The Industrial Revolution | Board Game Biographies - Episode One

content warning this video will feature a discussion on slavery imagine you're in bristol you've finally got a day off from the hustle and bustle and you're going to the seaside you know your train is at 10 am and you've just about managed to get all your family together and to the station on time you wait for the train you wait a bit more and then finally with everyone bored and annoyed you go and find a porter to complain this train is extremely late he looks at you and says no sir you're late by 11 minutes we run on london time here welcome to board game biographies a mini series where we'll visit some of the stories behind the settings of the games that we play if you've ever played a board game and wondered why are there all these sheep here well that's the sort of thing we'll find out together this time i want to talk to you about england's place in the industrial revolution and the trains that carried it i remember learning about the industrial revolution at school but i also remember it being quite boring sorry miss ackermann studying diagrams of wafts and weaves felt like explaining cheese to someone by showing them a hole board games have the special ability to bring a setting to life putting you at the center of one of the most significant changes in british history [Music] unless you keep a sheep in your garden only use rainwater and are in fact not watching this because you don't have internet then the industrial changes that happened 300 years ago are still influencing your life if the industrial revolution hadn't happened then no pun included would just be me and ethical watching each other talk about sticks that we found in the garden this is richard arkwright the founder of fast fashion what a lovely wig one that he probably made himself but we're not here to talk about his sublime syrup to the 87 of our audience who aren't british syrup is cockney rhyming slang for wig it was helping to develop and paint a method of machine manufacturing yarn to make clothes that made him well known he also weaved the fabric of britain's factory landscape before him factories didn't really exist they were just places where people gathered to work he created whole villages centered around factory life with pubs and houses and even their own currency the cromford dollar arkwright is now a household name at least for people who play board games and for people who mishear blur lyrics [Music] the card game know what i mean i'll crack the card game looks at british industry in the late 18th century you'll control factories upgrade them employ workers sac workers as you replace them with cheaper machines and sell goods with the prices fluctuating depending on demand and shipped goods overseas when you build factories demand will increase there are more people earning money and therefore able to afford knives and forks this was the beginning of capitalism and the middleman in britain raising profits in an increasingly competitive environment unsurprisingly then your goal in arc right is to make the most money by having the most valuable shares in your own goods the cheaper you sell for the more appealing they are and the more people will want them but then of course as the factory owner you would have made less money than if you'd sold the goods at a higher price i've come to nottingham just down the road from arkwright's first mill in derby while some old mills are now just dumping grounds for trash cromford mill is still there you can even have a tour and if you're feeling particularly ghoulish you can relax in arkwright's cafe encircled by the memories of mostly women and children filling their lungs with cotton dust surrounded by noise and danger literally risking life and limb cheap small and agile children could fit into the parts of the machines that adults couldn't whilst costing a fraction of the wages win win it's cold out here i'm gonna go back inside now luckily in arkwright the card game you're not playing a worker but a rich factory owner you start the game with 50 pounds and two factories what have you done to earn these maybe you spent your early years working hard to inherit everything from your dead relatives who knows your job now you've got them is to use your loaf and make even more dough arkwright wasn't known for lamps or knives or even bread but he was known for cloth specifically a type of cloth that's now so popular it's even been grown on the moon the cotton industry would become big business in britain but we're not exactly known for our ability to grow it and britain's appetite for this lightweight comfortable material would not only spur on the industrial revolution but also contributed heavily to the atlantic slave trade british people generally know that we are the bad guys of most of history but this is an area where we turn our heads away we ring our shulls and condemn the history of what we see as somewhere else by the start of the industrial revolution enslavement was beginning to be seen as unlawful spurred on by people like james somerset and joseph knight and we had laws preventing racial segregation we did good on this one right whilst it was not strictly legal to enslave people in britain it was a very different story in the colonised countries that britain owned another superpart of our history britain profited massively and by the end of the 18th century liverpool was the largest human traffic port in europe in total more than 3 million african people