
Speaker 4: The phone was beside our bed, so we answered it in the middle of the night, so sometimes you're talking to the phone boy. It's a good thing. You cannot see. There's no video that goes with this phone.

00:32:59
Speaker 3: George kept on the road to turn up new business, but as he drove around the country games in tow agriculture had fallen into a death spiral. While farmers were growing on credit in the nineteen seventies, inflation was rising too, and the Federal Reserve decided to jack up interest rates to slow it down. Suddenly, banks started calling in the loans they'd been so confident in years earlier, and the farmers couldn't pay. Within the span of just a couple years, family farm income dropped by more than eighty percent. In nineteen eighty one, the USDA said about half the farmers in the country would eventually be driven from the land. But it wasn't just the farms when they went all the small local businesses that sold them seeds for the fields and feed for their livestock, and ice cream and candy for their kids. They began to close. Two rural communities and family farms were falling apart.

00:33:55
Speaker 1: We had a nationwide economic crisis, which at the very same time was it a nationwide family crisis because at that time every farm in the United States had some family roots two or three or four five generations back. So you inherit this from granddad, and you're the dumb, sull bitch who lost it.

00:34:24
Speaker 3: A lot of that land was bought by farm management companies corporations. We sometimes hired the broke farmers from the same farms back to work it. However bad it was for white farmers, it was worse for black farmers. They lost their land ten times faster. More than half a million people left rural America in a single year. Losing a job is one thing. Losing a farm is losing everything.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: It looked like death. And when you bury the farm, a big part of your heart, a big part of who you are, a big part of who your family is, is dead. But it's I can't go any deeper into that.

00:35:13
Speaker 7: The situation with bad loans and low prices has gotten.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: So bad the nation's largest source of farm loans need big help and fast.

00:35:21
Speaker 5: Ninety three thousand mid sized US farms are deeply in debt and are on the verge of going broke.

00:35:27
Speaker 1: I had a gun in a pickup. The thoughts that entered my mind that maybe my family was better off with me going alive.

00:35:40
Speaker 3: It was terrible, But as the crisis worsened, the Farming Game became a kind of advocacy tool in a way for farm families to find some relief from their troubles. A North Dakota mental health program used the game to help farmers relieve stress and talk about their problems. It became well. It became a body of knowledge, a chronicle of a disappearing way of life, but maybe also a way to save it.

00:36:08
Speaker 1: In Southern California, whose family was in the citrus business, was given the Farming Game for Christmas, and when she played it. Immediately, she saw the ability to teach the basic economics of farming and just the social superstructure in which the business is set.

00:36:31
Speaker 3: The lady worked for an advocacy group for women in agriculture. In the mid nineteen eighties, they decided the country needed to know about the game. They flooded the halls of the Capitol with hundreds of board games, one for each member of Congress, five hundred and thirty five games in all, trying to explain what was happening to farmers. The board game didn't get any laws passed, but it was making its way out into the world, sharing the hardships of farming and the joy of it. Right when the country hit a crisis of understanding, schools began teaching the game in droves. According to George, more than three thousand and classrooms in North America have used the game in one way or another to teach kids about what it means to run a farm. I talked to a slew of agriculture teachers and they all said the same thing. The game was a perfect teaching tool because it was fun and it was true. It got passed along one year to the next, spread from classroom to classroom. Like seeds on the Wind, the Washington State Legislature passed a resolution recognizing the game's educational value. When the Soviet Union fell, the US Agency for International Development helped bring George and the Game to Russia to help teach what privatized farming would look like. Over time, the game sold hundreds of thousands of copies. With the money from the Farming Game, George and Ann could keep their own farm running, a small oasis at the far reaches of the farm crisis.

00:38:04
Speaker 6: The house that we grew up in was built up around us.

00:38:07
Speaker 3: Laura Roherbucker, the daughter who occasioned the Farming Game, She and the game they're the same age.

