It happened! COIN came to the internet’s best online wargame platform, Rally the Troops, in the form of the series originator Andean Abyss. In many ways this is the obvious choice for Rally the Troops, it’s both a great place for those interested in learning the system and out of print with little promise of a reprint soon, so not in direct competition with sales. It also offered me the first time to try and dive deep into a COIN game and see how I feel about the system after repeated plays. The requirement to get four players and dedicate most of a day has made consistent plays of COIN games a challenge. I have dabbled with solitaire play, and enjoyed that, but I’m terrible at flow-charts and multi-hand solitaire is a very different kind of experience. So, I’ve been logging many, but not an insane number, of Andean Abyss plays over the past month or so, what have I learned?
The Game
While not my favorite game in terms of aesthetics, I still really enjoy looking at Andean Abyss and it can be very striking in its own way.
I haven’t played all that many COIN games but even I can tell when playing Andean Abyss that this is the originator of the system. It feels like the Ur-COIN, the foundation that the rest have built themselves on top of. Each faction feels the most like itself. I don’t know a better way to put it than that. This is the COIN system at its most pure, and that makes it perhaps the most interesting to me as a game to play many times over and over again. It doesn’t bring a new twist on the formula or some little tweak that maybe I could develop a jaded familiarity with. What Andean Abyss brings is the whole package – the COIN system itself. Four different factions, three of which play similarly but all of which have very different paths to victory. Games can have a shared rhythm to them, but each one will play out differently. It’s not hard to see why there are more than a dozen of these games with no end in sight, the core system is strong.
For me the most interesting element of COIN is probably the action selection system. The first player’s ability to dictate what options are available to the second player, cutting off some options by restricting their own choices, is genuinely fascinating and I’m not sure I’ll ever get bored of it. I also enjoy the fact that only two players act each round, so by taking an action now you know that you won’t be acting for at least one more turn. This system is not without its hiccups. The fact that initiative is dictated by cards can create a sequence of turns where you just are never first player and thus don’t get to act very often at all. I think this can be particularly pronounced if the Events on the cards are themselves not very good – if the first player takes the Event you can still have a great turn, or alternatively if they let you take the event that can be great. I have found in other COIN games I’ve played that it is possible to be locked into several turns of Limited Operations (actions that affect only one of the board’s many spaces), which is a bummer, but in my recent run of Andean Abyss plays I haven’t found it to be as much of a problem. This could be blind luck or reflect the fact that I’ve been playing with more newer players who seem more likely to take either the Event or make big plays, leaving more options open to the second player, but it is also possible it reflects good card design and until I have better evidence I will give the credit to Volko – to potentially be rescinded if I ever learn otherwise! Even after many plays the deck doesn’t feel boring – I’ve seen every card it has to offer but I still enjoy playing it which is testament to a strong system that uses its cards well but is not totally reliant upon them to deliver the gaming experience.
The interplay of the factions is the thing that I think most people notice in COIN and that is not without good reason. While hardly fundamental to the experience, see for example The British Way designer Stephen Ranganzas’ talk on modelling COIN, the 2+ player experience is still relatively rare in wargaming, and it is often a joy to experience. While it takes some getting used to, I enjoy COIN’s reliance on the players to keep each other in check. I also enjoy that it generally discourages punishing whoever is in last place, as you never know when you might need them to cripple the leading player and, besides that, while they are down and out, they are generally not much of a threat. Coin also allows a certain amount of resource exchange which can be useful for making deals between players, perhaps bolstering someone who is falling behind to help them attack the leading player. I haven’t experienced much of it in my playing of Andean Abyss, but perhaps as I become more familiar the possibility of swapping resources in exchange for support or certain actions will become more common. It certainly featured in my one game of A Distant Plain and was an interesting element of the system there, and there’s no reason not to do it in Andean Abyss.
It's hard to know what else to say about a now genre defining game from over a decade ago. Andean Abyss remains a truly impressive piece of design and thanks to Rally the Troops it has literally never been easier to play it. It contains staggering nuances that are better experienced than told of but also does not rely on surprise to keep itself exciting, making it potentially eternally replayable.
The Platform
It is actually very challenging to get the entire map from Rally the Troops to display in a single image - usually you just look at one section but it does have functionality to show you a wider picture. Hopefully this gives some indication of how clean the presentation on the website is - but I promise the blurriness is all my fault!
Rally the Troops is an amazing website, and I will say nothing ill of Tor’s implementations of the games on it. They’re the best I’ve ever encountered, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. That disclaimer out of the way, I want to say that my experiences playing Andean Abyss on Rally the Troops have been mixed at times. The reason for this comes down to the two different ways to engage with Rally the Troops: as a platform to play with friends or as one to play pick-up games with strangers. Playing Rally the Troops with friends is great. 10/10, no notes, would (and will) do again. Playing random pick-up games, however, I have found to be more of a mixed bag.
I did not exactly discover this while playing Andean Abyss. In my deep dive into the Columbia Block games on the site I had a better time playing with my friends than with strangers, but in those cases it was more a matter of my being utterly crushed at a game I was trying to learn rather than a strictly negative experience. The internet strangers who handed my ass to me at Crusader Rex or Julius Caesar were very friendly about it and I hold no ill will against them, but it was also a rough way to learn those games and I preferred playing with people more on my level. That said, I’ve had many fun games against strangers, especially with Shores of Tripoli whose quick play time keeps my crushing defeats short! However, Andean Abyss hasn’t been like this. Not only has it not been a case of crushing defeats, in fact the early balance of the game feels way off as people are only just learning it. Rather, it is that a core element is missing from the experience: the other players.