were displaced and transported by ships bearing our flag this isn't the video to go into depth about the atlantic slave trade there are people far more knowledgeable and more reliable sources of information than i am and if you're interested a good starting point would be david olasoga's excellent approachable book black and british a short essential history many people like me have never been taught their stories and are only just now learning about some wonderfully eclectic parts of british history like alarda ekriano a writer whose autobiography depicting the horrors of slavery has become one of the most influential first person accounts or henry box brown a magician who spent 25 years of his life in england he got his nickname by escaping posting himself in a box on a 27-hour journey to philadelphia that must have cost a fortune in shipping duties i'm not actually kidding he spent half his life savings doing that talking of freight let's move on to [Music] just before the victorian era began in britain goods were chiefly transported by canal but it's annoying lugging stuff about on boats you have to open locks horses get tired and the weather can be unpredictable as the industrial revolution continued it became clear that something better was needed and in 1830 the liverpool and manchester railway opened legend tells us that the railways are the width of two horse bottoms this is quite possibly nonsense but what is true is that the now standard gauge was recommended by mr train himself george stevenson unfortunately the day the l m opened was also the day of the line's first fatality but this wasn't going to stop its popularity from choo-chooing ahead rhinocenizia's stevenson's rocket looks at the excitement of the time that would eventually lead to the so-called railway mania of the 1840s set the decade before you play competing barons exerting influence over the rails where they're built how they're built and how well they carry passengers in this game you win by being the best at doing the trains not so far from the truth huge investment meant that in the years following major lines cropped up between liverpool london and birmingham as in the game the better connected a city was the more profitable it was and businesses vied to take advantage of this fresh produce could be delivered to cities newspapers could be read all over the country and people could try things they'd never even seen before unfortunately when you've never experienced something you don't know what it should look or taste like naturally unscrupulous shopkeepers took advantage of this let's say you see a piece of red gloucester cheese you've never had it and you want to try it you might not end up liking it but at least it will be edible right blimey gertrude no your red gloucester is just as likely to be whatever cheese painted with red lead your ice cream full of cat hair and bed bugs and your chocolate well it's just wax with brown paint in it delicious but now that trains have come about previously regional products could become known nationwide such as guinness and cadbury and would guarantee a mark of quality stevenson's rocket even features beer as one of the resources like in all good train games you'll be building track to connect parts of the country the kinezia twist though as well as being a popular 1960s dance move is that you don't actually need to have built your track to move your trains instead you place a train where you'd like track to go and wait for another player to shout veto if that happens players bid shares to change the direction the train is headed and therefore the direction in which the track will eventually end up look at this slap up meal this wasn't the food of the elite this was the food of the navies the people who literally built britain's railways and this was just for breakfast then there was early elevenses late elevenses and that was all before lunch they ate well they had to eat well because their job was so ridiculously tough they were paid better than a lot of other people at the time and they learnt useful skills i'm not doing the rest of this video i'm just going to eat this but there was heavy discrimination from respectable society particularly for the navis from ireland who some english people saw as stealing their jobs leading to unfair treatment riots and further inequality thank goodness things have changed so much today like with cockney rhyming slang covert methods of communication developed amongst them with tiddly meaning drunk possibly coming from navi slang a tiddly wink being a drink wherever they were from they lived and worked in horrendous conditions with injury disease and death just being another part of the job i should admit that i took some of this information from a website selling drain supplies so you know watch out for that biased agenda back to the game the more shares you control in a company the more say you theoretically have and the better you'll be at building your engine to lay track connect to companies and ultimately win the game by having the most prestige if though a train ends up adjacent to another train or piece of track the two lines will merge into one if you control shares in the dissolved company you'll score prestige and replace them with shares in the new company forget the people who are actually building it you're not being popped off at the rate of 500 a year you're a baron and you deserve compensation as the railways grew in popularity for freight and even for passengers once people realized