Kurt Vonnegut’s board game GHQ finally published

Author, Kurt Vonnegut

 In 1956, Vonnegut, though a published author, was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His money making solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which utilized his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game diligently to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins.

With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein honed the original rules, straightened out the lumps in GHQ’s endgame, and created art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years after it was created.

General Headquarters could be a contemporary Risk, Diplomacy, or other legendary wargame.

“The success of Slaughterhouse-Five and the other novels is nice enough,” Vonnegut’s son recently wrote Engelstein in an email, “but I truly believe he’s watching somehow, someway, from somewhere and that the success of GHQ will be a greater and purely unadulterated pleasure. [...] He was discouraged about his writing at the time, but had unshakable faith that GHQ would succeed.”

You can find Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, along with a special forward by author James S.A. Corey, exclusively at Barnes & Noble.