OPINION: Volko Ruhnke

COIN and the battle for hearts and minds

Volko, we all know it’s a good game, but how good is the COIN Series at simulating counter-insurgency? I have a concern.

One of the counter-insurgencies covered in the series is the Algerian War of Independence (Colonial Twilight, Vol VII). Following the French withdrawal, David Galula, a French infantry officer, undertook an analysis of the conflict. It became a benchmark for counter-insurgency ‘theory’, still referenced by modern day forces. Galula’s four principles for success:

1. “The support of the population is as necessary for the counter-insurgent as for the insurgent.”
2. “Support is gained through an active minority of the population.”
3. “Support from the population is conditional.”
4. “Intensity of efforts and vastness of means are essential.”

In short, its hearts and minds more than brute force that wins out. It takes time. It’s expensive. 

If that’s so, why does the COIN Series do so little to model the hearts and minds aspect? In most volumes success or failure in combat is scalable and dependent on variables. Moving government support or opposition by contrast is mechanically deterministic. You just need sufficient resources, and cubes in the right place. Why isn’t more emphasis placed on the variables of moral and political suasion, given its importance to success? 

In short, are we actually simulating counter-insurgency, or are we just playing a rather involved area-control game?

When James contacted me to write this article, I asked him to frame a question that I could respond to. Above is his question. Here’s my response.

Thank you for the questions and the opportunity to address them in this issue of Punched. Galula’s theory was indeed among the inspirations for the COIN Series, not only regarding the focus of counter-insurgency on hearts and minds, but in other aspects such as the multifactional dynamic of most insurgency. These questions on the Series’ simulation can illuminate the design scope and purpose relative to other games. I will seek to address each below.

How much does the COIN Series model the struggle for hearts and minds?

A glance at the victory conditions for just about any COIN Series game should immediately reveal that it puts the struggle for ‘hearts and minds’ at the very centre of play. The game constantly tracks popular support, neutrality, and opposition to the government. For some player roles (‘factions’), the amount of popular support or opposition is a key or even the only objective needed to win the game.

For others, ‘Bases’ represent not just military and logistical hubs but political infrastructure—political cadre, local shadow government, administration of services for the population, propaganda networks, and so on—and the player’s count of such Bases pieces on the map is their victory score.

Contrast these COIN Series player objectives with the victory conditions found in most conflict simulation boardgames. How many of the latter even consider popular support? The vast majority award victory by capturing and holding territorial objectives or eliminating enemy forces while preserving one’s own. (There are exceptions outside the COIN Series, such as Victory Games’ Vietnam, discussed below.) And that focus on land and attrition rather than hearts and minds is fitting because the overwhelming majority of these games concern conventional warfare, rather than insurgency.

And the unusual focus of typical COIN Series victory conditions on popular support is a big deal. Victory objectives incentivise players, and the resulting player behaviours — their strategies — drive the model in the simulation game. So, these rules for what will reward players with victory are not a small side detail, but rather the very heart of the design.

Why is moving government support or opposition in COIN Series games mechanically more deterministic and less dependent on variables than combat?

Actually, the rather deterministic resolution of combat was a common criticism of the earlier volumes, each of which simulated a modern counterinsurgency. For clues to the determinism of the Series’ mechanics for moving support, let us first examine its similar determinism in resolving combat.

Traditional wargames typically resolve individual combats with dice rolled on a ‘combat results table’ that produced outcomes dependent as much on the random rolls as on input conditions such as odds between force strength. In Andean Abyss (COIN Series Volume I), Government assault operations simply kill one exposed guerrilla unit per Government unit, with some differences to account for urban, rural, and mountain environments. Why this difference in game mechanics for combat?

Simulations of conventional combat tend to use highly variable combat resolution not only because the outcome of any single battle can be difficult to predict in real life, but also because a small number of engagements can decide the outcome of a campaign — perhaps just one battle. Think of simulating Napoleon’s 1815 campaign and the importance of all the variables on just one day and on one field, that of the Battle of Waterloo. A model of that campaign for fidelity should bring those variables — weather, morale, command, and the sheer happenstance of that day — into play.

Now consider instead the nature of combat in guerrilla and counterguerrilla warfare that is the bread and butter of a modern counter-insurgency campaign.

