Revisionist History - Board Game Season

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

A young family nearly lost everything in the 1970s farm crisis. Then, they invented a board game. Today on the show, producer Ben Naddaff-Hafrey shares a story about how life shows up in games and what games teach us about risk, life, love, and in this case ... farming. For more episodes like this, check out Pushkin’s The Last Archive podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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, putty, pencils, and dice. There will be 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 10 players and the games would take minimum 12 hours. Once one took 16 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 C.T. Nguyen says that games are an art form that work in the medium of agency. Games 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 1970s. 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 Nadaf-Haffrey 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 ride, part comedy, part tragedy, and the love story perfect for the holidays. It begins in the fall of 1969 in an apartment living room. Start of the semester at the University of Colorado, move-in day. Yeah, it was two blocks off campus, a little teeny apartment. We flipped coin. Who gets the bedroom? Who sleeps in the living room?

Well, I slept in the living room. That's George Rohrbacher, inventor of the farming game, but not yet. At this exact moment, he's creating something entirely different. I was in the midst of making

a fringe suede 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 suede that are, you know, right off the cow kind of pieces. I'd visited George in Colorado, where he lives now, and he got out the jacket. Okay, the guy that I got the suede from had the most outrageous color of suede I'd ever seen or have seen since. This is like a lurid green sort of purple. Lime green, purple, and orange. I believe it was the fringe on this arm that I was cutting.

There's your timestamp. 1969. The war in Vietnam. Anti-war protests on campus. Woodstock. George in the amazing Technicolor suede jacket. Which, I should say,

is cut like a tuxedo. It's a one-of-a-kind, let's just put it that way. It's pretty awesome. Oh, and tails. I'm telling you this not only because the jacket is a wormhole to the 1960s,

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 contemplating this when all of a sudden, he looked out the window and saw a girl walking by on the balcony. Wow. He thought she was gorgeous. He also thought she might have a frying pan. And I was making a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and with nothing to, well, this is prior

to the invention of microwaves. 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 hard to get it. George drops the suede jacket and heads next door. I was in the apartment on the phone when there was a knock at the door. That's Ann, the girl from the other apartment, also a student at the University of Colorado. She answered the door. And he said, can I borrow a frying pan? She's on the phone.

Yeah, sure. And I handed him the frying pan, and he said, I'll bring it back. She gets back on the phone and closes the door, and I just stand there just stunned. I was thinking, I want to get to know that guy. Well, first off, she's beautiful. I mean, beautiful. And she had this long, honey brown hair.

He had long hair down to his shoulders and had a big beard. Basically, the outside world said, there's a hippie. And he had on overalls and he drove a sort of old purple pickup truck. And 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. And the joke is, I always say, I had to marry him to get my frying pan back. Ann Rohrabacher, co-creator of The Farming Game.

First thing George told me, the story of that game is a love story. Anne lent George a frying pan, he made his BLT, and then later that night, he went back over to Anne's apartment. 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. How it was made and, you know, just all of the nuances of where it fit in society. 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. Well, you know, it's a strange, it's a strange topic to spend the evening talking about with the woman

that you're going to ask to marry you in a week and a half. But it must have worked. That's Wednesday. Thursday, George walks Anne to class and writes her a poem. Friday, they get on a plane to Seattle to meet Anne's Wednesday. Thursday, George walks Anne 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 Anne decide to get engaged. This is where I want to be. This is who I want to be with. It was instantaneous. It was just a knowing that he's my partner. He should be my partner. And we should do life together.

Just before Christmas, the square that kicks off play on the game board, they tell Anne's parents they're getting married. They were not overly excited about George. Her parents were horrified. But George and Anne won't change their minds. Sometimes

you just know. The weeks pass by in a haze. Lucky rolls, only sixes. Classes missed, exams taken, papers and poems written, ringing around the board till it's June, George graduates, and he and Anne get married. It's the summer of 1970. 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. Anne had been working as a cleaner and they had saved up a thousand dollars. They loaded up George's purple Dodge pickup truck and set off. They drove through 37 states over the course of 10 months. As they wandered, they got fascinated by a new movement of going back to the land.

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. In the 1970s, 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 and air, though.

