Before playing my latest COIN game I didn’t have to learn how to play it because someone else had to teach it to me instead! At the end of May I had the opportunity attend Chimera Con in Dublin. Chimera Con is a one-day convention dedicated to playing games with other people who relish the opportunity of spending all day playing the one epic game. The organisers seek out volunteers in advance of the event to bring a game that they are prepared to teach to a table of potentially new players, and then players are allocated to those games for the day. I got a space playing A Distant Plain, Volko Runke and Brian Train’s COIN game about the Afghanistan War, covering the period of the war from 2001 to 2013. This would be my first time playing the game, but my third COIN game overall so I was reasonably confident I could pick it up pretty quickly. When I had played Andean Abyss at the start of May, I had been the government player, so this time I requested an insurgent faction and was given the role of the Taliban. The game organiser was the Warlords and the other players, both totally new to the system, were the Coalition and the Afghanistan Government. In the end the game took us about 7 hours, and I had an absolute blast playing it. I also have a few thoughts about it which I hope you will indulge me by reading!
The opening of the game, everything is very much not peaceful in Afghanistan and it’s about to get a lot worse.
First things first, I enjoyed A Distant Plain quite a bit more than Andean Abyss. That’s not a nock against Andean Abyss, which is a great game. In fact, most of the mechanics in A Distant Plain are largely identical to those in Andean Abyss, it’s just a few tweaks to the game that made me enjoy it significantly more. The most significant of these was the different roles the players took. The Taliban, which I played, along with the Warlords could have fit in with the insurgent factions in Andean Abyss – they weren’t exactly the same, but they were very much of a type. The big difference here was in the Coalition and Afghan Government (Government from here on) players. In Andean Abyss there are three insurgent and one government player, while in A Distant Plain two players take on the role of governing powers – but they don’t exactly see eye to eye.
End of the first Propaganda Round, at this point it’s still very much everybody’s game and most of us are only beginning to grasp how the game works.
Our game was an amazing illustration of the Coalition-Government relationship. Early on the two players were learning to cooperate and then quickly found that they worked best in tandem. Often the Government player would Sweep a region to expose Taliban guerrillas so that the superior Coalition military could eliminate them. Cooperation was key to keeping the insurgent players in check. The problem arose as we kept playing and they started thinking about how to actually win the game. The thing is the two sides don’t actually have identical victory conditions and only one of them can win. The Coalition wants to boost support for the Government (in direct opposition with the Taliban who want high opposition) and then to remove as many troops and bases as they can from the country. In contrast, the Government wants to control large parts of the board, something made easier with significant Coalition presence, and to boost their own Patronage – which decreases Support. The extra wrinkle that makes this phenomenal is that the two players share one pool of Resources – the Coalition spends Government Resources to take several of their actions (some of their actions are free, so long as they only use their own pieces. They are also able to move and use Government pieces on the board). That meant that as we progressed through several phases, their cooperation began to degrade into the bickering of an old married couple. The Government player being increasingly frustrated as the Coalition spent all their money buying popular support that they didn’t care about. I wasn’t even playing one of those factions and this aspect greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the game. I can see how this dynamic was repeated and modified in Pendragon and it makes me even more excited to play a four-player version of that game – that bickering just isn’t the same as a solitaire player.
Start of second Propaganda Round and I am one point shy of winning - almost winning is a dangerous place to be in a COIN game. I expect to be punished for sticking my neck out.
I also preferred how A Distant Plain only has one big city to fight over instead of Andean Abyss’s many distinct cities. The push and pull on who controlled Kabul, whether it supported or opposed the government, and just generally the chaos in that area was a lot more interesting to me. It also meant that we never had to use the overflow boxes, since Kabul could take a lot of pieces. In Andean Abyss if anything goes down in one of the cities, you’ll quickly find yourself struggling to fit everything into the relevant space. The struggle for Kabul felt like it more easily created a narrative than the scattered and occasional conflict in Andean Abyss’s cities. That said, that could just as easily be down to how my two games played out, and in another game of Andean Abyss it’s possible that there would be significantly more urban conflict. I find it hard to imagine a game of A Distant Plain where Kabul isn’t a pivotal spot on the board, though.
End of the third Propaganda Card (it came like 4 cards after the second) and I’m holding it together better than I’d expected. Things are heating up in the East, though.