But what is the importance of a single guerrilla battle or a single day in a counter-insurgent campaign that lasts for years? The meaningful outcomes for real-world COIN result from the accumulation of myriad such tiny engagements. Each one is highly variable, but statistics in fact make the trends that matter to the conflict rather predictable. 

Therefore, our simulation of insurgency at the national (rather than tactical) level can afford to depict that predictability in guerrilla attrition, influenced by general factors such as troop efficiency, terrain, resources, and the decisions that national-level commanders make regarding where, when, and how often to sweep and assault. (Imagine the opposite design choice, to require players to calculate and roll out every clash of troops and guerrillas occurring across a country over the years-long war represented in a single session of the game!) 

Ok, that’s combat. What about moving popular opinion: do the games put too little emphasis on the variables of moral and political suasion, given its real-world importance to counter-insurgent success?

Mass political support or opposition to a government, perhaps even more so than attritional guerrilla warfare, is an accumulation of many, many individual occurrences—the opinion and expression of each of millions of citizens. A model of national-level counter-insurgency similarly can leverage statistical expectation to deliver a simpler, more accessible and engaging game. Think of how predictable an election is once underway and early returns become available: outside of very close races, news services can forecast the winner with high confidence even with only a small fraction of actual votes reported, because sampling of a large population works and trends in each precinct are known and matter rather deterministically.

The three-to-five levels of opinion represented in a COIN Series game, from ‘active support’ to ‘active opposition’ are simple representations of such accumulations of many individual thoughts and acts. As with guerrilla combat, we do not need to represent each individual citizen’s view in our simulation casting the players in the roles of national-level decisionmakers to produce plausible insurgency dynamics in their game play.

In the COIN Series, higher-level interactions of player decisions among multiple operations and events combine with semi-random initiative through shuffled card draws to produced highly variable outcomes of both the fighting and its effects on population support from one playthrough of the game to the next, at an appropriate level of detail.

From each player’s point of view, the way that varying opportunities and impediments to both engaging in combat and in shifting popular support feed into achieving victory conditions thereby ends up feeling far from deterministic. (Otherwise, it would not be much of a game!)

But are we really simulating counterinsurgency or just playing an area-control boardgame?

All that said, yes, it is far easier and more to shift popular support in a COIN Series game than in a real-world insurgency. In real life, combatants not only could not know exactly what the results of any given action might be on popular sentiment, they generally did not even know what effect they might already have had! This is because credible polling in the context of armed conflict is near impossible. The US counter-insurgency in Vietnam, for example, had to rely on indirect indicators of sentiment toward the Saigon regime, such as incidents of anti-government violence or the amount of information that the population provided on Viet Cong presence. COIN Series mechanics vastly simplify these uncertainties at the centre of counterinsurgency practice; for some player tastes, they may oversimplify to the degree that we no longer buy the model.

Here then we arrive at the nature of board wargames as models and the fact that COIN Series games are far from immune to their limitations. A ‘model’ is purposeful simplification, by definition, always. This is the reason that mathematician George Box famously told us that all models are wrong (but some are useful). Models always simplify a more complicated or complex reality; that is their point. Wargames simplify war so that we hobbyists might explore certain aspects of historical events.

Take the hex-grids so common in board wargames: hexes are simplifications of circles, chosen by designers because circles don’t fit together into a grid. Hex grids regulate forces’ movement over terrain when such matters of time and space were important aspects of the events we seek to simulate. But hexes warp movement, they allow faster progress in a certain six directions than in any other directions in between them. Similarly, the typical odds-based combat results table that jumps from a 2-1 column to a 3-1 column with markedly different effects simplifies the true dynamic that the impact of force correlations on the probability of combat outcomes would be a smooth curve in reality. 

Yet grognard board wargamers will rarely object to hex grids or CRTs as implausible or unrealistic. Players used to these models of movement and combat understand that, yes, these game mechanics simplify, so as to serve their purpose.

COIN Series mechanics that model of counterinsurgency are no different, only, perhaps, not as familiar and therefore more subject to scrutiny than hexes. Civic action and agitation mechanics in Andean Abyss, for example, require only area control by the right pieces and the investment of sufficient resources to shift popular support. These mechanics vastly simplify the reality of counterinsurgency.

