I was twelve when the War on Terror began, not quite fourteen when American invaded Iraq. The political and global climate created in the aftermath of 9/11 defined some of my most formative years – the time in my life when I first became aware of politics and tried to become politically active for the first time. By the time Labyrinth was released in 2010 I was in my twenties and living in Ireland. Labyrinth isn’t unique in being about a still ongoing war whose conclusion was far from determined when it was designed and published, but it is still a rarity within the hobby. That it was on such a major conflict, and one whose casualties extended well beyond a traditional notion of battlefields, certainly drew a lot of attention to it, as did the fact that its designer Volko Ruhnke was an analyst with the CIA at the time. Playing it fifteen years after its initial release, after America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 marked what is often considered the end of the War on Terror, is an interesting experience. This is not exactly a historical game, it was not made with enough distance from the events it covers for any real historical hindsight, but it captures a certain perspective on events of the time that we can look back on now and try our best to evaluate. It’s also an incredibly well-designed card-drive wargame (CDG).
GMT Games kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of Labyrinth and both its published expansions.
I first became aware of Labyrinth years ago, probably around 2011, and I first acquired a copy in 2016 with the release of the Awakening expansion. Sometime in the next year or so I played half of a game with a friend to learn the rules, but we never managed to schedule time to play a proper game. I ultimately traded it away in an attempt to reduce the size of my collection before moving house. It, along with Falling Sky (another Volko design), were markers of a previous unsuccessful attempt to “get into” wargaming. With the recent reprints of both Labyrinth and Awakening (the first for the latter), I decided that this was my opportunity to rectify my past failure and, equipped as I am with more experience in the hobby, finally play Labyrinth.
While I’m an established fan of Volko’s Levy and Campaign series and I would classify myself as broadly fond of the COIN series, my previous experience with his other CDG, Wilderness War, was not particularly favorable. I found that game incredibly obtuse and far mor complicated than its (relatively) thin rulebook would indicate. A lot of complexity is buried in its deck and after one play I haven’t been particularly excited to revisit it. It even made me wonder if heavier CDGs were my thing. This meant I had some trepidation about revisiting Labyrinth, after all these years would I just hate it?
Where Wilderness War is rooted in the tradition of point-to-point CDGs like We the People/Washington’s War or For the People, Labyrinth seems to draw more from the most famous CDG of all: Twilight Struggle. That is a slightly misleading notion, though, since where I could happily classify Wilderness War within that broader tradition of operational/strategic point-to-point CDGs, Labyrinth stands out far more as a unique take on the genre. It takes elements from Twilight Struggle and its ilk but carves out a distinct position somewhere between the two traditions, one that I’ve not seen before or since (not that I’m the world’s expert on this specific genre). Perhaps that’s because Labyrinth has a clear successor in the COIN series, but while it is easy to see the roots of COIN in Labyrinth it is an oversimplification to view this game as just an origin point. It is very much its own thing.
That’s enough vaguery, at some point we must consider what Labyrinth is. Labyrinth is played on a point-to-point map of boxes representing countries and regions in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, with a few fringe boxes for parts of East Asia and North America. Players compete over the status of Muslim majority countries (excluding Iran), trying to shift their level of governance across four levels ranging from Islamist Rule to Good and between political positions as an Ally, Neutral, or Adversary to the United States.
While played on a point-to-point map, you won’t be moving armies between these locations. Instead they are important for determining adjacency for some die roll modifiers and moving Jihadist cells without making a roll.
Victory is primarily achieved through manipulating these states, the US wants a certain number of national resources (each nation has a value based on its wealth) to be under Good governance while the Jihadist player wants the same but under Islamist rule. Both players also have an instant win condition, either eliminating all Jihadist cells on the map or detonating a WMD in the US. The Jihadist player will move wooden pieces representing cells between these regions, using them to trigger plots or enact terrorist violence, while the US player can drop in cubes representing armed forces into friendly or hostile countries, effecting a regime change in the latter. So far, so CDG: you have actions to take, you can spend Operations Points to take them.
If only it were so easy. In Labyrinth you will be rolling dice, lots of dice, and those fickle little cubes will ruin your plans. The Jihadist player must roll for essentially every action they take, constantly playing the odds and hoping that crucial actions come out in their favor. The US player has far more luck-free actions available but their main path to victory is via the War of Ideas action, which shifts the status of Muslim nations, and that is up to fate. While in individual moments I found myself cursing these rolls, on the whole I love them. You make so many dice rolls over the course of the game that the luck will balance out, assuming you make good choices about when to push your luck to the extreme by hoping for that 1 versus opting for safer plays. You must play your odds and not put all your eggs into one roll.