They were worried about what we put into our rivers and air, though. They were worried about what we put into our bodies. I think that a very great, great deal of sickness is because of the refined foods. I think we're literally at the mercy of the people who take all the minerals and vitamins out of the sugar, out of the flour. 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 our uncertain nuclear future, the homesteading movement is once again gaining ground. 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' Let's Get Well. They ate vegetables raw from their gardens and cooked gypsy soup from the Moosewood Cookbook. They sang songs like Joni Mitchell's Woodstock. I'm gonna camp out on the land. I'm gonna try and get my soul free. Americans have been going back to the land since the 19th 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 Granby's Green Acres. 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. But the 1970s 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. A friend of Ann's parents bought a duck hunting club in Washington State. They needed a caretaker. The club, not the ducks.

Basically, it was four rooms. A bathroom, a bedroom, a living room, and the kitchen. Opened the door, the place, it was full of dead bugs and mosquitoes. The house and the duck club was a shithole. And it was hot and it was miserable. There's really no other way to describe it. And we're like, what the hell, we'll take it. The club was in a town called Toppenish 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 Ann started a garden off the shack near the creek and got jobs in town. George is a teacher, Ann is a bank teller. On the weekends, George helped out at a cattle ranch and learned about taking care of livestock and riding horses. There was something that struck a chord inside me that said, this makes sense. Well, it's like you eat something new and it just, boy, that was really good. He left his teaching job to work more with the farmers in the valley, learning all he could about farming. Ann stayed on at the bank.

They got cattle and ate the food they grew from their garden. We not only like it, but we're doing well at it. I think this is how we want to live. I came home one day from work and George said, I found a farm. It was 27 acres in the Yakima Valley, on sale from an improbably named widow. Her name was Leifa Fields.

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 fields. Their concord grapes went to Welch's Juice and their sweet corn to Del Monte's. They worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, at the farm, at the bank, at the feedlot. 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. And basically, since we left the duck club, we had been on a roll where things were getting better and better and better.

The early 1970s, those back-to-the-land years, were amazing for American farmers. I didn't know any farmer who had gone broke. Gone broke is back in the Dust Bowl era. 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 1910s. Here's Butts. I don't want to go back to the good old days. I only want to go forward. 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 1970s, just as George and Ann 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 U.S. grain and soybeans. Wheat prices rose enormously. Farm income hit an all-time high. Butz had found a global 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. Our challenge is not to go back to more inefficient ways. Our challenge is not to put more people back on the land. Our challenge is to adapt to the changing situation in which we find ourselves. Butz'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. Butz'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 not? Fourteen miles out of town, four miles from the next-door neighbor, and you can see the Milky Way. And it just felt just absolutely right. And we said, this is where we want to raise our kids. The thousand-acre ranch was surrounded by canyons, 95 miles away from their old farm across the Satus Pass, fringed by timber off the Cascades Mountains at the breaks of the Klickitat River, where the rocky land pulls away from their old farm across the Satis Pass, fringed by timber off the Cascades Mountains

at the breaks of the Klickitat River, where the rocky land pulls away from the water. They called it the Breaks Ranch. The day they saw it, they made an offer. The next day, they got a call. So the house burned down? It is 100% gone. Electrical fire.

Consider that this place is 10 times the farm George and Anne have ever worked. Consider that the farmers selling it are doing so because they've fallen on hard times. And consider that the house has now burned down. This, I think, was a sign from the universe about what was to come. George and Anne had the chance to fold up the board and walk away. But that's no way to play a game. And we'd been rolling fives and sixes since the day we got off the bus. I said, well, hell, let's go for the place and we'll build the house. They negotiated the price down and bought the land and also 50 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.

Well, it's like the fringe jacket, you know. And there was a contractor in Yakima who was actually building two geodesic domes at the time. For the uninitiated, a geodesic dome is a structure popular in the 60s counterculture involving lots of triangles fit together in the shape of a dome. And you can put the walls interior anywhere you want them because they're not holding up the roof. The roof is holding up the roof.

George was a dreamer. He believed everything could be done. And he was right. He was right. Most of the time. They bought the dome. Easter weekend of 1976, with their one-year-old looking on, George and Ann put up the 45-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. You talk about back to the land? We're back. Only six years earlier, they'd never farmed in their lives. Now they owned a 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 going to get laid low. Well, all of a sudden, a place that normally gets 25 to 30 inches of rain, we got four inches of rain. There wasn't enough hay to feed the cows. And instead of 35 bushels of wheat per acre, they made 10. It was 1977.

Something like this was happening to farmers across America. Prices were down, costs were rising with inflation, and farmers were having to take on more and more debt just to survive. In the pit of my stomach, the bottom is falling out. They had their second child, a boy named David. And so year 79 kicks in. We get two and a half inches of rain.