00:38:14
Speaker 6: I don't know if you heard the story. Like when I was born, there's this little nook in our living room and my dad was building it, and my mom said, Okay, I'm gonna have this baby, stop building, so clean up your mess. And then my dad never finished that little nook. You can still go there and there's still like insulation sticking.

00:38:28
Speaker 4: Out around it.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: All the kids remember the phones, how the ring of the eight hundred numbers sounded different than the other two lines. The order sheets printed in triple get posted by each phone.

00:38:38
Speaker 6: It rang all hours, so back then, like eight hundre number twenty four seven just rang into our house and all the kids we're going off the wall, like doing whatever we're doing, and just monkeying around, and my dad would yell before aso the phone, it's.

00:38:50
Speaker 4: A money call.

00:38:51
Speaker 6: It's a money call, quiet town, And of course we wouldn't. And so then my dad's trying to take a farming game order on the phone as these crazy noises here in the background, and we'd hear him say, oh, congratulations, you're the ten thousands call or this week or something. We're all celebrating here in the office, and it's just us kids yelling and screaming in the background.

00:39:15
Speaker 3: Farm kids are born into jobs. Farming game kids the same. When they got to be eight or so, they started taking the calls themselves.

00:39:22
Speaker 6: If you didn't feel like taking an order, but you were the one closest to the phone, you know, your brothers would scatter and you'd be the ones staying there with the phone's ringing, So you'd answer the phone, Hello, we can for our company in a year old voice. M yes, oh that's a great question. But this is a shipping department. Let me get you sales, and you put them on hold, and then you say, Mom, the phones for you.

00:39:47
Speaker 3: The house was full of games, cardboard boxes for forts, hundreds of dice, millions of dollars in play money. But the house itself was a kind of wonderland too. At Christmas they'd get these gigantic twenty foot trees and nail them straight into the floor. They lived year round in nature, watching the seasons turn, shading one into the other. At each corner of.

00:40:08
Speaker 6: The game, you get just enough snow to pull the sleds out and slid down the horse pasture. You know, that's right next to like this little creek that when the snow melts, it fills with water and you get to like get sticks and pretend they're fishing poles and then just pass that as the waterfall that pours down and in the spring it rages like you got to keep little kids away from it. And then by the end of summer it's totally dry and you just have like a rocky bet. I mean, there's just you can explore forever just right outside the door.

00:40:38
Speaker 3: That life is why George and Anne, but everything they had on the game a long shot to let them raise their kids in nature, tending nature. They were an idiosyncratic farm family, but other farm families, even ones who didn't live in geodes Sicdomes, have always been the game's biggest audience, And during those hard years when rural America was coming apart, they were playing it in so many kitchens, with the table cleared and the bright green of the Yakima Valley laid out under the ceiling lamp, the dark outside s trouting an ailing farm, the family imagining what a lucky role would feel like, or a bumper crop, or a bad thing you could laugh at instead of cry. Those moments are the game's true legacy, and they aren't recorded for posterity, but George glimpsed one of them one year during the crisis when he had left his family at the ranch to head out on the road selling the game at an agricultural exposition in Montana.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: And I'm sitting behind the booth waiting for a customer to walk by, and there's sort of a crowd of people milling around, and at the back of this crowd was this absolutely gigantic guy farmer. Anyway, he is eyeball in the booth an eyeball on me, and I'm thinking, boy, what's on his mind? If it's not good, I don't want to be here. He kind of pushes his way through the crowd and he comes right up to me, and he said, I want, I want to shake your hand. And I am hooked in a handshake with a oh about a six foot six, three hundred and fifty pounds guy who could wrestle a steer and win. And he's crying.

00:42:31
Speaker 3: The man told George he was divorced with two sons. The oldest, a teenager, had been arrested not long before. When his son was home from jail and was over at his dad's house with his little brother, they pulled out the farming game and the three of them began to play.

