Justin Pickard

[BoRT] Free Territory

Following Thursday’s post, this should be able to kill three birds with one stone a grenade.

Firstly, it’s my response to February’s BoRT challenge:

February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Secondly, it’s part of that whole alter-urbanism thing – my (slow, progressive) attempt to catalogue all kinds of feral, rogue, and wild cities.

And it should appeal to the literary sci-fi set.  I’m taking Mile Zero’s plans for Iron Council: The Game … a design based on the novel by everyone’s favorite socialist – China Miéville.

I’ve read Iron Council, but it’s been long enough now for the specifics to have faded into fog, leaving me with the taste and shape of the book’s mood.  Perfect.

I’m really enthusiastic about the way Mile Zero used game mechanics to support (or simulate?) the dynamics of a political movement.  With an expiry date built in, you can track the revolution’s lifecycle from start to finish (not that Miéville would agree that such a cycle is particularly mechanistic), watching as the various (broadly aligned) factions jockey for position:

In theory, Iron Council: The Game (or ICTG, for the sake of expedience), is won by returning the Council to New Crobuzon successfully: everybody wants that to happen. But each player’s Role card, representing a character from the book, dictates a certain set of conditions (time frame as represented by tiles on the board, cards in play, and position of other players) for that particular player to “win the game.” (…)

The whole characters-with-agendas dynamic reminded me of the murder mysteries produced by freeform games, in which character abilities, the trading of maguffins, and competition between characters always seemed to culminate in epic, frantic melodrama … with the gradual realisation that someone else got there first.

I certainly approve of the decision of representing the story through a board game, rather than anything computer-based.  The hex-based Germanic goodness (Settlers of Catan (above right); Carcossane) is an analogue representation that seems wholly appropriate – particularly when dealing with something as speculative and radical as Iron Council. There are certainly issues of representation at play; issues that could easily affect the experience of play, and – indeed – the potential for replayability.

In the author’s own words:

[T]he revolution is both incomparably more important to a socialist than to a non-socialist, and is incomparably more problematic to write. It is not a setting, but a moment necessarily present in the most banal quotidian, let alone in moments of heightened social tension. The nearer a socialist novelist closes in on the revolution itself, the more impossible the task of its representation becomes.

Now, moving away from literary criticism and random tangents of gaming, and onto the challenge itself! And here, removing the literary source material, I think the mechanics could be applied to a variety of revolutionary situations.

Like what?

Various historical mutinies (remove the time limit of a return to “port”, but add events where the ship sustains damage … what of victory conditions?), the Paris Commune (remove the hex play space entirely, and run it as a cardgame), Makhno’s activities in the Ukraine, or even the Czechoslovak Legion’s march through Siberia in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War (following the path of the Trans-Siberian railway, appropriately enough!).  Although the audience for such games would definitely be limited, my point stands – these are strong but flexible game mechanics.

Actually, I really like the Ukraine idea – how about a hex/card-based (alternate) history strategy game?  Let’s call it Free Territory:

• The players are the immediate subordinates of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, competing to amass resources and meet certain conditions (mostly involving their own self-preservation) while preserving the autonomy of the ‘Free Territory’ (represented by a certain configuration of hex tiles) in the face of attacks by various enemies -  Bolsheviks, Germans, Austrians, counter-revolutionary White Russians, and various Ukrainian nationalist movements.

• Historial Player Characters: Lev Zadov, Viktor Belash, Simon Karetnik, Fedir Shchus, Peter Arshinov, Volin (or, alternatively, a bunch of fictional characters – circumventing controversy and opening up the endgame as something where anything could happen)

• Three stages of play: (1) set-up (semi-random determination of the size and borders of the ‘Free Territory’, plus the location of player power-bases); (2) the middle (bulk of the game, comprising of alternate phases of politiking, historical events, and random events); and (3) the end (determining which of the players escape the fall of the ‘Free Territory’, and with what).

• If the game was to stick to history-as-it-happened, the game would run from January 1919 to November 1920.  I’d rather have the game finish at a random end date, as the ‘Free Territory’ falls to one of its enemies.  The end would be between – say – December 1919 and December 1923.  If rounds were monthly, that’d give us a game of between 12 and 24 rounds.  Does that sound manageable?  Would monthly intervals give enough room for manouvre?  Depends on how long a round is.

Right – I’m going to have to go and read some more history before continuing, but should be able to churn out some more rough plans and designs over the next week or two.  I know there are a lot of specifics to fill in, but I’m enthusiastic about the general shape of the game, and am set on continuing.  I suppose that makes my first BoRT a provisional government success.  Huzzah!

(Images by Squirmelia, toddjohnson534, and poorly-translated Ukrainian anarchists)