By John Giebfried, Ph.D.

[A much younger version of the author, presenting the first version of the game at a Mongol history conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in December 2017]

In 2017, after finishing my PhD in Medieval History, I moved from the US to Israel to work as a postdoctoral fellow on the "Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia" project, led by Professor Michal Biran at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The project aimed to study the impact of the Mongol Empire on world history through the prism of mobility: why, how, when, and to where did people, ideas, and artifacts move across Eurasia, and what were the outcomes of these movements? To answer these questions, Professor Biran assembled an international team of researchers from America, Europe, Israel, and East Asia, working in more than a dozen languages from Persian and Arabic, to Chinese and Mongolian, and Latin and Old French (the latter two being my specialties). The project's central goal was the creation of a multilingual database recording information about individuals active in Mongol Eurasia. By the project's completion in 2017, the database indexed over 13,500 persons and countless additional categories of data points.

[The Mongol database indexed not just people, but thousands of textual references, including the various ways they died in the sources. This list kept growing as we encountered new sources.]

Like all the junior scholars on the team, I was expected to spend half my time on the database and half producing my own secondary scholarship. For the rest of my colleagues, that meant writing academic journal articles or book chapters. I wrote articles too, but I decided that one of the lasting pieces of scholarship I wanted to come out of my time in Jerusalem was a Reacting to the Past game about the Mongol Empire. In the database I was helping to build, my colleagues and I probably had access to more sources on the Mongol Empire than anyone else in history, and I wanted to use this treasure trove to tell a story about Mongol history that students could use. The game that resulted, Grandsons of Genghis: The Mongol Qurultai of 1246, was first playtested in Jerusalem in the Fall of 2017, added to the Reacting Consortium’s library in 2023, and is now under revisions for physical publication.

[This image and the ones that follow are from the introductory PowerPoint I made to accompany the game. You can find it here if you want to use it with your classes]

As I work on Reacting 3.0 revisions for the game, I want to use Grandsons of Genghis as a concrete example to showcase how Reacting to the Past is more than an innovative curriculum, but represents genuine academic scholarship, no less valuable or rigorous than the peer-reviewed articles and book chapters that came out of the same research project that this game did. 

I recognize that for those outside the Reacting community, this may be a strong claim. However, the game creation process contains the same interpretive labor as writing a monograph: synthesizing primary sources, adjudicating between competing interpretations, and making explicit claims about causation and contingency. Unlike a monograph, our games express these arguments through game mechanics rather than academic prose.

Picking the Moment Is Making an Argument

The first major choice for any Reacting game is choosing the precise time and place of the game. This choice isn't value-neutral. It's an interpretive claim about what matters, both for teaching and for our understanding of the past. My choice on when and where to set Grandsons of Genghis, is not just one, but two interpretive claims, one scholarly and the other pedagogical.

During my project-related research, I came across an article by the Korean historian Hodong Kim titled "A Reappraisal of Güyük Khan." Güyük is unarguably the most obscure of the Mongol Great Khans. He ruled for less than two years before his sudden death, and his reign is typically treated as a footnote between the regency of his mother Töregene and the eventual triumph of the Toluid line under Möngke. But Kim's article argued that Güyük's negative reputation was largely the product of Toluid propaganda. The sources that depict him as a drunk were written under Toluid dynasties that had seized power from his family and had every reason to delegitimize him. Other sources, particularly Christian ones, describe him as a stern, capable, and serious ruler. Reading Kim's article, I realized that the 1246 qurultai that elected Güyük was exactly where I needed to set my game. The obscurity wasn't a problem. It was the point.

For a game about the Mongol Empire, the more obvious choices for a game would have been the qurultai that elevated Temujin to Genghis Khan, or the one that settled succession among his sons. Both are well-documented in the Secret History of the Mongols. Both are dramatic and have clear outcomes. And both, for the same reason, would have made poor games. In both cases, there was no real contest, because the outcomes had largely been decided before the qurultais began. They were also smaller events in terms of who could be characters and what sources we have about them.

