Recently, a new game named Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order entered GMT Games’ P500 list. This is the second in a series of articles about the game. The first article discussed the game’s perspective to the post-Cold War period.

In this second article we’ll look at the game’s concept of victory.

From the profile page: Order & Opportunity is a 2 to 4 player game with a dedicated solitaire system 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.

The Difficulty of Victory and the Ending

One thing you will often hear designers of historical games lament is the artificiality of historical games having to have an end. I mean, history does not have an end ― we talked about that in the previous article on Order & Opportunity ― but games do. Games typically end in a win by someone.

What it is to win in the post-Cold War era is a vexing question also because in the longer historical perspective the post-Cold War period has only just started. And not only that, but with the great ideological rivalry of the Cold War period resolved, perhaps there no longer was any one single opponent and no single way of winning?

One aspect of the core argument of Order & Opportunity indeed is that the post-Cold War period has been about many different ways of winning and losing. There is a fragmentation of victory and defeat. In the game this finds the expression that there are multiple ways of making, and losing, points.

But unlike in the 1990s and 2000s, there is no prospect on the horizon of a universal liberal order. Instead, there is a free world competing with a neo-authoritarian world. Yes, it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are fissures and shades of gray on both sides, and a great deal of connection and shared interests across the divide. But the contest is real.

(Thomas Wright, Brookings Institution in The Atlantic)

This idea of a fragmentation also coheres with an early design aim of mine that Order & Opportunity should have a certain sandbox quality. The player should have the option, say, whether to play the Russian leader Vladimir Putin as the young reformist that Putin seemed to be for a while in the early 00’s ― or whether a more aggressive course should be pursued that seeks to restore Russia to its former Soviet glory, as Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine suddenly seemed to make clear. The game does contain certain subtle dynamics that may under circumstances encourage particular sides towards particular trajectories, but in principle the sandbox is there.

Similarly, the game allows the players to examine and experiment with some of the advantages and complexities of the trans-Atlantic alliance. The US political scientist and assistant to multiple US administrations, Zbigniew “Zbig” Brzezinski, foreshadowed some of these complexities in his 2001 book The Geostrategic Triad:

The transatlantic alliance is America’s most important global relationship. It is the springboard for U.S. global involvement, enabling America to play the decisive role of arbiter in Eurasia — the world’s central arena of power — and it creates a coalition that is globally dominant in all the key dimensions of power and influence. America and Europe together serve as the axis of global stability, the locomotive of the world’s economy, and the nexus of global intellectual capital as well as technological innovation […] In the longer run, the appearance of a truly politically united Europe would entail a basic shift in the distribution of global power … The impact of such a Europe on America’s own position in the world and on the Eurasian power balance would be enormous … a united Europe would dwarf the United States.

(Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Geostrategic Triad)

From Agenda to Victory Points

Mechanically, the thematic idea of the fragmentation is realized in terms the distinction between what the game calls Agenda Points (APs) and Victory Points (VPs), the latter of which is the terms in which victory is adjudicated.

Agenda Points abstractly represent the holder’s control of or visibility in the domestic or global agenda of issues. APs can be made in three ways: players can resolve World Events and they can place so-called Alignments onto the map ― the third way is via the so-called Pivotal Events which we will discuss in a later article in this series.

Alignments are counters placed onto the map representing the owning player having managed to establish some manner of a political, economic, or military alliance or a related agreement or pact in the region in question. Accordingly, the Alignment counters are named thematically, for example, as “EU Expansion”, “NATO Expansion”, China’s “Belt & Road”, and the like.

World Events are historical events evocative of the period drawn and placed as half-size cards in different spaces of the map. Each World Event has its own “resolve conditions” and associated rewards for the resolving player.

Resolving a World Event will earn the resolving player one of three types of APs, or two APs if the task is particularly difficult. Similarly, placing one of a different types of Alignment earns the corresponding kind of an AP.

Focus and Legacy

There are three kinds, political, economic, and military APs in the game, so there is an element of “multiple pathways to victory” in terms what AP type you wish to focus on. Thematically one might think of the focus as building a legacy (of a leader, an administration, or policy continuity across administrations).

This legacy aspect is amplified by three related aspects about the game. The first is that, at the game end, everyone gets to resolve all APs of one type into VPs, one to one. Otherwise players are limited to converting APs to VPs during the game in a far less cost effective way. Think of this as the reward of building a longer-running, consistent legacy.

The second aspect is that the different types of APs can only be earned by playing the corresponding type of influence e.g. to resolve a World Event. So again, some level of dedicated focus will help to earn particular types of APs, and keeps others from recouping them from you. However, in a fragmented or fragmenting global order, continuity and certainty may be hard to ensure.

After all, the unipolar moment, if it ever existed, has ended. The emerging order of the 21st century will be fluid, complex, and messy. While it may be premature to specify the precise pecking order of status and clout, no one nation will be able to call the shots ― not China and not the United States. Global hegemony is a mirage.

(Andrew Bacevich, the Quincy Institute in the Boston Globe)

Third, there is a light deck building element to the game that allows players to “build” as well as “thin” their deck with the action suits and event effects that they think they’ll need. This makes some tuning of the deck, and with that the abilities of the side you control, possible.

The catch is that the APs come from small, fixed-size pools of points and that when a player is to gain an AP, they may instead choose to return one AP held by someone else back to the pool. That is to say, APs are this fleeting currency that come but may also easily go away again before they become tangible legacy, namely a VP. Thematically, the game argues that in the era of the internet, social media, and the 24/7 news and commentary, ideologically principled politics may have given way to more superficial politics focused on attempts at controlling the fleeting agenda.

In the next article we’ll look at the thematic background and the mechanics of turning APs into VPs.

---

Previous Article: Order & Opportunity: A Perspective to the Post-Cold War Period