COIN games are generally four player experiences and often rely on players at the table balancing the game against each other. The factions may not all be created equal, and the game is reliant on the players knowing this and jointly acting to execute whoever the leader is while other players craft schemes over how to exploit the upcoming power vacuum. This is much harder to do when everyone is playing asynchronously on their phones rather than around a shared table. Rally the Troops does include a chat function, but it’s no substitute to the free-flowing discussions that can make a COIN game exciting. In games like this I really enjoy doing my best to persuade the other players around the table that I’m no real threat, and shouldn’t we all be really worried about that player over there? This is much harder to do in asynchronous play with strangers I barely talk to. The burden of communication is higher, and they have far more time to study the board state and ignore what I am saying.
I would like to stress that this is not a flaw with Rally the Troops – you could easily play on the platform while in a Discord chat group or voice channel and effectively replicate the experience of a shared table. Instead, it is a problem with how I often play games on Rally the Troops – taking turns on my phone when they crop up and not really thinking about the game outside of that. If I’m playing games with friends, I chat to anyway then the opportunity to discuss the game comes up naturally and fills some of this gap, but when playing with strangers it creates a more isolating game experience. This isn’t to say that it is necessarily a bad way to play. As I said, I’ve had lots of great games on Rally the Troops and I wouldn’t change anything about the platform. This is just something that I’ve noticed more when playing Andean Abyss. While I really appreciate how Rally the Troops has given me the opportunity to play Andean Abyss many more times than I would have otherwise, it is also not a substitute for the shared experience of playing a game like this in person and I intend to keep playing COIN games that was as much as I can. However, I will also be playing more Andean Abyss on Rally the Troops – although I will probably mostly play with my friends for the time being.
Repeated Plays
I really like Andean Abyss and I’m so glad I’ve been able to explore it as much as I have thanks to Rally the Troops. I owned a physical copy of the game, but only managed to get it to the table with friends once. Rally the Troops enabled me to experience so much more of its depth. That having been said, as I play COIN more, I find that I’m not as drawn to repeated plays as I would have thought. A game series filled with multiple asymmetric factions in each box practically cries out for players to try them all and discover the depth in each one. However, I have found that because COIN really requires a deep familiarity with every faction at the table, especially after the first couple of learning games, each game feels a bit like you are playing all the factions – you are just only in direct control of one of them. You try and push your opponents into certain plays and direct them towards taking actions that benefit you (or at least hurt you less) while bolstering your own position. This is a great dynamic, but it also means that I feel like I’ve played each of the factions in Andean Abyss more times than I technically have. Playing the AUC, I spend so much time thinking about the potential FARC actions that after a game I feel like I’ve intimately experienced both factions, even if I was only in control o fone.
Unlike a game like, say, Here I Stand where I feel like I’ve barely learned my faction after a game let alone the others, I feel a much greater familiarity with the COIN factions. Some of this may be the lack of separate board positions – players in COIN games generally use the whole board, maybe not equally but certainly to some extent, so there isn’t that obvious difference in how we experience the shared gaming experience. This isn’t really a criticism of the COIN series, but rather is an indicator of the fact that I after a few games of any given COIN title I’m usually more interested in trying a different one than I am in logging a half a dozen or more plays in that first game. I like the thrill of the new history, the new tweaks to the system, the new map, and then after a few plays I feel like I’m ready for the next one.
That having been said, as Andean Abyss is the most foundational COIN of them all, I still had a lot of fun playing it repeatedly and I will continue to play it thanks to the convenience of Rally the Troops. I’m just not sure I would be playing it more if I couldn’t play it on my phone – or at the very least I’m not sure I would be seeking it out. It’s not like these are light card games I can throw in my backpack and play in the pub. Playing a full-length COIN game takes many hours and perhaps some light coercion among my friend group. Coordinating that is a lot of work, and in that environment, I think I’d prefer to try something new than keep digging into the one we have already played.
That does lead into my one small issue with Andean Abyss, especially in person: it’s really quite long. It manages to stay enjoyable throughout the experience, but this is a long game where you will spend most of it taking only four actions – or fewer. As the Cartels I do a lot more Rallying than I do Attacking. This isn’t a terrible thing – the games would probably be much worse if you were given a menu of half a dozen or more actions. Four makes it manageable and keeps it feasible for you to learn all the factions’ core capabilities in one game. However, it is also an experience that I think I would generally prefer to last 90-150 minutes rather than four hours. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes all-day COIN is great and I like the ability to have these big games unfold over the course of an afternoon or even a full day, but I don’t want it to be the primary way I experience it. I know Andean Abyss comes with a short scenario, but it feels a bit truncated as an experience, I think. Rally the Troops, by removing the requirement to play all at once, reduces this burden but it is something that would discourage me from playing Andean Abyss again in person. It’s also a reason I’m excited for titles like The British Way or People Power which are offering ways to engage with COIN but with a much shorter time investment.
Conclusion
Andean Abyss is a good game and Rally the Troops is a great platform. It’s basically the chocolate and peanut butter of wargames – except, that’s definitely Nevsky, so maybe it’s more like the bacon and eggs of wargaming: two great breakfast foods that pair together wonderfully. This metaphor is a mess. Look, stop reading and go play Andean Abyss – it’s free on Rally the Troops and you can even play multi-hand solitaire if jumping straight into a game with other people is too intimidating. While you do that I’ve got some other COIN games I need to try..