It dovetails nicely that Labyrinth is a game of creeping progress. Like its Volko-designed COIN descendants, this is a game that develops slowly with players achieving incremental progress rather than big blow out plays that shift the tide decisively in one big moment. Much of what you achieve on a given turn will be undone by your opponent on theirs, but over time you can shift the global position in your favor. It is a game to be played in a broad scope – nudging your way towards victory each turn while also putting out fires as much as possible.
You will have a turns where you achieve absolutely nothing because the dice were not in your favor, but the same is true of your opponent. Global change can feel glacial. That is not to say that Labyrinth is boring. It is incredibly tense. I have never felt secure in my position during a game in Labyrinth, even when it turned out I was only a turn or two away from victory. The dice giveth and they taketh away, and you can play the odds towards victory but you can never be confident in them. I was reminded frequently of a description designer Dan Bullock gave of playing Twilight Struggle for the first time, namely that it was like having a stomach ache for several hours (in a good way). I feel that way about Labyrinth – although I’m probably not as fond of the sensation as Dan was.
The card play helps, somewhat, to mitigate the at times comic chaos of trying to take actions. Each player plays two cards on their turn, resolving the first entirely before playing the second. This is a system I’ve never seen replicated in other CDGs and introduces an interesting tempo to Labyrinth. As in Twilight Struggle and its descendants, enemy events are resolved when you play those cards for Ops, for your events you must choose events or Ops. Because you play two cards, you can sometimes play an enemy event first and then mitigate it’s outcome with a second card play. It can also allow you to set up some key combos as you play back to back cards, using the second to capitalize on the opportunity created by the first. At the same time, you must be afraid of your opponent doing the same to you, particularly as the Jihadist player can achieve automatic victory by detonating a WMD in the US, which always keeps the US player on their toes.
The combo potential of Oil Price Spike is particularly potent. There are two copies in the deck and since they both let you dig into the discard (always a fun, but dangerous, mechanism) and adjust the value of certain countries on the map for victory determination they can give you that final push to victory at a critical moment - if you draw one!
Before you begin a game of Labyrinth you must first decide how long you want it to be – measured in the number of times you will cycle through the deck. I have yet to play a game of three cycles, but most of my games have ended before then anyway. A single deck cycle feels a bit too short given how slowly the game develops – a victory by tiebreakers seems almost inevitable unless someone gets very (un)lucky. Two decks has so far been the sweet spot for me in terms of letting the game breathe and develop. However, at two decks Labyrinth is not a short game. I played most of my games asynchronously via the Steam app – a decent but not perfect implementation in terms of usability – which helped mitigate this to a degree. A game being long is no great criticism, it is almost the norm within wargaming, and each turn of Labyrinth moves along at a good pace when you get going but at the same time I don’t know if I love how long it can take. I have similar feelings about some of the COIN games where I just wish they moved a bit faster, but at least since Labyrinth is two players I don’t have to wait so long for my turn.
I don’t love the multiple cycles of the deck as a system for determining length, though. I appreciate that Labyrinth has a timer – if it was just a “play until someone wins” situation, the games could drag on for an eternity. However, I generally prefer unpredictability in my CDG decks – games like Here I Stand or Successors where the deck is reshuffled every turn.
In Labyrinth, to play well you want to know the contents of the deck, especially if you’re going to (potentially) see every card in it two or three times in a game. At the same time, I haven’t found that many instances of events that totally negate a play (i.e. if a player doesn’t know about that event before the game begins, they’re going to have a very bad time) and the few that exist you can learn quickly.
Perhaps two of the worst offenders that you have to watch out for, since they can instantly change the governance of a country. Ethopia Strikes can undo the enormous effort required in making a country Islamist Rule in the first place, while Musharraf can punish either player but can also be blocked. Still, these are in the minority and they can be managed.
Both sides also have ways of burying events, which is generally a must in games like this but I like how in Labyrinth they’re asymmetrical. In general the events in Labyrinth feel useful but not amazing, so the game strikes a good balance where you will play most of your cards for Ops with one or two key events a turn. I spend more time thinking about the order to resolve the enemy events I have in my hand than my own, which feels pretty par for the course for this style of CDG.
I have played six games of Labyrinth at the time of writing, and in true Volko fashion I feel that I am only now really coming to grips with it. This is partly due to the depth of the design, but just as much it is due to the asymmetry. The US and the Jihadist players are playing fundamentally different games. For my first few plays I was the Jihadist and once I had come to terms with how my faction played I still had no idea what my opponent was doing – which made for a pretty weird first few games. There probably are people out there who can grasp Labyrinth during their first game, but for me it took 3-4 plays to even understand every aspect of how the game works. In this regard the app version isn’t entirely helpful, and I learned a lot by setting up the physical game and playing it solo two-handed. Even then, it took a while for the importance of some systems to sink in. For example, for my first few games I didn’t really understand why the Ally/Neutral/Enemy status mattered for countries as I was entirely focused on level of governance, then I started playing as the US player and it became immediately apparent that the status was incredibly important. There is so much to unpick in this design and the two sides are so different that it could take me dozens of plays to really understand every aspect of Labyrinth.
