Recently, a new game named Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order entered GMT Games’ P500 list. This is the first in a series of articles on the game.

From the profile page: Order & Opportunity is a 2 to 4 player game with a solo variant about the making of the post-Cold War world order covering the first decades of the 21^st century. In the game, the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union compete over the control of the agenda and ultimately over victory points in the dimensions of economic, political, cultural, and security power projection. Order & Opportunity combines card-driven, asymmetric game play to produce a topical and thematic historical game on a global scale. The game offers a distinctive and captivating play experience at every one of its player counts.

An End and …

Sadly, we all learned that the end of the Cold War was not “the end of history.” Mankind would find new ways to divide itself. While the threat of nuclear holocaust disappeared, newer and more sinister forms of conflict would take its place. Where once superpowers bestrode the globe, decentralized networks and even individuals now command the world’s attention.

(Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, Twilight Struggle)

In his well-known 1992 book, the American political scientist and writer Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history” following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the great ideological rivalry between communism and democracy. The post-Cold War period that commenced was for America and its liberal democratic allies a “unipolar moment”, as the American political writer Charles Krauthammer called it at the time.

For Fukuyama, the “end” had two principal dimensions and causes. There was the dimension of unprecedented economic prosperity deriving from a “liberal revolution in economic thinking”, as Fukuyama put it. And there was the dimension of the “ideal of liberal democracy” that had once again beaten its rival ideologies ― most recently, communism, before that fascism, and before that monarchism.

However, as Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews ― designers of the blockbuster historical boardgame Twilight Struggle on the Cold War ― wrote in the rulebook for the game (quoted above), in hindsight Fukuyama’s declaration turned out to be premature. A perspective to what went wrong underlies the argument that Order & Opportunity takes to the post-Cold War period.

… a Beginning

Fukuyama correctly identified the two pillars of the liberal economic and the liberal democratic triumph as integral to the shape of the post-Cold War world order. Only, soon those supposedly foundational pillars began to wobble again.

Take the economic dimension. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund (or the IMF) ― one of the chief institutions of the liberal world order instituted in the watershed Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 ― had for the standards of a free trade champion come to a staggering admission:

Since the early 2000s, however, the pace of trade, productivity, and income growth has slowed, leaving many behind, most notably in advanced economies. For all its benefits, trade has had a negative impact on groups of workers and communities, particularly in Europe and the United States. These dislocations, which also reflect the impact of technological innovation, have been intensified by slower growth and the resulting backlash has undermined support for global economic integration. Concerns about the impact of trade are on the rise among some in many advanced economies. This shift has been reflected in public opinion surveys and some elections.

(IMF Annual Report 2017)

That is to say, where for Fukuyama liberal economic thinking had given rise to “unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and … in the Third World”, the IMF had now come to recognize that excesses of economic globalization had caused serious “dislocations”, particularly in the advanced economies.

These dislocations were being felt, among others, in “some elections” that the IMF report would not name but that could plausibly refer, for example to the 2016 US Presidential Election, the Brexit referendum of the same year, or the 2017 French Presidential Election, all of which saw populist candidates score great victories or at least seriously challenge more traditional parties.

This takes us to the liberal democratic dimension identified by Fukuyama. Recently, the phenomenon of “democratic backsliding” has been discussed intensively in political science and beyond.

One of the prominent theses here is that, again, structural economic but also social and cultural changes have begun to cause a “silent revolution in reverse” as was recently argued by the political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris. The original “silent revolution” was the post-World War II rebuilding and material prosperity-induced gradual liberalization of political and other attitudes. That revolution has now began to be reversed, argue Inglehart and Norris, as offshoring and automation of not just industrial work but an ever broader range of occupations eat into the prosperity and perspectives of the middle classes.

The argument goes that one result of the reversal has been a certain “il-liberalization” of political values, politics, and eventually governance will follow. Alongside these specific developments, we may spot a broader, global trend as the Global State of Democracy Report from 2021 pointed out:

[E]lectoral and closed autocracies are home to 68% of the world’s population. Liberal democracies diminished from 41 countries in 2010 to 32 in 2020, with a population share of only 14%. Electoral democracies account for 60 nations and the remaining 19% of the population.

(Global State of Democracy Report 2021)

A third threat to the liberal democratic hegemony hit the public consciousness in the form of the passenger planes that on the 11^th September 2001 were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one brought down by courageous passengers before it reached its target ― the threat was, or is, international terrorism. This prompted Charles Krauthammer to revisit his thesis from the “unipolar moment” as he, a year after 9/11, wrote:

The American hegemon has no great power enemies, an historical oddity of the first order. Yet it does face a serious threat to its dominance, indeed to its essential security. It comes from a source even more historically odd: an archipelago of rogue states (some connected with transnational terrorists) wielding weapons of mass destruction. The threat is not trivial. It is the single greatest danger to the United States.

(Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment Revisited)

The resulting War on Terror and a series of US-led interventions, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan ― and the concomitant domestic terror threats, many of which materialized in deadly attacks in Europe, the US, and elsewhere ― are essential aspects of the still young post-Cold War period.

Consequences, Order and Opportunity

How is the above argument realized in Order & Opportunity? One chief mechanic is that of Consequences.

On a basic level, Order & Opportunity involves an area control mechanic whereby players use cards to play or remove one of three kinds of influence in and from map spaces. Consequences result from the intensity, or “unilateralism” if you like, of those card plays.

Consequences involve the increase of their Terror Threat or Polarization level tracks. There are periodic die roll based checks that may punish players for too high levels.

Consequences also involve adjusting the players’ contribution to the upholding of the rules based order on the World Order track. The Democractic powers in the game ― that is, the US and the Europeans represented in the game by the EU ― have a special duty to uphold the liberal democratic principles. Failing to do so will allow the Authoritarian powers, China and Russia, certain freedoms in challenging the Western “unipolarity”. Failing to uphold the order also imposes a penalty on the Democracies.

These effects of the Consequences result from the players’ own card play decisions ― and are in this sense self-inflicted. In the game, each player has their own associated and asymmetric deck of event cards. The cards can be used to trigger the card’s event text or the card’s suit can be used to take one action of the corresponding kind. When cards are played for their suit and actions, one Consequence follows from each two cards of a suit played.

Using this basic mechanic, the economic action suits have Polarization as their Consequence, while the political action suit increases the Terror Threat level. As the third type of Consequence, the security i.e. military action suit decreases the player’s World Order contribution.

The resulting game play dynamic involves the dilemma of players deciding to push hard and “unilaterally” in terms of playing multiple cards during their turn, but also feeling the Consequences as a result.

The analysis of the character of the postwar order points to three broad categories of possible risk:

1. some leading states that see many components of the order as designed to constrain their power and perpetuate U.S. hegemony

2. volatility from failed states or economic crises

3. shifting domestic politics in an era of slow growth and growing inequality.

(Michael Mazarr and colleagues, Understanding the Current International Order, RAND Corporation)

This setting characterized by internal dilemmas is contained in the two terms of the game’s name: order and opportunity. Especially the US and EU players will feel the tension between the preservation of the liberal democratic “order” while in pursuit of the perks of economic globalization and other “opportunities” in the game. China and Russia have the choice whether and where to contribute to the order or to look for opportunities to challenge it.

According to the game’s argument, then, the post-Cold War period is a post-ideological period that, however, has a tendency to teeter more and more on the brink of own instability as the game progresses.

In the next installment, we will look at the game’s concept of victory.

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