They do so with the purpose of highlighting important aspects of that complex reality, such as that popular support is a key end of the counter-insurgent strategy, that the provision of security and a higher living standard to a population by its government, for example, was believed by COIN theorists to be a way to build the support and legitimacy necessary for victory over the guerrillas.

Certainly, we can get more refined in our game models to achieve a higher fidelity of the struggle for hearts and minds in modern insurgency. Designer Nick Karp’s brilliant and breakthrough wargame Vietnam 1965-1975 (Victory Games 1984) — an important influence on me in conceiving the COIN Series — is a shining example of that.

It models not only the need for security control of an area to make progress in winning over the population (‘Pacification’, in the Vietnam War context) but also the variability in results achieved. And it does so province by province, for no fewer than 35 distinct regions on the game map, each tracked individually, season by season, over the course of a decade of counter-insurgency war. Every other operational turn, over 40 times in a single game, players assess area control of each of the 35 depicted provinces, apply modifiers, roll dice to find the increase or decrease in population beholden to Saigon, then record and tabulate the results on a Population Control Sheet. Whew!

But that was too much even for the dedicated wargamer audience of Victory Games Vietnam 1965-1975 to take on as a matter of routine. So, the game drops all that variability of population control for a much simpler mechanic of victory points for area control and attrition in its scenarios. The Population Control Sheet features only in the full strategic game that takes many hundreds of hours to play (yes, I know that because I have done it; well, halfway through twice).

As I similarly knew that the COIN Series would fail if it asked players to dedicate that amount of time for a single playing, I emphasized simplification. COIN Series mechanics severely simplify the application of counter-insurgency precepts of Galula and others to specific historical conflicts. And they do so with the purpose of depicting those aspects in the form of a game that seeks to be more enjoyable than painful to play — a purpose that calls for them to eschew all the calculations and randomisations that would be needed to model these conflicts with any higher fidelity.

I hope that you will nevertheless end up spending many hundreds of hours over the course of time enjoying COIN Series games and continuing to ponder their implications for insurgency and the other factional and irregular conflicts so common throughout human history.

Words: Volko Ruhnke

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There’s a thriving community on Discord that spends much of every day talking about COIN, playing COIN, and sharing thoughts and ideas about their own COIN-inspired game designs. Game designer Fred Serval shines a light on these COIN enthusiasts and some of the most interesting fan-made designs in the works

In April 2020, I joined the COIN player’s Discord server at the invitation of Joe Dewhurst, someone I had met on Twitter. He had just put out a call for testers for his COIN prototype about the Ōnin War (called The Pure Land). Little did I know that I was also embarking on an epic design journey. I discovered the community that wasn’t just playing COIN games, but making and sharing new COIN-inspired designs. 

Before looking at some of the most interesting fan-made, or as we call it on the server ‘Community Created’, designs under development, some background on the server and the community it created.

It was set-up in 2020 by London lad Luke Barton, who had become tired of trying and failing to find players in real life to play with. “I saw an opportunity with the ten-fold increase in players using Tabletop Simulator as a result of Covid to build an online COIN community,” say Luke. His two-fold objective for the group was that it should be a medium where it was easy for people to arrange games, and that the community should drive itself. “I set up the Discord server, hoping over-time perhaps there’d be 50 or so of us to play games. We reached that number in a few days!”. 

Two key joiners were Joe Dewhurst and Stephen Rangazas. Seeing a number of members designing or keen to design their own COIN games, the pair set-up a design workshop channel on the server. “We wanted to give designers, especially new ones, a safe place to get constructive feedback”, says Stephen.

Designers are invited to the workshop and given a three-week development slot. Stephen or Joe commit to playing each game once solo, and then competitively, normally against each other. They then typically send the designer some written feedback focusing on usability, gameplay, and conceptual/model points in the design that could be improved. “If I have the time, I usually like to read a little bit on the topic to help give informed feedback”, say Stephen, “then we try to help organise live plays among the broader COIN Discord community.”

Joe adds: “The benefit for the designers is it helps them get early feedback, set a deadline, and gives them a taste of the back and forth of the development process. Hopefully, it will help some designers make the leap to designing a publishable COIN game, or ones that deviate from COIN but might show up in other series, like GMT’s new Irregular Conflict Series.”

“The Community-made games section has become the lifeblood of the server,” says Luke.

