Polish Your Dice

Whether it’s the hit series of computer games based on The Witcher books, or award winning board games like Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, Polish games are today known around the world. Still, whilst many involved, such as The Witcher’s lead writer and story director Marcin Blach and Ignacy Trzewiczek, co-creator of Detective, began their careers writing for RPG magazines it is only in the last few years that Polish RPGs themselves have begun to make a name for themselves beyond our borders. 

To understand why that might be we should first offer up a brief reminder of our country’s recent history. Until the last days of the 1980s Poland sat on the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain. Poles had to fight not only for freedom but even just the ordinary things of life. With everything from food to toilet paper rationed and the ever present shadow of government censorship, fantasy tabletop games, unsurprisingly perhaps, ranked low on many people’s priorities.

Equally importantly for most Poles travel to the West was simply impossible. whilst those few who could visit then hit an economic barrier. With the average 1980’s Polish worker’s wages up to thirty time less than an American’s those who were travelling abroad generally weren’t bringing home tabletop games.

Still, for all that some who made it abroad did prefer games to washing powder or Walkmans and these imported titles were soon put to good use. As the 80s gathered pace pirated copies of foreign games began to circulate, often bootleg versions of popular SPI or TSR games and mainly produced by a company called Encore. Indeed in 1984 it was Encore who did finally publish the first fantasy games in Poland, the groundbreaking board game Labirynt śmierci, known internationally as The Citadel of Blood, and Bitwa na polach Pelennoru, a pirated version of the Tolkien themed war-game Gondor.

Pirate releases like these were not unusual in Poland, indeed back then Poles were busy bootlegging everything from otherwise unavailable technology to otherwise unavailable Star Wars figures, VHS movies and much more besides. This phenomenon led to an important part of Polish culture, what we called the "Third Circuit”. Where the “First Circuit” consisted of publishers approved by government censors, and the “second” underground publishers tied to political opposition movements, “third circuit” publishers were often associated with specific subcultures, such as music scenes or science fiction and fantasy novels.

Importantly for our story it was via this "Third Circuit" that Poles were able to not only access literature then unavailable in bookshops, but also discover new tabletop games. A good example was Warsaw’s Groteka club who, in the early 1980s, distributed unlicensed Polish editions of several foreign games such as Książę, originally Machiavelli from 1977, and Ave, a translation of the Wargames Research Group’s 1972’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

Intriguingly from these clubs we also have reports of an original socio-political simulation game called Andia. Intended for between 8 and 36 participants, though sometimes played by up to 80 people, it was run by four people who acted as kind of Game Masters, and contemporary accounts brings to mind a combination of RPG and LARP. Due to their nature the circulation of these "Third Circuit” publications was small, often 1000 copies at most, and irregular so information spread slowly, still it was from these clubs that the Polish RPG scene would begin to emerge.