Classic board games are nostalgia machines. They simulate a stable reality: fair starts, fixed identities, durable borders, and a referee you can trust. Checkers, Risk, Go, Chess, Othello: different costumes, same underlying fantasy.

Xenovore is built for the world we actually inhabit.

The Old World (Risk / Go): In the old canon, symmetry is moral theater. Two equal armies. One rulebook. One optimal line. You win because you played "correctly."

The Reality (Xenovore): Risk treats armies as the primitive unit of power. Go treats territory as something you can hold. Xenovore treats both as period pieces.

The Homeland starts entrenched with 40 tokens. The Horde starts with nothing—but moves three times faster. Not because it is "unfair," but because speed is the only advantage that matters now. Institutions are heavy. Disruption is cheap. The swarm does not need permission.¹

The Verdict: Risk is a map. Xenovore is a physics engine.

The Old World (Chess / Checkers): A piece has a fixed identity. A Rook is a Rook. A Pawn is a Pawn. You are what you were born as.

The Reality (Xenovore): In Xenovore, power accumulates as height. Height gives you capture. Height also slows you down. Accumulation turns into drag. Influence becomes inertia. The "best" Homeland position is always one move away from becoming a monument: powerful, immobile, and perfectly edible.²

The Verdict: The taller you get, the easier you are to topple.

The Old World (Othello): You are Black or you are White. The game enforces clarity.

The Reality (Xenovore): You are Red, or you are Blue. If you are Red and you consume Blue, you become a mix. You become Purple. And in the logic of Xenovore, Purple is Tainted.³

To be Purple is to be suspicious. To be Purple is to admit context in a world that pays premiums for slogans. So players do what modern systems train them to do: they perform purity. They purge. They radicalize themselves to remain recognizable to the tribe.

The Verdict: Xenovore is the only game that mechanizes the purity spiral.

The Old World (Monopoly): Accumulate. Buy properties. Build hotels. Get rich and stay rich.

The Reality (Xenovore): The Heartland is a shared resource, but every token consumed, every square lost, degrades the whole.⁴ The Horde has no investment in preservation—they seek only occupation.

Xenovore does not moralize this. It operationalizes it. The Pure eat the Impure until no one is Pure.⁵

The Verdict: You are what you eat. And now you are edible.

The Old World (Chess): Perfect information. The board itself can be trusted.

The Reality (Xenovore): Truth is contested. In the multi-player variants, cooperation exists only as long as it is profitable. Betrayal is not a twist; it is the baseline protocol.

The game keeps asking the question that dissolves every clean narrative: When does "defense" become "occupation"? When does a "freedom fighter" become a "terrorist"? When does a piece stop being Homeland and start behaving like Horde?⁶

The Verdict: Truth is just the color with the most chips in the stack.

Checkers trains kings. Risk trains maps. Go trains forever.

Xenovore trains the present.

Fifteen minutes. A tilting board. A swarm that never stops. Identity that will not hold still long enough to be honored.

In 2025, you are not a King. You are a Heap.

¹ The Red Queen Hypothesis — Leigh Van Valen (1973). Systems must keep moving simply to avoid falling behind. In Xenovore, stasis is defeat.

² Cellular Automata — Stephen Wolfram (2002). Trivial rules produce complex, uncontrollable behavior. The only way to know what happens is to run the simulation.

³ The Sorites Paradox — Eubulides (4th c. BC). Identity erodes by increments. When does "enough" change become a different thing? Xenovore answers: sooner than you want.

⁴ The Tragedy of the Commons — Garrett Hardin (1968). Individual incentives degrade shared resources. The Heartland is a commons under siege.

⁵ A Modest Proposal — Jonathan Swift (1729). Cold utilitarianism turned on bodies. Xenovore literalizes the logic: consumption continues until purity is extinct.

⁶ Liquid Modernity — Zygmunt Bauman (2000). Categories liquefy, institutions lose solidity, and identity becomes a mutable asset.

Black Market Games Ludic relics for a post-ethical world.

xenovore.com | blackmarket.games © 2025. Made in the USA.