So, that’s the background. Let’s have a look at some of the future hotness that’s under development.

Conclusion

I’ll conclude by sharing with you Stephen’s three top tips for would be designer thinking about joining the workshop:

1) Don’t be worried about joining. It doesn’t matter if it’s early in the design process for your game, it’s often important to get feedback at that point. 

2) Don’t take feedback personally. Everyone understands it’s a prototype. If we provide critiques of the design, it is to help you push towards your next version. The point is to address things now before pitching to a publisher.

3) Be a sponge. You want to collect as much feedback as possible. You don’t have to incorporate all of it, but I would see the workshop as three weeks of serious engagement with your design, so take any feedback you can get. 

Have your own design? Want to playtest other people’s designs? Want to speak about COIN all day with other COIN nerds? Then JOIN US: https://discord.com/invite/fUeHg8CenT

Oh, and Joe’s game the Pure Land? Yeah, that just got added to GMT’s P500. Made the cut in about three days. Proof that if you work hard enough at it, you can get there.

Words: Fred Serval

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Armageddon War

Summary: A very thematic tactical-level war game with a great counter-attack and reaction mechanic that makes for a highly dynamic gaming. 

A regular sight on the television news in recent years has been that of a technical, speeding across a desert, adorned with chanting bearded fighters and the streaming black flags of ISIL. The scene may then cut across to a poorly trained local militia-fighter, blindly shooting an AK47 above a parapet. Maybe there’s a final reel of Russian fighter-bombers, rocketing a spot in the desert from the air. Such is the unfortunate fate that has befallen parts of the Middle East and North Africa in the 2000s. Such are the images my mind conjures when I play Armageddon War – “a platoon-level game set in the near future”.

That near future is 2028. The setting is the Middle East. ISIL is resurgent. Russia and the US battle indirectly through proxies, though accidents can and do mean things are sometimes more direct. Israel, Turkey, the Kurds, the Syrian army and rebels skirmish continuously. 

You and your opponent are participants in the fight. The base game comes with 15 scenarios. The first scenarios start simple. New mechanics like off-board artillery, IEDs, snipers and drones are introduced as the scenarios progress. In one scenario you might be a Syrian opposition force trying to hold off ISIL raiders. In another you need to finish off a botched assassination job before opposing reinforcements arrive. In later scenarios you play Russian forces supporting a coup against an ISIL-friendly leader in Turkmenistan, or combined US and Israeli forces encountering Russians and Syrian rebels attempting to capture a city.

If all of this sounds incredibly interesting and thematic – it is! Modern tank-porn lovers rejoice. Want to know who wins out of a T-14 Armata and M1 Abrams? You can find out in this game. Autonomous vehicles, Apaches and drones come up against militia armed with RPGs. Sometimes, in a tight urban setting, your elite Israeli Mechanised Infantry unit may become pinned down by that AK47 waver in the parapet.

It’s not just the theming that makes this game so enjoyable, it’s the mechanics. Forget IGO/UGO. Each side will comprise one or more formations. At set-up, each formation is assigned one or more chits. These are drawn from a bag. All units of the drawn chit’s formation: tanks, infantry, technicals, drones, can activate. Once all the formation chits are drawn, all but the last drawn chit are returned to the draw bag, and play continues. There’s no end of turn. The game ends when there’s a winner, or after a certain number of chits are drawn. 

This allows for some very tactical play, and tough decisions. Your chit is drawn. Do you go all out, hoping to also get the next activation chit? Or leave some units unactivated? This is an important decision. Unactivated units can react, opportunity firing on the opponent’s turn, potentially ending an assault in its sandy tracks. Weighing up when and with which units to press home an attack, and who to hold back for reaction-fire, is often the difference between winning and losing.

The other main difference between Armageddon War and other hex and counter games is the lack of a combat results table. Combat results are determined by custom coloured dice. Stronger units may get the opportunity to roll more of them. The quality of them – the number of ‘hits’ each face has – will move up or down depending on factors such as range, if the attacker has moved, unit quality and the like. It takes a while to get the system down, but it streamlines things when you do.