For different reasons, I also decided against the qurultais that elected Möngke Khan in 1251 and Kublai Khan in 1260. The former was a strong contender, with excellent source coverage and compelling characters, but by 1251 the Toluid ascendancy was largely settled. The drama was over. In the latter case, the election of Kublai was contested with his brother Ariq-Boke, but instead of meeting at one qurultai, they each held rival ones and then spent the next decade fighting a civil war that fractured the empire. So while Kublai is a very famous name, and I could have dragged Marco Polo’s father and uncle into the game, mechanically, this was not the best fit.

In contrast to these more well-known moments, the 1246 qurultai is different. It's the only qurultai of the United Empire period where the question of succession wasn't effectively predetermined. Multiple candidates had viable claims, and the factions were genuinely divided. Güyük's election was not inevitable, and the coalitions that formed around the succession question shaped Mongol politics for the next decade, leading directly to the ascension of Möngke and the Toluid Revolution.

[The three main contenders for the position of Great Khan in the Qurultai of 1261]

It also allowed me as a game designer to talk about the 1251 qurultai, by writing the characters whose objectives and potential alliances allowed that later qurultai to play out earlier in the timeline of the game. My design choice, therefore, allows instructors to talk about both events together and gives the players a sense of how the next stage of history would unfold.

1246 was also the first qurultai where we have truly international participation, a theme I wanted to emphasize. Mongol vassals had to come in person to the qurultai to pledge allegiance to the Great Khan; others like John of Plano Carpini, who traveled from Lyon as Pope Innocent IV's ambassador, were funneled there as a matter of course. Before this moment, the empire hadn’t had the post road system developed by Ogedei, which enabled this level of centralization to do this; and after 1251 (because of the civil war between Kublai and Ariq-Boke), the succession was never fully a global event again. Thus, this is a unique moment. For perhaps the first time in recorded history, representatives from the Atlantic to the Pacific gathered in one place to witness the same political drama, and we have their accounts.

As a result, what at first seems like a less intuitive moment in Mongol history to set the game becomes the best choice. This kind of counterintuitive setting choice isn't unique to my game; it’s a pattern in RTTP design.

Consider The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 BCE. If you were designing a game about Athenian democracy, the obvious choice would be the golden age of Pericles: the Parthenon, the flourishing of philosophy and drama, Athens at the height of its power. But Mark Carnes and his co-authors set the game after all that, in the aftermath of defeat in the Peloponnesian War, when the democracy was fragile, and factionalism ran high. Why? Because that's when you can stage the trial of Socrates, the most famous and revealing “failure” of Athenian democracy. The post-war setting lets students grapple with the tensions and contradictions of democratic governance in a way that Periclean triumphalism never could.

The same logic permeates Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791. The obvious moments for a French Revolution game would be the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of the Bastille, or the Reign of Terror, guillotines and all. Instead, Carnes and his co-authors set the game between the Flight to Varennes and the Battle of Valmy. Those bookends might seem obscure, but they create the richest possible pedagogical experience, capturing both the idealism of the early revolution and the forces that would lead to its bloody radicalization, while leaving the outcome uncertain.

In each case, the designers chose a moment that looks wrong at first glance but turns out to be exactly right. The most famous moments are often the worst settings for games because their outcomes feel inevitable. The less obvious moments are where genuine contingency lived, where historical actors faced real choices with uncertain consequences.

This is where the pedagogical and the scholarly converge. The same reasoning that produces a good game also produces a historiographical claim. By setting my game in 1246, I'm not just creating an effective teaching tool. I'm advancing an argument: that we've underestimated this qurultai's significance, that it represents a “hinge” moment in world history, that the convergence of global witnesses makes it the first truly international political event we can reconstruct from multiple perspectives. On the Consortium's website, I open the description of my game by saying, "There is no more truly global event in the history of the pre-modern world than the great Mongol Qurultai of 1246." That's not marketing language, it’s a historiographical claim, and the game's existence is an argument for that claim.

