Monthly Archives: March 2022

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Sovereign of Discord: The Strategic Hamlet Program

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In my last InsideGMT article, I gave some background on the Ngo Dinh Diem regime and covered some of the threats to the regime besides the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. In this article I shift focus to the war in the countryside between the ARVN and VC players. In the early 1960s, the Strategic Hamlet program was the major counterinsurgency strategy of the Diem regime. The main goal of the program was to separate the rural population from the Viet Cong while increasing the state’s control of the countryside. Sovereign of Discord introduces new wooden strategic hamlet pieces and additional mechanics to Fire in the Lake to model this strategy.

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The Powers of Baltic Empires — Prussia

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This is the third article in a series I will present each of the five powers of Baltic Empires in turn. This time I will cover Prussia, the clear underdog among the powers during this period (1558-1721), and certainly not the Prussia from later eras that wargamers may be more familiar with.

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Infernal Machine: The Inventor’s Vade Mecum (Nautica ed.) Part 6 — On Choosing and Caring for a Journeyman

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By Ed Ostermeyer, Master Engineer (Grade 2)

A good day to you once more, young Inventor.

In our last look into the Inventor’s Vade Mecum, we learned how to recruit and retain your project’s Mechanics.

In today’s lesson, the Inventor’s Vade Mecum will provide you guidance in choosing and caring for a surprisingly necessary crewmember for your Wonder of the Age, the Journeyman.

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This Isn’t Even My Final Form: The Past, Present, and Future of the Final Crisis ‘System’

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In his 2018 release Fort Sumter, Mark Herman laid the foundations for what has now come to be known informally as the Final Crisis ‘system’ (although there is as-yet no official Final Crisis series). At the heart of the system is a mechanical and thematic emphasis on the escalation and build-up to a historic conflict, rather than the conventional resolution of a conflict that is the usual focus of wargames. The core ingredients of this two-player system include:

  • Playable spaces spread across several ‘Crisis Dimensions’ (four Dimensions of three spaces in each game so far).
  • Pivotal spaces in each Dimension that are often crucial to victory and became hotly contested focal points.
  • A ‘Crisis Track’ that limits available tokens or cubes, and punishes players for escalating the conflict.
  • Hidden objective cards that focus the players’ attention each round, and offer an additional advantage when scored.
  • Three regular rounds, during which cards are played either to place or remove cubes or trigger events (a fairly typical CDG mechanism), followed by a fourth ‘Final Crisis’ round in which players are limited to targeting specific spaces using cards they have saved from previous rounds.
  • Victory is determined by a tug-of-war victory point track, scored at the end of each round for controlling either objective spaces or whole dimensions (advancing too far on the crisis track can also trigger a victory point penalty).

The combination of the limited token pool and penalties for escalation does a great job of invoking the feeling of a mounting crisis, forcing both players into a game of brinkmanship as they seek to place exactly as many cubes as they think they need to, but no more than are necessary, as if you place too many cubes in one space you risk overcommitting and weakening your flexibility to respond elsewhere. Fort Sumter features only one additional special rule, a ‘Peace Commissioner’ that is typically placed by the player who has contributed less to escalating the crisis (or by event), and prevents either player from adding or removing cubes in one space. The game is otherwise extremely streamlined, taking less than half an hour to play, the ideal length for a ‘lunchtime’ session.