Disaster. The crop failed. The farm was failing. Ann 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 feedlot. About the middle of May, Ann, 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 lets the kids loose in their room and she comes up to me and she says,

Honey, I'm pregnant again. We both knew that it was a slim chance we were staying, that we were going to have to admit the experiment failed and we were going to have to give it up. Ann 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. 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 7th, 1979, he got up at 3 a.m. and stepped outside. There's no other lights other than

starlight above and the lights of my tractor. And I'm as alone 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 blinked into my head. This problem I'm in would make this hell of a subject for a board game. We'll be right back. It's 1979. Family farms across America are in trouble. One farmer in particular is taking it pretty hard.

Crop prices are just total shit. George Rohrabacher. Farmer in trouble. Crushing debt. Failing farm. Baby on the way. It's 3 a.m., and he's out in the field. Not asleep, but still dreaming. About a board game. I finally get done baling hay, eat breakfast, go down in the basement, get a scrap of sheetrock and a framing square, and draw myself a game board.

Picture 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 sheetrock. There is a fine line between genius and insanity, or sometimes no line at all. And it occurs to me that those four sides could be the seasons. Okay, that makes sense. 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. I didn't go back out to the field. I didn't eat lunch. And Ann 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 trap door, the way out of this mess. It had just come, like like full out of his head. Here was this game and we got to do this. You know, this is what's going to save us. And she gave me a look like, are you frigging crazy? A board game?

One crazy thing that's going to save the other crazy thing. 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 wheat stalk 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 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 $5,000 in debt, with a $50,000 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. But that was farming.

Had to have the debt. It is punishing. It's not fun all the time. So we had to do balance, make it be possible. 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, 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 your luck's breaking. Often something bad happens. Tractor malfunction, grain embargo, IRS garnishing your wages, Mount St. Helens erupting. All these things that could happen to you in the game, all of them had happened to George, Anne, 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 Anne had absolutely no idea how to manufacture a board game.

And at the time, we just thought we needed a printer. We just thought we needed a box maker. 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. And our four-year-old would put a rubber band around them for us. It's August, 1979.

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. 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. Farmers drove their tractors to Washington, D.C. 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 overleveraged, 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, and ordered a run of 10,000 games. When we say we bet the ranch on it, we did. Board games sell best at Christmas.

December was only three months away and was due at the end of November. The middle of September turns into the end of September and the end of September turns into October. But making the game is only half the work. Sowing without reaping. One of the questions, of course, when you're producing 10,000 copies of a board game is,

how do you sell the damn thing? In case you hadn't noticed, George is a born salesman. He sent a letter pitching the game to President Jimmy Carter. Three weeks after I sent the letter, I got a mimeograph letter from an underling saying essentially, thank you for whatever you sent to the White House. 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 orders started to trickle in. And then, George had an idea for a Hail Mary. Hello Americans, this is Paul Harvey. Stand by for news. Paul Harvey was a radio broadcaster who was 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 game started to sell. Dolores from Western Farmers said that Paul Harvey spoke about it, and so they all want one in their store. 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, Ann went into labor. 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 home. Sunday night at 1.30 a.m. 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. Within six weeks, we had sold 7,000 of the 10,000 copies. 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 1980, the farming game was starting to take off. People magazine wrote it up. Anne and George started a company called the Weekend Farmer Company to manage it. But they needed this game to be more than a passing fad. Ann and 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. In the wintertime, there are farm supply shows all over the United States where farmers go to kick the tires on the new tractor or whatnot. He decided to tour the farm shows selling the game. They bought an old 15-passenger Dodge van and took out all the seats. If you packed it to the roof, it held 1,200 games. George hit the road. 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 are 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. 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 800 number. Soon, a UPS driver was coming out to the farm most days, past the sign reading primitive road to pick up shipments of the farming game. In the summer, he'd bring the

kids popsicles. The 800 number patched straight into the house, and the phone rang off the hook. The phone was beside our bed, so we answered it in the middle of the night. So sometimes you're talking to the phone, you're like, boy, it's a good thing you cannot see. There's no video that goes with this phone. 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 1970s, 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 80%. In 1981, 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 too. Rural communities and family farms were falling apart. We had a nationwide economic crisis, which at the very same time was 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 son of a bitch who lost it? A lot of that land was bought by farm management companies. Corporations would sometimes hire 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. 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. The situation with bad loans and low prices has gotten so bad, the nation's largest source of farm loans need big help and fast. 93,000 mid-sized U.S. farms are deeply in debt and are on the verge of going broke. I had a gun in the pickup. The thoughts had entered my mind that maybe my family was better off with me gone than alive. It was terrible.