While Kim wrote an article rehabilitating Güyük's reputation, I built a game that puts his qurultai at the center of world history. Both are scholarly interventions; the difference is in the medium, not the substance.

Mechanics as Historiographical Claims

The choice of 1246 is the largest-scale example of this design logic, but the same reasoning operates at every level of the game. Each mechanic, each rule, each victory condition involves a similar calculation: what choice will produce both the richest learning experience and the most defensible historical claim? Let me take one example: the religious debate.[The Three Phases of Grandsons of Genghis]

From the beginning, I knew the game needed two kinds of characters: Mongols who would drive the succession politics, and foreign dignitaries who would represent the wider world converging on the qurultai. But I had a structural problem in the succession debate; the Mongol characters naturally take center stage. They're the ones with claims to power, factional allegiances, and votes that matter. The foreigners can observe, advise, and scheme, but they're not the main actors. I needed a complementary phase where the foreigners could shine, where they would be the central performers and the Mongols would sit back and watch. The religious debate gave me that inversion. Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims would take the stage and argue for their faiths before a Mongol audience. The structure of the game would shift: first, the Mongols dominate, then the foreigners dominate, then, in the third act, they would mix more evenly. It was a pedagogical solution to a casting problem.

The second moment of clarity came when I read William of Rubruck's account of the religious debate at Möngke's court in 1254. We don't have detailed accounts of religious debates at Güyük's qurultai, though sources give us a colorful example of a failed debate during his reign, where a religious debate turned into literal hand-to-hand combat. But Rubruck gave me something remarkable: not just a description of what was debated, but an account of how the debate was structured, what rules the Mongols imposed, and what the three faiths debated. I could use this to fashion the mechanics for my game's religious debate, transplanting the 1254 evidence into a 1246 setting.

What struck me most, though, was how Rubruck's account ended. He describes the Christian delegation winning their debate, celebrating their rhetorical triumph, and then watching as precisely no one converted. The account concludes with William tallying the miles he traveled and noting, devastatingly, that he baptized only six souls, three of whom were the children of Christian slaves. For all the spectacle, the debate changed nothing.

I built the possibility for conversion into the game. Foreign characters could make their arguments, and Mongol characters had the option to convert written into their role sheets. The mechanics allowed for conversion. But I suspected, based on Rubruck's account, that it wouldn't happen through debate alone. The playtests confirmed this, and then taught me something more.

Over multiple rounds of playtesting with students and then hearing from other instructors about what happened in their games, a pattern emerged. Mongol characters rarely converted after the religious debate. The arguments didn't move them. But some did convert, and when I looked at why, it was almost always political. A Mongol character would convert to Christianity to secure an alliance with a Christian faction that would help them in the succession debate. Or they would convert to Islam because a Muslim character had promised support for their military objectives. The conversion was real, but it wasn't about theology. It was about power.

My students accidentally taught me something that scholars have long argued: most religious conversions throughout history happen top-down, driven by rulers making political calculations. The spread of Christianity in late antiquity, the Islamization of Central Asia, the conversion of the Mongol khanates themselves in the decades after my game is set: these were political decisions, not the fruits of theological persuasion. Religious debates were spectacles, not conversion engines.

I had read this in the scholarship. But watching it play out in my classroom made it vivid in a way that reading never had. By the fourth or fifth time I ran the game, the pattern was undeniable. Students arrived expecting that a good enough argument would win souls. They experienced what William of Rubruck experienced: the gap between rhetorical victory and actual conversion. And then, when conversion did happen, they saw it happen for political reasons, not theological ones.

The analogy I use with students in the debrief: it's very much like watching presidential debates in America. You may watch the debate, you may enjoy it, you may even have strong opinions about who won. But how often does watching a debate actually change who you vote for? Speaking personally, in two decades as a voter in the United States, watching a presidential debate has changed my vote exactly once. I suspect for most people the number is zero. And if watching a debate won't change your vote on a political question, how much less likely is it to change your commitment about the eternal fate of your soul?