00:42:47
Speaker 1: They were laughing and just being the kind of family you want to be. And anyway, this family of three men, two little ones and one giant one played the game every Sunday afternoon and left the game where it was on the table until the next time, and the boys came and then picked it up in the middle of the game. And anyway, he's still holding my hand and he looks me right in the eye again, and he said, you say my boys, and then he turned around walked away.

00:43:38
Speaker 3: Farming is cyclical, like the seasons. The Farming game turned out to be countercyclical. Over the years, it became clear that it sold best when times were worst. It's been in print ever since nineteen seventy nine, and sales picked up both during the financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. That first crisis, though, the early nineteen eighties, is when George's fate in the games diverged from the fate of the American family farm. He'd been in lockstep with the trends of the day, the Butt's agenda bigger, buying on credit, planting fence road to fence row, and then watching it all come apart. But the game saved the Roarbackers, even while the farm crisis drove so many other small family farmers off their land. At the start of the twentieth century, nearly forty percent of Americans lived on farms. Today about one percent due there are still family farms, just fewer and mostly bigger. And in George, they had meant to make a board game. They wound up writing a eulogy late last winter. I spent a weekend with the Roarerbackers in Colorado. They still owned the farm in Washington State, but they live here now, in a little town in the far southwest of the state, near a national forest. We talked for hours and hours, but on the last night there was one thing I had left to do. We played the farming game me George and Laura, her husband Tim, and her daughter Vivian.

00:45:09
Speaker 6: I see hey, and set it up.

00:45:16
Speaker 1: How my five thousand dollars a Yet everybody starts with of course, Oh no, God.

00:45:23
Speaker 6: That's ingenius.

00:45:25
Speaker 4: Just wow, what a great idea.

00:45:28
Speaker 6: We're gonna find out who admitted the game at the end of this take.

00:45:31
Speaker 1: Him out to the party.

00:45:34
Speaker 3: We began to play I've never been a farmer, so with each bumper crop or farmer's fate card, I was learning some of the things George and Ann learned from their neighbors that their neighbors had learned from their parents. George, for his part, seemed to be learning some lessons for the second or third time.

00:45:51
Speaker 4: I noticed all you have leftis five hundred dollars. Yeah, you're going to go bankrupt in the first ten minutes.

00:45:58
Speaker 1: Well, I do have a reputation of either winning or going.

00:46:01
Speaker 3: Brok and told me earlier that George either wins big or loses big. That night he was out of the game before he made it around the board twice.

00:46:10
Speaker 4: Now here's where your situation is.

00:46:13
Speaker 1: You're out of money. I got some troubles here, you always said.

00:46:20
Speaker 3: Watching George and Ann play together was like seeing the whole story in miniature. The dreamer and the pragmatist two ways of thinking about chance. You expect the best or you prepare for the worst. I had come to their story expecting it to be a story about the loss of agricultural knowledge that used to be the most common kind of common knowledge there was, and I'd thought when I set out that the game was just a very sweet way to share it again. But playing the game that night, I was thinking about games and risks and knowns none knowns. George says farmers have to be optimists, otherwise they'd never plant a seed. The farming game is a model of farming, but farming is a model of life itself. Their good years and bad. You can pair, but you can't control. You live in a world where things grow if you care for them, and if you're going to play games of chance. It's best to play them with someone else. That way, you win even when you lose.

00:47:23
Speaker 4: I'm gonna buy some you can't.

00:47:26
Speaker 8: Why, Oh, I'll see it.

00:47:29
Speaker 9: I was gonna buy them less, but you are going okay.

00:47:54
Speaker 2: This episode originally ran on The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth. You can find a link to listen to more Last Archive episodes in our show notes. The episode was written by Ben Adaph Haffrey, who produced it with Lucy Sullivan. It was edited by Sophie Crane and Julia Barton and executive produced by Jillapoor, Sophie Crane and Meila Belle, engineering by Jake Krsky, fact checking by Amy Gaines, and original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of stell Wagon Symfidet. Happy holidays everyone, I'm Malcolm Glauco.