I'm trying to get this blog back to being a semi regular thing again. We will see how successful I'll be at that. I'm hoping it will include more ruminations on games I'm working on myself, as well as those I'm playing in.
We just had another go at one of the GMT COIN series, namely Cuba Libre. This is the second in the successful series of wargames that seek to model conflicts with a high degree of counter insurgency activity, i.e. where one side represents government forces while another side represents the guerrillas. The series was launched with Andean Abyss, about the war in Colombia in the 1980s/90s. But rather than having just two sides, the games have up to four players.
Typically one side represents some kind of criminal element, seeking to exploit the situation for their own ends. In the case of Andean Abyss, which I don't own, this was the drug cartels. The third game in the series is the much bigger and more sophisticated, A Distant Plain, which covers the war in Afghanistan. Here the 'green' faction of opportunists is represented by the warlords and their drug trade. We have also played this, and in this game the US-led coalition and the Afghan government represent different factions which do not always cooperate.
Cuba Libre, the second in the series, depicts the monumental events in Cuba in 1957-58. The four factions are the US-backed Cuban government, the Mafia, the July 26 Movement (Castro's communists) and the Directorio, who sit ideologically between Castro and the Batista regime. The Directorio, who I played, are not completely aligned with Castro, but do have their own guerrilla forces, and have scope to subvert both communist and government forces.
We played Cuba Libre because it is smaller in scope than A Distant Plain, but it is still too long to play in a single evening. There is a sudden death mechanic in the form of the propaganda phase - when these cards come up in the events deck, then victory conditions are calculated. Hence there could be a winner relatively early on. We hit our first propaganda phase and while the government was probably closest to a win, they did not quite have it.
A couple of turns afterwards my Directorio was on 60% of its victory conditions having managed to win control over much of the central Cuban countryside. This was partly because the military was focusing on the cities and the communists seemed to have decided to mass their fighters in western Cuba and start moving on Havana. The mob had opened four out of the eight casinos they needed for their victory conditions, although eight casinos were on the board. The Directorio had successfully shut down the sugar industry, despite mob efforts to keep the sugar mills running. I suspect we would have had a winner in the second propaganda phase, but we ran out of time.
It should be noted that the COIN series of games gives each faction radically different rules and pieces to play with. The government player, for example, has troops and paramilitary police forces and can conduct air strikes. His cost of operations varies according to the level of support he is receiving from the Eisenhower administration.
Both the Directorio and July 26 have different menus of orders even though they are both technically insurgencies, but both have guerilla formations that can go underground, meaning they are immune from attack. The mob, of course, have their casinos, and in a nice touch, pay 'skim' to the players who control the regions where casinos operate - even if it's the communists. Historically they paid graft to all the players in the Cuban revolution.
I like these games a lot; the challenge is that there are a lot of moving parts under the hood, as each player is really playing his own mini game. It is hard to return to these after a couple of years, with relatively little time for prep, and expect to get up and running immediately. There is also a lot to think about during the game, as with the likes of Scythe, and you need to concentrate on what you are doing to avoid spending a long time during your turn analysing what is happening.
I'll probably set up one of these games soon to run solo. They come with programmed AI sheets that let you run the other factions as NPCs. Cuba Libre was the first in the series to let the solo player take on any role, while Andean Abyss only lets a solo player use the Colombian government. I hope we can return to this game again soon.
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