The discovery went further. One of my colleagues on the Mongol project, Jonathan Brack, later wrote an article examining exactly this dynamic:

“Disenchanting Heaven: Interfaith Debate, Sacral Kingship, and Conversion to Islam in the Mongol Empire, 1260–1335” Past & Present, Volume 250, Issue 1, February 2021, pp. 11–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa002

Reading his work years after I had designed the religious debate mechanics, I found scholarly confirmation for what my students had shown me through play. He argues that when it comes to the divine, the Mongols only cared about tangible results. This explains both their famous religious tolerance and why debates never produced conversions: the Mongols weren't indifferent to religion; they evaluated religions by effectiveness rather than doctrine. As Brack puts it, the interfaith debate "represented more than the Mongols' pluralistic attitude... Rather, it represented the culmination of the Mongol religious logic." The khan's ability to preside over and judge these debates demonstrated his unique, heaven-granted wisdom. Religious representatives who wanted to convert the Mongols had to work within this framework, proving their religion's superior power rather than its superior truth. Conversion, when it happened, came through political alliance, not theological persuasion. My students, without reading Brack's article, discovered the same dynamic through play. The game had led me to conclusions that aligned with specialized scholarship I encountered only years later.

I went back and revised the teaching materials to lean into this fact. The Instructor's Manual now tells instructors explicitly: everyone expects the debate to produce conversions, but it won't. The conversions that happen will be political. This isn't a failure of the game; it's the point. The religious debate mechanic doesn't just describe a historiographical claim. It makes the claim testable. And when students discover for themselves that persuasion doesn't produce conversion, they're not taking my word for it anymore; they've lived the argument.

What We Should Do About It

However, while I strongly believe the case for games as a vehicle for scholarship, there is one glaring flaw in the argument. If game design is scholarship, where's the scholarly conversation? Historians argue with each other. They cite each other's work, challenge interpretations, and build on previous arguments. No one cites my victory conditions in their footnotes. No one writes response games challenging my interpretation of 1246.

This objection is valid, but it's an indictment of our practices, not of the work itself.

Right now, the historiographical arguments embedded in RTTP games are largely invisible. The Instructor's Manual gestures at some interpretive choices, explaining why certain mechanics exist or what historical debates underlie certain character positions. But this documentation is inconsistent and focused primarily on helping instructors run the game, not on making the scholarly contribution legible to other historians.

I think that going forward, we need something more deliberate: perhaps a companion essay for each game that makes explicit the historiographical work the design embodies. Not a defense of every choice, but an articulation of the major interpretive moves, and one that exists outside the materials of the game itself. What is this game arguing about its period? What historiographical debates does it engage? What choices did the designer make, and what alternatives did they consider?

 

[The four sons of Genghis, whose heirs make up the four central factions of the game]

This would serve two audiences. For instructors, it would deepen their understanding of what the game is doing at an intellectual level, helping them frame discussions and debrief more effectively. For scholars in the relevant fields, it would make the game legible as a contribution to their discourse. A specialist in Mongol history could engage with Grandsonsof Genghis not just as a teaching tool but as an intervention in debates about the 1246 qurultai, religious conversion, or the political dynamics of Mongol succession.

I would love to see the Consortium encourage this practice for new submissions, and I would love to see UNC Press consider publishing a collection of such essays for existing flagship games, a volume where designers lay out the historiographical work embedded in their designs. It would be useful for instructors and game designers, valuable to external scholars, and powerful evidence that this community produces serious intellectual work.

I am writing this blog post not only to make an argument, but to look for ideas. Others may have entirely different ideas about how to make game design legible as scholarship. How do you think about your design work? Do you see it as scholarship, and if so, how would you describe what kind? What practices have you developed for documenting the interpretive choices your games embody? What would help you articulate the scholarly contribution of your work to colleagues outside the RTTP community?

The work we do is intellectually serious. It's time we said so clearly and figured out together how to make that visible.