The Finnish civil war goes down as a particularly bloody conflict: in the space of a mere five months over 36 000 people died (of 3.1 million), a staggering 9 700 of the victims executed or murdered. Terror was an inseparable part of how both sides conducted the war.

In this fourth InsideGMT article showcasing the game (the first three articles can be found here), we’ll look at the game’s concept of Terror, both, in its role in the mechanics of game play as well as historically.

We’ve had Red terror, will we also have to have White terror as well? The road for it is being paved, the public opinion is being prepared for it. –The Finnish novelist Juhani Aho in his war time diary on 26 April 1918

The Concept of Terror: The Predecessors

Terror has featured in the action menus of every modern period COIN game to date. All Bridges Burning is no exception, but the way the game handles terror, and the way it featured in the historical conflict that the game seeks to model, differs from its predecessors quite significantly.

There is a history of terror in many places in Southern Finland. (Non-final playtest art.)

In the COIN Volume I, Andean Abyss, the FARC guerrillas “can terrorize the populace into resenting Government fecklessness”, wrote Volko Ruhnke in the game’s Playbook. This concept of terror is based on the idea that successful terror operations weaken the authority of the governing faction exposing their inability and fecklessness to govern effectively. Terror creates opposition, too, by turning the populace to seeking protection, law and order, from somewhere else than the governing faction.

Brian Train’s Colonial Twilight took a slightly different look at terror questioning in the historical Algerian context “whether it accomplished anything at all besides moral decay”, as Brian put it in the game’s Playbook. Accordingly, in Colonial Twilight, the terror operation is incapable of creating opposition while otherwise working similarly to those of its predecessors.

The Concept of Terror: All Bridges Burning

In the course of developing All Bridges Burning, it soon became clear to me I needed an altogether different concept of terror. For one, in the context of the Finnish civil war, there really was no central governance the authority of which terror could erode. In fact, politically the war was in part about filling the power vacuum caused by the melt down in the course of 1917 of imperial Russian authority in Finland. (Finland was at the time a semi-autonomous province of Russia.)

Accordingly, there also was no national police force in Finland as the one it had got dissolved alongside that of the Russian authority. This historical fact represented an additional design challenge, for I could not just adopt the concept of the police, their ability to prevent terror, kidnappings, and all the rest of the complex “COIN scaffolding” of mechanics and dynamics that had gone together with the police in many of the previous volumes of the COIN Series. I had to weave a different web of dynamics.

[T]he Finnish state had suffered damage in one essential respect as a result of the February revolution [in Russia]: it was left without control of the principal concentrated means of coercions. […] The Finnish police also disintegrated. In the years following the revolution of 1905 the police had been largely “Russified,” that is, reorganized to comply with imperial policy. Immediately after the February revolution policemen and rural police officials were again forced to resign, much as they had been in 1905. […]

At the same time, specific worker militias were founded in a few urban centers. These were often rudimentary and transient in character, organized largely to maintain order among the workers themselves. In several cases they overlapped partly or wholly with the communal militias … Hence, the distinction between public and private maintenance of order was not clear immediately after the February revolution.

–the Finnish historian Risto Alapuro in State and Revolution in Finland

The concept of terror in All Bridges Burning is based on intimidation: terror can be used to discourage the supporters of the enemy factions. In the game mechanical terms, intimidation means two things. First, in All Bridges Burning you use terror to remove enemy pieces somewhat similarly to how the Ambush special activity works in the previous volumes.

Second, in All Bridges Burning, terror, in the form of red and white terror markers littering spaces, represents a history of terror in these places. The effect is that each unfriendly terror marker in a space increases the cost of recruiting more of friendly forces in that space (via the Rally command). In All Bridges Burning, terror has thus been completely divorced from its previous function of increasing or decreasing support or opposition. Instead, terror is now about removing enemies as well as making their return more costly.

The historical situation the concept of terror simulates in All Bridges Burning covers a range of phenomena. Often in the case of Red terror, at stake was a personal revenge for what were sometimes perceived as decades of wrong doing. Empowered by joining the local Red Guards, the landless tenant farmers and laborers would turn against their former landlords and employers. Sometimes the retribution took the form of the “new rulers” avenging a bloody revenge for past injustices and humiliation experienced in the context of what especially in the countryside were effectively feudal social relations.  Later on in the war when the tables had turned, the White Guards would have their revenge in kind.

