Unlike other COIN games, People Power does not simply measure the Support for, or Opposition to, the Government. In most COIN games, Support and Opposition measure the willingness of a population to actively enable or hinder the operations of a faction through supplying guerillas, providing intelligence, and supporting Government operations.

People Power introduces a subtle distinction: while Support still models the support for Government policies and cooperation with Police and Military operations, Opposition represents political means of opposing the government, generally via nonviolent means such as protest, boycotts, demonstrations, and funding opposition parties in elections. Spaces at Opposition take more effort to sway to support with Civic Action – the Government must first quell any Protest in that space, then rebuild trust (shift to Neutral), before finally winning Support. The NPA, however, operates in a manner similar to insurgent factions in Andean Abyss, A Distant Plain, and Fire in the Lake. Factions like FARC, the Taliban and the Viet Cong did not simply oppose the government through violent means, but actively sought to create a people’s government which would supplant the existing government through a popular uprising. This is a distinct type of opposition, enough so that People Power has a different axis for it – Resistance. Resistance is the willingness of the population to overthrow the existing government and replace it with a new one by potentially violent means.

The way this works in People Power is different from other COIN titles, but still easy to understand. Each space can be in one of 4 states: Support, Opposition, Resistance, or Neutral. Neutral is the state between each of these other states, so to shift a space from Support to Resistance, it must first be shifted to Neutral. A shift in a space from Neutral now hurts both of your opponents instead of just one: for example, shifting a space from Neutral to Support makes it harder for both the Reformers and NPA to shift that space to their alignment. Terror still serves to entrench these divides by making it more expensive to use Civic Action or Agitation to shift a space (and blocking Reformer Protest entirely). Finally, like in A Distant Plain and Colonial Twilight, there is only a single level of each alignment, so spaces can and will shift rapidly between these states.

Each Faction interacts with these alignments differently:

Many of these are typical COIN interactions, but the three way tug-of-war makes them feel very different, especially when one faction ends up unintentionally creating an opening for another. The Control model in People Power also reflects the differences betweenthese Factions. Only the Government and NPA can Control a space (modeling the assertion and operation of their respective governmental infrastructures in that area). Reformers contest Control of either Faction, but only when Active – like in Gandhi, bases are always Active but Activists are only Active in a Protest space. Unlike Gandhi, the NPA contests Control normally (active and inactive pieces are counted). Both the Government and NPA depend on Controlling (or the Government not Controlling) spaces for various actions.

This three-way alignment with two-way Control adds a rich narrative to each game of People Power, telling the story of people who were fed up with corruption and abuse, but approached solving it in very different ways.

For more reading on the differences between the NPA and Reformer approaches to dismantling the Marcos’ regime, I recommend The Anti-Marcos Struggle by Mark R. Thompson.

The story of how they attempted to solve it, and the contrasts between violent and nonviolent methods of change, will be the focus of our next chapter.

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