There are several expansions for the game, all part of the initial Kickstarter, but now available separately. Alone in the Desert, a solo card-driven system. The 600, a six-scenario persistent campaign where one player plays the US infantry battalion throughout, the other various opposing factions (I’m desperate to try this – email me if you are too!). And a standalone expansion, Burning Sands, covering a hypothetical conflict in 2028 between Jordan and Hezbollah (meant to be quite gritty and low tech, so probably more for the hardcore). The designer is also planning a Chinese invasion-of-Taiwan game, based on the same system.

As you’ll have gathered, some of the scenarios in Armageddon War require you to play the ISIL commander, trigger IEDs, kidnap civilians. If that kind of thing makes you feel queasy, steer clear. The rules I found very poorly laid out. I had to design my own player aid to resolve the issue. But others haven’t had a problem. 

Price and availability could be sticking points. It’s $100 MSRP. That’s quite a lot for the fairly limited number of, albeit high quality, components. I’ve also not seen it currently available through any UK retailer, though there are second-hand copies. A new print run is planned by the publisher Flying Pig Games at some point, so hopefully that situation will improve.

I hope so. I want to see this game played more. If playing out some of those iconic Middle Eastern conflict scenes you have seen on the TV in recent years appeals, try to pick this up. Great game.

Words: James Buckley

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Twilight Imperium 4th Edition 

Summary: If you’re looking for an optimised space combat game, that plays cleanly and quick, TI4 isn’t for you. But if that depth, breadth, character and complexity appeals, then nothing else really competes.

“Signs of great change are everywhere. This year, as if walking out of ancient prophecy, the Lazax returned from the darkness of history in a foreboding cybernetic form. Their coming is like the first wind of a terrible storm. The galaxy is waking, as if some ancient beast stirs from its slumber… the day will soon come when a new Empire will rise. For the sake of all, may the new Emperor have not only the power to seize the throne, but the strength to conquer the peace.”

So begins the latest edition of Twilight Imperium from Fantasy Flight Games. Twilight Imperium – TI for short, has been around in one form or another almost since the dawn of ‘modern’ board games. It is the poster child for ambitious, high production value, space operas. Arguably, without Twilight Imperium there wouldn’t be a Fantasy Flight Games, Without FFG, modern thematic board-gaming (especially the non-euro kind) maybe wouldn’t either. That weight of history though doesn’t answer two important questions; “what’s it all about?” and “is it any good?”

What’s it all about?

TI is a grand strategy space opera in an original setting. Over the course of 6-10 hours, between 3 and 8 players will develop their fledging empires from a single solar system and handful units to star-spanning imperiums. These will be backed by fleets of powerful ships and fighter swarms, deploy ground armies to conquer and hold planets, research new technology, trade and haggle with their neighbours over everything from boundaries to votes in the galactic Senate, all in pursuit of an elusive 10 Victory Points and the crown of Emperor that comes with them. 

What TI isn’t is an optimised knife-fight between fleets of interchangeable plastic bits. It sprawls. It takes time. Each Round consists of multiple phases in which each player gets to take various actions, all of which usually have an entire flow-chart worth of steps. That said, the galaxy can still feel claustrophobic, your borders are never defended as well as you’d like, and maybe, just maybe that enemy fleet across the cosmos is manoeuvring for a surprise attack on you through a wormhole. Despite an average of a 7.5 hour play time for four players, you don’t have much room to dawdle. Fleets are expensive to build and slow to move, so getting them in the right place at the right time takes skill and planning. TI is first and foremost a strategy game; it challenges you to control timing, positioning and logistics, not a tactical game that hinges on dice rolls and massive battles. That’s not to say big fleet engagements can’t, or don’t, happen; but repeatedly smashing mountains of plastic into each other and hoping you emerge from a close fought engagement on top is rarely the long-term winning play. 

If that’s piqued your interest and you’ve decided a day of space based empire building is for you, the second question beckons: 

Is it any good?

I’ll admit to some bias here, the previous incarnation of TI (3rd Edition) was the first ever modern boardgame I bought, before I even really knew much about the hobby. It was consistently one of my top picks ever since, and 4th edition has only improved and built on those illustrious foundations.