However, I’m not sure if I want to put in those dozens of plays. I’ve enjoyed every game of Labyrinth I’ve played, but after six games my enthusiasm to play it again is waning. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of what it has to offer and while I could pursue greater mastery of its systems, that isn’t really why I play historical games. Not that I’m finished with Labyrinth, I could still see myself pulling it off the shelf again next year to try it again It is worth revisiting, assuming I have someone to play it with, which isn’t a guarantee given the game’s subject matter. I can’t exactly blame anyone for not wanting to play a game on the War on Terror. I may want to stick my head back into this historical mess every twelve to eighteen months, but not everyone will want to even do it once.
Usually I like to spend some time analyzing how a game captures the history it purports to portray, but that’s not exactly possible with Labyrinth. Labyrinth was published approximately midway through the War on Terror, not that we knew that then, and is ostensibly about the opening chapters of that war, but I don’t think that’s what it’s really about and so I don’t believe it to be particularly valuable to dig deep into how well it captures how the Global War on Terror developed in its opening years. There are historical elements in the game that don’t feel particularly believable – chief among them are how every game I play involves an intense fight over Pakistan whose descent into Islamist Rule releases WMDs for the Jihadist player to use. Similarly, nation building seems far too easy for the US player. Sure the game makes deploying large scale forces to a nation costly and you do risk getting bogged down for a few turns, but the game doesn’t seem capable of replicating the two decades that the US spent trying to reshape Afghanistan only to ultimately, and decisively, fail.
But I don’t think that’s really what Labyrinth is about. Labyrinth is about the neo-con mindset and the worldview within US politicians, military, and intelligence services that motivated the War on Terror and informed their decisions. This is the opening years of the War on Terror as American decision makers saw it. It’s no coincidence that one player plays a coherent political entity, the US, while the other is playing a total fiction, an international network of Islamist jihadists spread across the globe. At no point was any radical Islamist faction ever as unified in its purpose or goals as the Jihadist player in Labyrinth is. This is not wholly uncharted ground – Twilight Struggle famously has systems to represent the Domino Effect, because even though the Domino Effect was nonsense the belief in it was highly influential on US decision makers and Twilight Struggle seeks to capture those decisions and that mindset. Labyrinth takes this to a new level where instead of being just a couple of systems it is the whole game.
This emphasis on a specific near-contemporary mindset is a fascinating choice, and turns the game itself into something of a time capsule when it is played decades later. However, it also makes for a pretty intense playing experience, especially if you have rather mixed to negative feelings about the Global War on Terror, as I do. I believe that all historical games should bring some complex feelings about their subject to the table, history is complicated and messy, but this is history that I lived through and that helped to shape who I am. I think Labyrinth does a pretty good job at keeping these elements on the surface rather than burying them within the game, even if its scale doesn’t leave much room for the human tragedy that accompanied this “war”. It could do more to dial in to the darker elements of US geopolitics of this era, but I also don’t think it makes a simple toy of its subject either.
As a game I enjoy Labyrinth while as a historical artifact I find it engaging and conflicting. It’s not my favorite style of CDG but it is probably my favorite example of its type – if that makes sense. I have been thoroughly engaged every time I played it, but I am also coming to an end of my desire to keep playing. That said, Labyrinth is somewhat of a rarity in the wargaming hobby in that it is blessed with multiple expansions. I have both of the currently published ones, and I am interested in seeing how designer Trevor Bender modifies Volko’s core system to cover new eras of the War on Terror. I am also very interested in how Peter Evans’ prequel expansion will take this system of contemporary political positions and apply it to a period long enough ago that we can actually apply historical hindsight to it – essentially turning the game into a true “historical” wargame.
Labyrinth isn’t a game that I would ever offer an unqualified recommendation of. Its subject matter alone makes it hard to universally recommend – most people will know instantly upon hearing what this game is about whether they would want to play it or not. What I can say is that while my initial enthusiasm for the game from first hearing about it in 2011 had faded in the intervening decade. As I played more CDGs I also began to worry that Labyrinth would not be a game for me. Having played it, I am happy to report that I am incredibly impressed with it. This is a masterful piece of game design that still manages to stand out from the field in modern wargaming. It is also so much more than just an originator that made COIN possible – in fact I probably prefer it to most COIN games I’ve played – it is an amazing and unique game in its own right. If you are a fan of CDGs, or just of interesting game design, and the subject matter isn’t a dealbreaker, then you should definitely try Labyrinth. Probably a couple times, because that first game is really confusing.
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