I now feel like I’m really beginning to come to grips with COIN as a system, and I’m excited to revisit Pendragon in that light. One thing that keeps occurring to me is how the Events don’t work exactly how you would expect them to, or at least not how I did. I’m a little more used to events in classic Card Driven Games, where often the Event is better than the actions you could take using the operation points instead, but it’s also usually a lot narrower in application. Obviously, that’s a big genre of games and this is a bit of an oversimplification, but my experience made me think that Events in COIN games would often be the best choice if their situational application fit your plans.
Deploying in force was a Taliban specialty - all of my guerrillas were on the board a lot. The Warlords were very good at filling the board with bases. You can see how it can be overwhelming trying to quash the insurgents.
In practice, I don’t think Events are actually meant for the first player of the turn. Most of the time anyway, sometimes the perfect Event does come up and you have to take it. In my game the Warlord player had an even that benefited him greatly, prevented one of the players from playing the next turn, and didn’t cost him his ability to act on the next turn – which coincidentally also saw him going first. That was a good run of Events. Most of the time, though, if you’re going first the Event is just not as good as taking a big action with a special ability would be. That’s where I think the actual cleverness of the Events comes in. You see, if you take that big action, the second player can take the event or a limited action, which is almost always underwhelming. You can choose to block the event, but that means no special ability. That, I think, is what the main Event calculus is – it’s something the first player has to decide if they’re happy to let another player have rather than something they decide if they want. It’s a subtle difference, but a really clever one.
The Taliban are largely wiped out in the East of Afghanistan, but a series of Ambushes wipes out Coalition power in Kandahar in the South and imperils control elsewhere. The fight for Kabul is particularly fierce.
That’s all the stuff I loved about A Distant Plain, let’s talk a bit about what I didn’t like quite as much: the theme. That’s not quite the right way to put it. I think the US led coalition invasion of Afghanistan and the war that followed is really interesting, and I think it’s a pivotal moment of the 21st century and something that looms very large over my own life. I was twelve when 9/11 happened, I finished my childhood in a very different world from where I started. It’s not that I think the War in Afghanistan is off limits – it’s very much something we need to understand and a game about counterinsurgency is a good way to increase understanding of the conflict and its dynamics. I just felt like it was missing the human element. Now, this criticism could just as easily be laid at the feet of Andean Abyss I think, but I suppose I’m not as intimately impacted by that conflict. The Colombian Drug War was something I was aware of, but it didn’t loom over my life like Afghanistan did and I’m not as viscerally familiar with it.
Game end - Taliban victory on final scoring. I once again finished just one point shy of my target, but this time it was good enough as no one else was closer to their win condition.
I was the Taliban player and throughout the game I used the Terror action quite a lot – it was essential to achieving my victory. My actions were clearly based on the historic egregious acts of terror that have killed thousands of innocent civilians. When we played the game, it wasn’t that heavy, though, it was a game. We cracked jokes; we had a good time. Now, I’m not saying that my game of A Distant Plain should have been a sombre affair, where we all reflected upon the human cost of war every time we took an action. It was a game, it was designed to be fun, we had fun playing it. At the same time, though, I’m trying to process how I feel about playing the Taliban, especially given my eventual victory. I think it would be a little too easy to just view it entirely as a game and not really think about the actual suffering that was caused by these people in history. The people of Afghanistan are once again living under Taliban rule, and that’s pretty depressing when you think about it.
I don’t know what A Distant Plain could have done to rectify this – I think it’s a pretty fundamental challenge to all wargame design. Any time you’re making a game out of something that featured vast human suffering, you run into the problem of how to balance making the experience into a game that is meant for entertainment with the need to do justice by the suffering those people faced. I’m not even necessarily saying that A Distant Plain was a complete failure in this regard – it was just the part of the experience that left me feeling the most uncomfortable days later as I write this. That’s it.
As a play experience, though, A Distant Plain was great. My experience at Chimera Con was easily the best time I’ve had playing a COIN game. I even got to establish contact with some people who play COIN semi-regularly, so when I hopefully manage to move back to Dublin, I’ll be able to play these games more frequently. I’d love to get Pendragon to the table with them, and they have a copy of Fire in the Lake which I hear is amazing.