Some time ago, a new game named Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order entered GMT Games’ P500 list. This is the fifth in a series of articles talking about different aspects of the game.

In this installment, we turn our attention from the thematic aspects of the game that have preoccupied us in the previous articles and consider now the game’s mechanics. We will review the various types of event cards in the game.

Recently, a number of short playthrough videos were posted on YouTube that can be a helpful companion to the present article at hand.

Associated Event Cards

From early on in the development of Order & Opportunity, it seemed that in order to ensure the right thematic feel for the game, it was important that the players had their own decks of cards specific to the side that they play. After all, the historical situation, and the abilities and weaknesses of the four historical sides in the game ― the US, EU, China, and Russia ― arguably are very different and asymmetric. For example, the specific kind of power that the EU represents was described by the professor of European Politics at the University of Edinburhg, Chad Damro, as follows:

[T]he EU may be best understood as a Market Power Europe that externalises its market-related policies and regulations. This externalisation reveals an oft-overlooked way in which the EU exercises its power in the international system. Such an exercise of power, which may occur as intentional or unintentional behaviour, suggests the EU is more capable and more likely to use coercive means and tools than would be expected by other conceptualisations of the EU as a power.

(Chad Damro, Market Power Europe)

A second consideration was this. While developing Order & Opportunity, I was involved in testing Harold Buchanan’s Flashpoint: South China Sea, a game that has since been released. As Harold has expressed in a number of interviews since (for example with Pushing Cardboard), Harold wanted that game’s event deck to be generic enough so that an experienced player how knows the deck wouldn’t have an unassailable advantage in comparison to the novice. That argument made sense to me.

(Interestingly, it turned out, something like this had also been thought once by Richard Garfield when designing the rare and common cards in Magic: The Gathering, as he revealed in the Five Games For Doomsday interview some years ago.)

The resulting power associated event decks in Order & Opportunity reflect the above considerations. There is some considerable asymmetry to some of the card effects specific to certain sides in the game, yet there is also a set of cards that are identical, or near identical from side to side.

Each associated event is what you might call a multi-use card and can be used in various ways:

• Play the Suit for a Corresponding Action. Perhaps the most common way of using a card is to play it for its suit. This allows the player to conduct one Action associated with the card’s suit. The Actions include basic things such as placing, increasing, and removing influence on the map, as well as manipulating certain tracks and counters.
• Trigger the Card’s Event. Familiar to players of historical games, most cards in Order & Opportunity also have an event text part to them. The event effects tend to be more circumstantial and relative to the board state at hand, yet provide amplified effects that often bend the game’s rules and parameters in various ways.
• Place on Map. As a more unusual feature, many cards in the game have two parts, each with a different card orientation. The portrait-orientated part shows the card’s suit and an event option. The landscape-orientated part shows a second event option or a so-called Reaction ability.

This third aspect of cards deserves a more detailed discussion.

Reaction Abilities

Alongside new event options described above, the second ability printed on many of the landscape orientated cards are Reaction abilities.

Originally, the Reaction abilities were born from trying to simulate certain interactions typical of the post-Cold War period.

Arguably, the post-Cold War period has been a period of ever increasing global economic integration, commonly referred to as economic globalization. The question was, how would the game incentivize this intensification of what in the game term is essentially player co-operation for a mutual benefit (or a promise of it)?

It turned out to be difficult to have gamers naturally co-operate in this way, equipped as they were with knowledge that the game would have an end and one winner. In this information situation, it may not be impossible but certainly it is difficult to incentivize co-operation. Not every playtester could see the trustworthiness in the opponent’s eyes unlike the US president George W. Bush:

I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.

(President George W. Bush on Vladimir Putin in the closing press conference of the Slovenia Bush-Putin Summit in 2001)

The idea of the Reaction abilities came as a response to the difficulty of incentivizing co-operation. Placing a Reaction card on the map, in the landscape orientation, allows players to benefit from other players’ actions by reacting to them, which can be thought of as simulating economic and other interconnections.

While arguably this doesn’t amount to genuine co-operation, we have to keep in mind that, especially in democratic societies, the citizen and the economic sector are to a great extent free to choose their business partners. This leads into a discussion of the nature of agency in games versus in “real life”.

In reality, governments might wish to and sometimes do curb global economic integration for strategic reasons ― in fact, we’ve began to see more of this sort of “reshoring” of strategic and other key production capacities in the recent years following the Covid pandemic and the intensifying tensions in global power competition. That said, the freedom e.g. of companies to target global markets, offshore production, and the like could not easily be touched, at least not in democratic societies. In this sense, while in games all agency is focused on the player, in actuality agency is essentially distributed across various dimensions of society. The Reaction abilities simulate the abilities of different player sides, and the multifaceted political and economic systems that they imply, to tap onto economic and other opportunities arising from the multidimensional, global nature of modern societies.

In the next article, we continue with reviewing further types of cards included in Order & Opportunity.

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