Boundary Error
BOUNDARY ERROR
For American families looking to add a sinister edge to an evening’s entertainment during the height of the Cold War, playing out a zero-sum nuclear fracas with the aid of a book, board game or simply that night’s TV schedule was a favourite choice. Nineteen sixty-two’s Cuban Missile Crisis was a conflict hosted largely in the minds of an ecstatically paranoid public, the news media animating the various destructive possibilities across maps indicating the plausible past and future positions of military units, as well as the arrows showing probable missile trajectories. If you wanted to have a hand in the action yourself, at that time you would have likely turned to Summit, a global strategy board game released in 1961 whose premise eerily predicted the conflict that threatened two world super powers with mutual destruction but a year later. After that crisis was averted, sales of Summit soared, while the popularity of constantly rewriting the narrative on which it was based would inspire board games makers and their audiences for the rest of the century.