For the last couple of years, Michael Brown (Anachronism’s designer) and I have been working together on a new Bible-themed game called Crossroads. We like to describe Crossroads this way:

Crossroads™ is a game of epic adventure through the stories of the Bible. In Crossroads™, one to four players work collaboratively to chart their own course through the biblical story.The starter set presents four stories, each with its own particular challenges. Each player selects a vocation and a set of prayers to help the group meet the objectives unique to each adventure. Players then work together to build paths to reveal, face, and overcome the challenges of the game. Skill in navigating the maps and adept use of prayer to influence play will determine the group’s success. Which path will you choose?

Crossroads is a collaborative, expandable board game that features tile-laying, role-taking, and delivery of randomized and customized elements via cards and dice. Basically, when you play a game of Crossroads, you control a traveler who builds roads and then moves along them, facing challenges as you try to achieve your group’s overall goal. Your traveler has certain traits with values based on his or her vocation, and can offer prayers to alter gameplay. Crossroads scenarios are based on biblical stories; each story has a definite beginning and end, but the middle sections are randomized and a successful outcome isn’t guaranteed! The Crossroads Starter Set will include four biblical stories. Thereafter, periodic expansion sets and organized play opportunities will expand the library of Crossroads stories until, over the course of seven years, the list has grown to 80 stories available in the starter set and expansion packs plus 20 stories that you can experience in the organized play program.

If this interests you—and I certainly hope that it does—learn more on the Crossroads website and blog, like our Facebook page, and/or follow @CrossroadsGame on Twitter.

… for your lights—eight of them, or rather, eight days’ worth—have come! Come to the Anachronism arena, that is. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been sharing on this blog the cards from the upcoming Judah Maccabee warrior pack for the Anachronism game. The time has come to reveal the final card in the pack. For those of you not familiar with Anachronism, each warrior comes with four support cards. One of those is labeled “special,” which is just a catch-all category for “something else we want to put in here but it doesn’t fit one of the other categories, or we already have a card in that slot but we want to give him this too.” A special card can be just about anything. Judah’s is, appropriately:

Due to an apparent typesetting error—I know that the correct spelling was supplied to the manufacturer—the sublinear dot was omitted from the card’s Ḥag ability, although the sublinear dot appears correctly in the card title.

Unfortunately, it looks as though the cards will just be shipping from the printer/packager tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll have any in hand at SBL. Still, if you want to see how the game works, I’ll bring along Julius Caesar, Beowulf, and some other goodies.

According to 1 Maccabees 3:9–12,

Apollonius now gathered together Gentiles and a large force from Samaria to fight against Israel. When Judah learned of it, he went out to meet him, and he defeated and killed him. Many were wounded and fell, and the rest fled. Then they seized their spoils; and Judah took the sword of Apollonius, and used it in battle the rest of his life.

In the Anachronism card game, each warrior comes equipped with a weapon, and Judah’s is the sword of Apollonius. (By the way, it is my fault that “Apollonius” is misspelled as “Appolonius” on the card—I typed it incorrectly in some information I sent to the game developers and I didn’t catch my own typo.)

In the Anachronism game, every warrior comes with an inspiration card, a card that represents the warrior’s motivation. For many warriors, it is a god (Ramses II‘s inspiration is Ra), a code (like Bushido), an ally (Anne Bonny‘s inspiration is Calico Jack Rackham), or an enemy (Beowulf‘s inspiration is Grendel).

For his inspiration, Judah Maccabee, the first warrior to be revealed from the Tribes of Israel culture in the forthcoming Anachronism 7, is on a quest to purify the temple from Seleucid depredations.

In his Anachronism incarnation, that is—the first of the Set 7 Tribes of Israel cards to be publicly revealed.

In Anachronism, “inspiration” cards are cards that describe things that motivate the warriors to fight. Usually, a card representing a god—current examples include Zeus, Jupiter, Mardukh, Odin, Thor, Freya, etc.—will be an inspiration card. Thus, Judah’s special ability allows him to discard pagan gods. Cool, huh?

Those of you who are my colleagues in professional biblical studies are likely gearing up for the SBL meeting, much as I am. I still have a lot of work to do on my papers presentations, and I am way behind on those preparations. Next week will be difficult in that regard.

To anyone who is interested, I extend invitations to my presentations in the following program units:

S20-73 National Association of Professors of Hebrew
11/20/2006
1:00-3:00 PM
Meeting Room 12 – RW
“What Does the Mob Want Lot to Do in Genesis 19:9?”
Genesis 19:9 presents a curious, though rarely-discussed, philological and interpretive conundrum. The Sodomite mob is quoted as telling Lot “גש־הלאה.” Most English translations render this instruction as “Stand back,” but a few interpreters have suggested quite the opposite sense “Come here.” Clues from the immediate literary context and wider philological considerations are marshaled in this paper to try to resolve this semantic ambiguity.

S20-103 The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media
11/20/2006
4:00-6:30 PM
142-CC
“God in a Bind: The Dilemma of Divine Decrees in Dogma, the Bible, and Modern Theology”
For all its irreverence, the movie Dogma raises some interesting theological questions that resonate with certain biblical texts and trends in modern theology. The presumed immutability and non-contradiction of divine decrees drive Dogma‘s plot, but these themes are complicated when referred to Amalek’s annihilation and Saul’s election and rejection. This paper will examine potential biblical and theological resources for addressing the problem that lies at the heart of the film.

For those of you who are friends and want to be sure we get to visit in person, I’ll be staying at the Metro Center Marriott. If you wish, e-mail me and (if I trust you with it) I’ll give you my cell phone number.

And, of course, I have to make a plug for Anachronism. I don’t yet know whether I’ll have any Tribes of Israel cards on hand (shown here is the artwork from the Devora card, which comes in Barak’s warrior pack)—they haven’t been shipped to stores yet and it’s still an open question whether the warehouse can get me some advance copies—but if you’re going to be at the SBL meeting and you enjoy games, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll try to find a time to show you Anachronism. It’s a game where you pit historical figures against one another in five minutes of gladiatorial combat, so I bet Jim West won’t be interested. But Joe Cathey might. Could Judah Maccabee take down Genghis Khan? In Anachronism, you can find out.