Steve Busfield Games
Consider the great board games. Think of Monopoly and you are a capitalist. Risk and you are a general. Cluedo and you play a detective. Now imagine a Monopoly board, where those fashionable London streets have been replaced by the illegal substances of the world. Instead of Old Kent Road you have Acapulco Gold, and where Mayfair sits in Waddington’s official game, you instead find Heroin.
This is Stash (it costs 15 in London but is not yet available in local toy shops. Or find it via a games sellingg company hidden away on the Internet at www.stashweb.com). In this subversive board game, instead of being the good guy, you are the baddie. And you win by taking drugs.
Produced by QED Games in New York, its declared creator, Lord Catfish, states in his rules: “You do not win by gaining more or other mere worldly possessions, but by getting enough karma, chiefly acquired by the consumption of drugs. You win by being the first player to achieve Nirvana.” In Monopoly, of course, you win by merely driving your opponents into poverty.
Like Monopoly, you move your counter around the outside of the board, buying drugs instead of properties, which you sell in the boardcentre, which you enter via accepted entry points during the game.
Nirvana cannot, however, be achieved by just guzzling drugs: there is a certain and fairly consistent morality within this subversion. Drugs may give you a good time (Good Karma points: reach 40 and you win), but, as in life, they are also capable of giving a big downer to your chances of winning.
Whoever designed this game (Lord Catfish?) obviously takes hallucinogens and hashish as drugs of choice, with the streets filled with Afghani Black and Mescaline giving plenty of karma, little chance of bad trips (it depends upon the roll of the dice), and low-dependency. Players who consume narcotics such as Kai and Heroin, however, run a high risk of falling foul to Bad Karma and Addiction. Addiction can lead to Overdose and Death, the ultimate bummer and the end of the game for you.
Angel Dust is a bad risk both karma-wise and financially. This is important because to get drugs you have to make money. To make money you have to buy and sell drugs. The centre of the board is a map of New York, complete with smuggling zones (via Upper New York Bay and the airports), and you are given a neighbourhood where you have your connections.
You can only sell with little risk to people you know, although you can do deals at concerts (an Osmond Brothers gig, however, is predictably likely to lead to your arrest).
The economics of the game are much as you would expect, but very detailed. Cocaine (Stash’s Park Lane) is expensive to buy at $2 000 a shipment, but has a high mark-up (you double your money in most areas and make $4 000 clear profit when selling in upper-class districts such as Wall Street).
Methadone sells well to the lower classes trapped in neighbourhoods such as Harlem and Bronx Park, but will leave you with an overdraft if you try to sell it anywhere else.
Deficit finances are definitely to be avoided. Loan sharks help out in the short term but will eventually repossess any cash you have have, and steal your drugs to boot. They may even refer you for Professional Treatment and you are out of the game, although perhaps this is salvation.
If the mob should offer their services, beware, obviously. Corrupt officials, however, are good people to know. Just as in the socially acceptable version, you can Get out of Jail Free, although here it’s by greasing the appropriate palms. A tip: trying to avoid jail by eating the evidence can be a very bad idea.
So stay away from the mob, the madhouse and jail and you may run out the winner. The clever player will soon discover the long game-plan, choosing the low road of buying and consuming soft drugs (Jamaican grass is a mere $200 a throw).
Unlike the real-life rule that good dealers don’t imbibe their products, too much purity will penalise you in Stash, so there has to be some consumption.
A similar (or possibly the same) game first surfaced in the 1970s, its re-emergence from the underground in the 1990s perhaps reflecting the moral decadence and decay of a society that first produces the Tamagotchi and then corrupts it with a mafia version where a needle-a-day keeps the doctor at bay better than any apple could.
Stash doesn’t offer a legal substance-abuse alternative such as alcohol, nicotine and tranquillisers. There are, however, legal highs to be had. For those who always found the Electric Company a boring square to occupy, Stash has found another way to secure Good Karma – sex. Get lucky on the Singles Bar square and you move closer to Nirvana.