Sometimes, however, terror was about intimidating and scaring the opponent to political inactivity not necessarily involving blood letting. Once the Red Revolt had begun, the Red terror was about control and intimidation of opponents, confiscation of weaponry and food, punishments or imprisonment for perceived violations or anti-revolutionary agitation, and the like. Here terror could be perceived to have a partially military and/or political purposes –the intimidation of the enemy and their overt or covert supporters. Yet, especially where things turned violent or bloody, there probably always was an element of personal revenge involved. This way, terror in All Bridges Burning covers, both, violent and bloody acts as well as “softer” acts of intimidation.

In the game dynamics terms, especially the violent factions –the Reds and the Senate– will find themselves using terror to establish area control. However, mirroring a key philosophical aspect of how All Bridges Burning is structured, too much terror can come to haunt the violent factions in that it increases the earnings (political capital and will) of the non-violent Moderates faction. Terror also increases mutual Polarization which at the game end may ruin the chances of victory of the violent factions themselves.

Active and Passive Forces

Above I mentioned how the historical absence of the police in the Finnish civil war threw up some interesting design challenges. An important set of dynamics in the most modern era COIN games has come from the counter-insurgent factions’ struggle to get in place the conditions for raising support. The conditions have often included the presence of police and COIN faction’s control of a space, the challenge compounded by the immobility of the police and the expensive, fragile, multi-turn character of the entire process of creating support.

These dynamics derive essentially from the historical situations they simulate: the methods of modern counter-insurgency are focused in part on the pain-staking process of winning the hearts and minds of the general population in places like Afghanistan, Columbia, and elsewhere. This has been modeled in classic COIN Series designs such as A Distant Plain and Andean Abyss. In my view at least, by now the ensuing dynamics also inalienably belong to the “feel” of the COIN Series and so I knew I wanted to replicate them in my design somehow.

Probably the closest thing in the context of the Finnish civil war to organized counter-insurgency was the Senate’s VATO, or the Department for the Pacification of Conquered Areas. This was a purpose-made task force designed to round up and punish the Red insurgents. (Non-final playtest art. Card image: Finnish Board of Antiquities, nba.fi)

However, historically, the Finnish civil war did not –and thus All Bridges Burning does not– feature counter-insurgency as such, even though in the game the Senate faction is effectively fighting back a Red insurgency. The situation being modeled in All Bridges Burning is rather one of the factions seeking to fill in a power vacuum a part of which is the process of mobilizing the sympathizers of their political cause. One challenge facing here, both, the Senate as well as the Reds leadership historically concerned the difficulty of conducting organized political and other actions using supporters that, however, were themselves not particularly disciplined or trained. (The same difficulty asserted itself in the sphere of military action more of which in another InsideGMT article.)

Active -that is, radicalized and motivated- red and white cells in Helsinki pose a danger to each other as well as to the Moderates’ cells and the network disc there. A spiral of violence threatens to envelope the town leading to nothing but gains in political capital for the blue, non-violent Moderates.

In All Bridges Burning, the active/passive mechanic simulates the difficulty of conducting organized political action using untrained supporters. Accordingly, in the game, the factions first use the Rally command to get some forces on the map placing them in the inactive state. After that, the factions must then use a different command (called Activism) to actually turn those sympathizers from passive to active supporters. Finally, in order to be able to create support or opposition in a space –that is, agitate– the factions need to control the space in question as well as have at least one active piece of theirs in the space. The process of creating and maintaining the needed conditions for agitation on the board is thus fraught with complications and dangers. And so the classic COIN Series “counter-insurgency” dynamic is there but in a changed form.

Thinking creatively about what I think is a key source of captivating game play dynamics in the COIN Series and recreating some of those dynamics while simulating a different historical phenomenon has been an incredibly fun and interesting aspects of developing All Bridges Burning.

Author: V.P.J. Arponen