TI4 is not perfect. The Agenda phase (where the players vote on different political effects, which can vary from the basically irrelevant to the awesomely powerful, depending on the situation), is noticeably weaker than the grand strategy layer where you build your fleets and expand your empire on the modular, tile based, galaxy map.  The technology tree is a branching, multi-armed beast that takes a few playthroughs to get to grips with. (The first time someone sneaks past your defenses with Lightwave Deflectors will prompt a sudden reappraisal of the ‘nice but not that great’ Fleet Technology tree). Trade can be a vital ingredient in fuelling the war machines of the galaxy, or amount to little more than a few tokens passing back and forth depending on the races in play. Combat can result in some downtime if it’s not your fleets engaging in dice and card-driven destruction. Even the myriad of unique factions lend themselves to a degree of ‘tiering’ with some potential balance issues. 

But all of that really points to TI4’s true strength; it’s breadth; it’s depth; it’s detail. It has politics, and technology and trade and espionage and diplomacy. But it also has space combat, and orbital bombardments, planetary invasions, rebel uprisings and even, in one recent game, planet-cracking super weapons. It presents players with the constant challenge of lots of levers to pull in pursuit of your objectives and only a murky sense of what the ‘best’ choice is. 

Given everything that’s going on in the ‘real’ world at the moment, a quick point on play options seems appropriate.  TI4 is not a cheap acquisition, clocking in at $150, or around £120, and that’s before considering expansions, hundreds of sleeves, inserts for the huge numbers of cards and tokens and so on. I’d say you get your money’s worth within a couple of playthroughs. The production values are excellent, with high quality artwork, decent sculpts on the plastic and genuine mountains of unique cards. Given the playtime, even a couple of outings starts bringing the cost per player hour down to fairly reasonable levels. 

Picking up an old copy of TI3 is sometimes floated as a budget alternative, and it’s certainly safe to say TI3 is better than no TI at all, but 4th Edition is a noticeable step up in terms of both gameplay and production quality. If budget is a concern, then the TTS (Tabletop Simulator) module is very playable, and even helps save on the setup and tear-down time. 

Words: Paul Williams

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1565: St Elmo’s Pay

Von Manstein’s Triumph 

Summary: an innovative approach promises a dynamic and interactive siege assault game.

Von Manstein’s Triumph is an upcoming 2-player block game from Spanish publisher Bellica Third Generation. By the time you read this, it may well have already funded on Kickstarter. I have been able to preview it thanks to an excellent Vassal module featuring most of the final artwork. 

The game depicts the final German assault on Sevastopol over four weeks in the summer of 1942, a topic rarely covered in board wargames, at least on this scale. A card-driven block game with an area-based map might remind you of certain titles from Columbia Games or other publishers. However, apart from using blocks for fog of war and to mark unit strength in up to 4 steps, Von Manstein’s Triumph is very much its own game. 

The heart of the action is the card system, which designer Francisco Ronco has developed from the earlier game Santa Cruz 1797 by Iván Cáceres. And, coincidentally or not, Iván provided the superb artwork for Von Manstein’s Triumph.

The players alternate action phases in a typical wargame fashion, but each phase can involve multiple card plays from both players. At the end of each phase, both players refill their hands with cards.

There are different classes of cards. Orders cards enable the active player to redeploy units, or launch air strikes or artillery barrages. An Assault card is used to move a group of blocks from a single area, or to move a single division. Up to three Assault cards can be played simultaneously to move multiple divisions in a co-ordinated assault. Whenever blocks enter an enemy-held area, then a combat is initiated. As soon as the combat has ended, the non-active player may then play a Reaction card to simply move units or even to counter-attack, before the active player continues with the phase. 

Combat consists of rolling multiple dice during a single round. However, unlike most block games, all dice are rolled together and the number rolled depends less on unit strength and more on the use of Combat cards – up to three per player – as well as terrain and special markers representing armour and pioneers. Armour, bunkers and minefields can modify die results or reduce hits taken. Casualties are not just suffered during the combat itself, but also during the subsequent retreat by the losing side, provided that the opposing player has units adjacent to the area where the combat took place and projecting a field of fire.

Victory is determined by control of specific victory areas at the end of the game. The Axis player must decide where to attack the Soviet defensive lines and, when a breakthrough is made, then has a choice of targets. The Soviet player can opt for different defensive strategies: moving up reinforcements to reinforce the lines or plug a gap or, at a suitable time, pulling units back to the secondary line or tertiary lines. 

Keep an eye out for this game, it’s a good one.

Words: Scott Moore

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