This is the eleventh article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide our understanding of the environment.
In the board game 1812: The Invasion of Canada (2012), players fight for control of the borderlands between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie as British, Americans, Canadians, or Indigenous peoples. The developer, Academy Games, specializes in creating dynamic, educational, history-themed board games. By drawing on historical scholarship, 1812 highlights British-allied Indigenous peoples’ contribution to the war effort. Nevertheless, the game is not perfect.
The in-game Indigenous warriors are not “Cardboard Indians,” a phrase that historian Benjamin Hoy employs to describe how Indigenous peoples have been stereotyped in modern board games. But the complexity of Indigenous participation in the conflict is ill-represented. Limited by the few Indigenous and environmental histories of the conflict, the significance of environmentally adept Indigenous warriors and environmental factors, both of which determined the course of the conflict around the Great Lakes, are absent. Despite this, the literal and metaphorical “cardboard battlefields” of 1812 are nonetheless an intuitive, fun way to learn about the conflict.
In 1812, players choose one of five factions: British Regulars, Canadian Militia, and Native Americans represent the British side, while the United States Army and Militia represent the opposing side. There are three historical scenarios to choose from, determining where each side (represented by coloured blocks) is placed on the map. At the beginning of each turn, players activate one movement card, determining their movement across the board, and one special ability card, influencing in-game combat. To initiate battle, players move into a space occupied by their opponent and roll six-sided dice with symbols representing hit, flee, or blank. The “blank” side allows players to continue fighting or retreat. The overall objective of the game is to “strategize together” and take the most territory. Players will feel like generals as they meet with their allies in a room separate from their opponents to secretly discuss their objectives for the coming campaign season. The game is overall simple and runs like Risk with historical flair.
The rulebook and box cover art provide historical context about the War of 1812 for players. The rulebook includes a historical overview of the conflict informed by scholarship. Understandably, it gets a lot right about Indigenous participation in the conflict. The overview explains the fractured relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the “Old Northwest” (present-day midwestern United States) as a major cause of the war. It emphasizes Indigenous sovereignty, listing Natives as nations rather than Anglo-American subjects, while highlighting the diversity of opinion towards the war among and within Native communities. Not all the history presented is so nuanced, though. The game designers cite an “expanded” American population whose “need” (rather than desire) for land increased, which tacitly (though unintentionally) justifies expansion by posing it as inevitable and necessary. At the same time, they contend the war “shaped the destiny of two nations.”1 In this passage, they neglect the significance of the conflict to the sovereign nations that fought in it. Increasingly, people learn history through non-academic forums like gaming, so it becomes imperative that Indigenous history is presented with complexity and nuance.
The box cover art highlights the centrality of Indigenous peoples to Britain’s military efforts in the war. The cover depicts two warriors wading through a river, guiding the British soldiers behind them. Historically, the British relied heavily on Indigenous peoples as guides during the conflict, such as when Maliseet attendants conducted an overland winter march of the 104th Regiment from New Brunswick to the Canadas in 1813.2
Beyond the rulebook and art, the game mechanics show how Indigenous peoples were significant, autonomous historical actors that mattered in the War of 1812. Like the actual war, all in-game factions have different strengths and weaknesses. Reflecting their advanced training, British and American soldiers have a higher likelihood of hitting their opponent in battle; British soldiers do not flee, while American soldiers do. North American militiamen, poorly trained and organized, are more likely to flee.
Indigenous warriors fall somewhere in the middle. Like their historical counterparts, these wooden warriors have more options to make “Command Decisions” through the blank side of their dice. This reflects the relative autonomy of Native warriors who, compared to their comrades, had more individual agency, choosing when and where to fight against their enemies, usually in an environment like a forest or swamp that benefitted their fighting style.
In 1812, you are only so strong as your dice. The more dice you have, the better you will fare in combat because you have a higher likelihood of hitting your enemy. The overall point of the game, then, is that collaboration with your allies is key to victory. This is a takeaway that the creators got from reading about the Battle of Queenston Heights, which, to them, “fell apart because of conflict between senior officers and the refusal of New York militia to cross into Canadian territory.”3 The game thus reflects a larger historical reality: because the British relied on Indigenous allies in the conflict, they had an advantage. This is further reflected in the fact that the American side does not have Indigenous allies, despite some participating in the conflict.4
The game also suffers from Haudenosaunee myopia. There are three ability cards dedicated to important British-allied Indigenous leaders, Tecumseh, John Brant, and John Norton. Unfortunately, like in the existing scholarship of the War of 1812, the Anishinaabeg of the upper Great Lakes are largely invisible.5 Players, therefore, often finish the game with an exaggerated sense of Haudenosaunee participation in the conflict. This is not a criticism of the developers, but of the historiography that has largely omitted the Anishinaabeg.
