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 sixth in a series of articles talking about different aspects of the game.

Following the previous insideGMT article on the cards and card play in Order & Opportunity, in this article we look at some further types of cards included in the game.

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

World Events

In many ways, the half-size World Events cards constitute the focal point of each period of play in Order & Opportunity. The World Events represent various historical crises and contingencies of the period. A random set of World Events is drawn at the start of each period of play and placed in the map space indicated on the card. These spaces tend to become “battlegrounds” or “flashpoints” of player interaction in the game.

Each World Event has its own resolve conditions and associated rewards. Resolving World Events ties together with the area influence aspects of the game. Typically, for a player to resolve a World Event, the player must get a sufficient level of a particular kind of influence in the space. The other players and the so-called “neutrals” (abstractly representing the agency of regional powers and other regional actors) have the option of blocking the resolving power if their influence equals or exceeds that of the resolving power — however, the players may negotiate with one another to agree to remove the block if the “price” of co-operation can be agreed upon.

As a result, a dynamic of influence investments as well as blocking and negotiations ensues as player jockey for positions to address crises and contingencies on the world stage.

Pivotal Events

Each of the five regions depicted on the game map ― Europe, Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East ― have their corresponding Pivotal Event card. The Pivotal Events represent the region in question becoming, for one reason or another, a strategically important focus point of players’ ambitions.

For example, the Middle East has a long history of global strategic importance due its natural riches. The region has frequently been the stage of foreign interventions — to the untold suffering of its people. In the words of Alan Greenspan in his 2007 book The Age of Turbulence:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

(Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence)

More recently, non-Western powers, such as China, have reportedly began to pay an increasing attention to the region. Once again, energy needs seem to drive the focus of foreign policy, as observed by the Hong Kong born political scientist and China expert Willy Lam:

In 2003, China became the world’s second largest importer of petroleum, and the leadership has gone into overdrive in waging “petroleum diplomacy”.

(Willy Lam, Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era)

The Pivotal Event card for Europe is titled “Color Revolutions”. The Color Revolutions were a string of separate events that took place in the post-Cold War period in a number of former Soviet bloc countries and regions. In the words of the German political scientist Julia Gerlach:

The phenomenon of Color Revolutions describes a process in which the autocratic leadership of countries in transition is ousted following electoral fraud; achieved through non-violent, large-scale mass protests that are led by counter-elites and supported by international/Western assistance.

(Gerlach, Color Revolutions in Eurasia)

As such, these revolutions can be seen to represent something of an abstract battleground of the “war of ideas” between democratic and authoritarian visions of post-Cold War political order and society.

The Color Revolutions have been argued to have caused shock waves, among others, in the Kremlin. The Russia-born, now exiled journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote:

Vladimir Putin’s main phobia … the debacle of the Orange Revolution [in Ukraine].

(Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men)

In Ukraine, in 2013-2014, the pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych eventually fled the country following mass protests due to his stance on the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.

On the effects of this in Moscow, Zygar wrote:

After the Orange Revolution, he [Vladislav Surkov] was commissioned to draw up the Kremlin’s strategy for preventing a similar revolution in Russia. The deputy head of the presidential administration analyzed all the major driving forces that had helped make the revolution in Kiev — the youth organization Pora!, Ukrainian pop musicians playing in Maidan, nongovernmental organizations involved in monitoring the elections, and independent media (above all Channel Five, owned by chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko) — and began targeting their Russian equivalents.

(Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men)

In Order & Opportunity, the Color Revolutions Pivotal Event sets up the European spaces for the scoring of Agenda Points. The card represents the pivotal role that these revolutions have played in the 21st century power politics.

Neutral Events

The last type of card in Order & Opportunity remaining to be discussed are the so-called neutral events. They represent smaller historical events, processes, even individuals of the period. These cards pop up as sudden “developments” when drawn from the Developments draw deck once at the start of each player turn.

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