But as the crisis worsened, the farming game became a kind of advocacy tool and 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 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. A lady 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. The lady worked for an advocacy group for women in agriculture. In the mid-1980s, 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,

535 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 3,000 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 U.S. 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 Anne could keep their own farm running,

a small oasis at the far reaches of the farm crisis. The house that we grew up in was built up around us. Laura Rohrbacher, the daughter who occasioned the farming game. She and the game, they're the same age. I don't know if you heard the story, but when I was born, there was this little nook in our living room, and my dad was building it. And my mom said, okay, I'm going to 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 insulation sticking out around it. All the kids remember the phones, how the ring of the 800 number sounded different than the other two lines. The order sheets, printed in triplicate, posted by each phone. It rang all hours. So back then, the 800 number 24-7 just rang into our house. And all the kids would just be, we're going off the wall, doing whatever we're doing, and just monkeying around, and my dad would yell before he answered the phone,

it's a money call, it's a money call, quiet down. And of course, we wouldn't. So then my dad's trying to take a farm game order on the phone as these crazy noises are in the background and we'd hear him say, oh, congratulations you're the 10,000th caller

this week or something. We're all celebrating here in the office and it's just us kids yelling and screaming in the background. 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. 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 one standing there where the phone's ringing. So you'd answer the phone, Hello, the Weekend Farmer Company. It's an eight-year-old voice. Mm-hmm. Yes. Oh, that's a great question. But this is the shipping department. Let me get you sales. And you put them on hold. And then you say, mom, the phone's for you. 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 20-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 the game board. You get just enough snow to pull the sleds out and sled 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 past that is 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

bed. I mean, there's just you can explore forever just right outside the door. That life is why George and Anne bet 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 geodesic domes, 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 shrouding an ailing farm, the family imagining what a lucky roll 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. 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 eyeballing the booth and eyeballing 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 to shake your hand. And I am hooked in a handshake with a, oh, about a six foot six, 350 pound guy who could wrestle a steer and win. And he's crying. 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. 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 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 saved my boys. And then he turned around and walked away.

Farming is cyclical, like the seasons. The farming game turned out to be counter-cyclical. Over the years, it became clear that it sold best when times were worst. It's been in print ever since 1979, and sales picked up both during the financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. That first crisis, though, the early 1980s, 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 butts agenda, getting bigger, buying on credit, planting fence row to fence row, and then watching it all come apart. But the game saved the Rohrbacher's, even while the farm crisis drove so many other small family farmers off their land.

At the start of the 20th century, nearly 40% of Americans lived on farms. Today, about 1% do. There are still family farms, just fewer and mostly bigger. Anne and George, they had meant to make a board game. They wound up writing a eulogy. Late last winter, I spent a weekend with the Rohrbachers in Colorado. They still own 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, Ann, Laura, her husband Tim, and her daughter Vivian. Let's see. Ten acres of hay. Ten in green. Hay. Ann set it up. Ten in green. Hay.

And set it up. How am I $5,000 a day? Everybody starts with $5,000. Of course. Ah, now I remember. God, that's ingenious. Wow, I mean, what a great idea. We're going to find out who invented the game at the end of this. Yeah, take him out to the parking lot and take the shit out.

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. I notice all you have left is $500. You're going to go bankrupt in the first 10 minutes? Well, I do have a reputation of either winning or going broke.

Anne had told me earlier that George either wins big or loses big. That night, he was out of the game before he'd made it around the board twice. Now, here's where your situation is. You're out of money. I got some troubles here. You always have troubles. Watching George and Anne 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 risks and knowns and unknowns. 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. There are good years and bad. You can prepare, 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. I'm going to buy some. You can't. Why? Oh, dang it! I was going to buy them last time, but you kept going. Okay, harvest your game. I'll harvest my hay. Harvest your hay. Oh!

This episode originally ran on The Last Archive, a podcast about the history of truth. Thank you. by Sophie Crane and Julia Barton, and executive produced by Jill Lepore, Sophie Crane, and Mia LaBelle. Engineering by Jake Gorski, fact-checking by Amy Gaines, and original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Happy holidays, everyone. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.