that no high-speed travel wouldn't injure the brain trains changed the way we see time in 1842 the first edition of the illustrated london news ran an article noting how frustrating it had been to have falmouth and dover different by more than 25 minutes before gmt was adopted in 1880 a standard train time was introduced to help with the running and catching of trains and the preventing of accidents [Music] focusing on the midlands brass birmingham is a game whose second act looked at the popularity of freight rail in the early victorian period between 1830 and 1870. like in stevenson's rocket you'll be transporting goods using tracks but brass doesn't care about the construction of railways instead we see the other great victorian pastime exploitation the tracks have already been laid but how well you can transport your stuff depends on how well you've built your network coal iron and textiles are all important but brass birmingham tells us that the more beer you drink the more successful you'll be you may not know this but trains unlike horses do not run on oats coal was massively important to the running of trains and is a primary resource in brass it's needed for almost everything from construction to transporting through your network to making dairy-free milk alternatives wait no that's oats again if i wanted to walk the 198 kilometers from nottingham to london it would take me about 41 hours at a good pace now imagine i have a whole cloud of sheep with me if there are anything like my dog stopping every few minutes to sniff and pee and eat bits of rubbish off the floor it would take a whole lot longer but thanks to trains farmers no longer had to watch their sheep getting skinnier and less valuable they could pop them on a train with a hate me for the pay phone and a packed lunch and they'd be there the next day in brass while you're not packing off sheep there is something called manufactured goods which honestly could be anything it's shredding a sheep but really you don't care what's in the crates all that matters is how well you can chew chew them to different towns you have your own network but connections are shed meaning that you'll inevitably use tracks or resources belonging to other players this peppy interaction will cost you and help them but sometimes it's smarter and more resourceful to use things that have already been built even the best entrepreneurs can't control the waterways railways coal iron and brass in the country there's no actual brass in this game i've already written to complain talking of players brass lets you pretend to be an important industry smith of the time you've got your classics like arkwright and stevenson but you also have a couple of women chucked in there for good measure with short biographies of everyone so you can get to know who you're playing there's chain maker eliza tinsley and stonemason eleanor code but others are missing like harriet samuel the founder of h samuel the jeweler where i got my wedding ring and mary ross a successful warship builder some of these aren't great people but you know diversity there are two sides of the board in brass a day and a night side whilst these are functionally identical they look quite similar don't get me wrong the art is amazing but even the trees and fields are covered in a haze of coal smoke brass doesn't pretend you're cheerily building on a green and pleasant land it recognizes the dark gloomy reality of the industrial revolution the board implies a grottiness that a lot of people felt at the time whilst it's become far more extensive the places featured in brass birmingham are still important to britain's train network today there's derby coventry you toxita they took your toxiter off the map damn it john for these railways to be built entire streets were leveled overnight to make way for track leaving people homeless trains brought noise and pollution and danger to previously peaceful places and a lot of people didn't like them but they also meant that people could finally escape the trappings of city dirt and disease and take their dirt and disease somewhere else and by the mid-19th century gradual improvements in working hours and conditions meant that for some people seeing the sea or the countryside could become a reality for the first time in their lives one last thing while we honor the businessmen and human traffickers involved in the industrial revolution most of the workers like the hundreds of children and enslaved people have been lost to history if you'd like to find out a bit more about the people who literally built this country i'll leave a list of articles and videos in the description below that i found interesting while researching this video so that's the end of part one we've seen how the industrial revolution began to change britain technologically and socially and how trains began to drive people out of towns and cities part two is coming but if you're hankering for more you can watch my sort of episode zero where i talk about space and how board games depict it [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right i'm done

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 25,042

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, board game biographies, industrial revolution, arkwright, card game, the card game, arkwright the card game, stephenson's rocket, reiner knizia, brass, brass birmingham, martin wallace, brass lancashire, episode one

Id: bzNMsAvgaLk

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022