While Indigenous peoples are vital to the British side’s in-game success, Indigenous peoples’ environmental knowledge, which the British relied on, and the environment more generally, is non-existent. The Niagara River is “greyed out” and traversable just like land. But river crossings were not so easy historically. For example, two American officers who crossed the river at the Battle of Queenston Heights described it as “a sheet of violent eddies” and “rapid and full of whirlpools and eddies.”6 The Americans employed experienced sailors to navigate their rowboats across the river, with albeit limited success.
Likewise, in-game water movements, used to transport soldiers across the lakes, are rendered as a mechanical process rather than one highly dependent on the season or weather. Even if we assume that each new round of the game takes place in summer, when lake transport was easier, this ignores the erratic nature of the lower Great Lakes in that season. Notably, the USS Hamilton and Scourge sank off the Twelve Mile Creek (present-day St. Catharines, Ontario) in a sudden squall on 8 August 1813, a major loss for the Americans.7 “The wind blows fresh but is diametrically against us,” wrote one American soldier after the ships sank.8 The course of the conflict was intimately linked to the rhythm of the lakes and the winds that propelled vessels over them, but this is not so in 1812.
Owing to the limited scholarship on environmental history and the War of 1812, the in-game environment is a static canvas, a cardboard battlefield over which players move their armies, rather than a dynamic landscape that impacted the course of the conflict. While it is easy to write off this limitation, the game could have included some environmental mechanics. For example, season and weather components would make a fine addition to the game, facilitating understanding of the environmental dimensions of nineteenth-century conflict.
Weather has been a facet of gaming since at least the early-nineteenth century. The Prussian engineer officer Johann Georg Julius Venturini, for example, further developed wargaming (a form of board games) by integrating environmental realism, including varied terrain and factoring in seasons, weather, and food procurement.9 1812 could do the same. The end of each turn could signify a new season. Spring and fall rain could reduce the movement of players on the offensive by a few points, while humid summers subject players to mosquito-borne malaria, cutting down an army before battle.
The two-dimensional Native warriors on the box cover art, and the cardboard battlefields upon which they fight, reveal something larger about scholarship on the War of 1812. Though informed by contemporary (2012) scholarship, 1812 is ultimately limited as a medium to understand history by the lack of Indigenous and environmental histories produced about the conflict. These fresh perspectives are necessary so students can understand the conflict, and history more generally, in three-dimensions rather than two.
[1] Rulebook for 1812: The Invasion of Canada, “A Historical Overview of The War of 1812-1815,” 9-10.
[2] Jake Breadman, “‘A Disposition to Carry on a Winter’s Campaign’: British Winter Military Operations during the War of 1812,” Network in Canadian History & Environment, 28 February 2024.
[3] Rulebook, “Historical Overview,” 11.
[4] Amongst the Haudenosaunee of New York, some Seneca opted to join Tecumseh’s confederacy in 1811, while some Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans to avenge losses suffered during the American Revolution, others were given to pacificism, inspired by Handsome Lake’s religious revival, and others were more belligerent and hoped to regain possession of land claimed by their British-allied cousins. Notably, around 300 American-allied Haudenosaunee warriors fought at the Battle of Chippawa in July 1814. Carl Benn, The Iroquois in the War of 1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 63-64.
[5] Alan Corbiere, “Anishinaabeg in the War of 1812: More than Tecumseh and his Indians,” Active History, 10 September 2014; The only card that hints at Anishinaabeg participation is the ability card “Mackinac Reinforcements,” which adds two British units (not Indigenous!) to an area adjacent to Lake Huron. The art on the card shows a small boat rowed by red-clad British soldiers. In one of the campaign scenarios there is, admittedly, land south of Moraviantown where two Indigenous units are placed at the beginning of the game, which may represent Anishinaabeg participation, but to better reflect the reality of their participation in the conflict this could have been made a recruitment zone replenished each turn.
[6] Major-General Stephen Van Rensselaer to William Eustis, Secretary of War, Lewiston, 14 October 1812, in Ernest Cruikshank (Editor), Documentary History of the Campaign on the Niagara Frontier in 1812, Part II (Welland: Tribune Office, 1902), 80-81; John Lovett to Joseph Alexander, 14 October 1812, Ibid, 85; Statement of Lieutenant-Colonel Thompson Mead, 17th Regiment of Militia, Ibid, 91-93.
[7] Robert Malcomson, Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812-1814 (Montreal: Robin Brass Studio, 2011), 171-172.
[8] Major Willoughby Morgan to Lieutenant Colonel David Campbell, Fort George, 9 August 1813, in William S. Dudley et al. (Editor), The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Vol. II, 1813, (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1992), 535.
[9] Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games (San Diego: Unreason Press, 2012), 218.
Jake Breadman
Latest posts by Jake Breadman (see all)
- Cardboard Battlefields in 1812: The Invasion of Canada - January 7, 2026
- Review of Fair, Improving Upper Canada - September 22, 2025
- “A Disposition to Carry on a Winter’s Campaign”: British Winter Military Operations during the War of 1812 - February 28, 2024