Introduction by Fred Schachter – Congress of Vienna (CoV), Assistant Designer & Editor: What a wonderful and pleasurable journey it’s been in this “labor of love” regarding Designer Frank Esparrago’s Congress of Vienna game. Previous InsideGMT articles were devoted to various aspects of the game (see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna); but with this piece Frank focuses on the game’s production status as of January 2024 in elaboration of what was shared by the 1/18/24 GMT January Monthly Update: January 18, 2024 Update from GMT: New P500s, Art Samples, Production Update, a Free Download, and More!! (mailchi.mp). So, take it away Frank!
We intend to offer up our design notes regarding our simulation of the 2nd Russo-Ukrainian War, Defiance, beginning with Volume 1: Miracle on Dnipro: Kyiv & Chernihiv campaign, from time to time. Given that we are designing a simulation regarding an ongoing conflict, it’s a first draft of history. Consequently, at least you’ll get some insight into why we got some items wrong. 🙂 In our 2nd article in this series, we discuss how we capture the political dynamics related to the 2nd Russo-Ukrainian War in our simulation of the conflict. We’ll begin with a survey of how politics gets reflected in a few of our favorite wargames, before moving on to Defiance. Feel free to break out a beverage of your choice.
We’ll also include a recipe for a cocktail, mocktail, or appetizer at the end of each of our Defiance Design Happy Hour articles.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week, in the second article, we discussed the action menus on counters and the interaction between those options and the dice draft. We’ve now covered the core engine of the game, but are missing one very large piece of the puzzle. This week we will be talking about the battle grid (basically the map), terrain, and Fog of War.
When first designing Firefight Tactical there were several things I was looking to reimagine about the tactical genre, and the top of that list was the maps. Don’t get me wrong; I love my tactical maps. In fact, as I am writing this, I have a huge binder of my starter kit style ASL maps on my immediate left. At the same time, I have some big problems with the status quo of tactical game maps.
Firstly, they don’t handle FoW very well. Really in most games FoW begins and ends with the enemy’s position and does not extend to the battlefield itself. Instead, the officer in command (you) has such godlike reconnaissance of the field that you have the precise location of every single feature perfectly mapped out. My other perennial gripe with them is that there is such little dynamism represented in the battlefield. Obviously in reality the field itself does not change, but the soldier’s perspective of the field is constantly changing. Seemingly irrelevant terrain features can become tremendously significant simply due to the enemy repositioning.
Both issues are addressed by way of Firefight Tactical’s battle grid. Let’s begin by discussing the battle grid as part of scenario setup.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of combat and movement, it’s time to tuck into the meat and potatoes of the game: Activations and actions. Grab your tactical spork and let’s dig in.
Welcome back to Firefight Fridays. Last week in the first article we discussed the dice draft and how Firefight Tactical is constructed around it. We covered what is being modeled by the dice draft and how it can be used to get an edge on your opponent. This week we will be looking at the other half of the dice draft handshake, the action menu.
In the third article in this series, I covered the first of the Central American civil wars featured in The Guerrilla Generation, El Salvador. In this article, I move on to the other Central American conflict and the last game in the pack, The Guerrilla Generation: Nicaragua. As with the game on El Salvador, the United States played a major role in the Nicaraguan civil war, serving as the external backer of the Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government. The Reagan Administration hoped to use the Contra insurgency as a means of pressuring the Sadninista regime into reforms, or at a minimum ceasing their alleged aid to the Salvadoran FMLN insurgency discussed in the last article. Nicaragua offers veteran COIN players the largest divergence from existing COIN mechanics, with a unique insurgent faction that almost entirely relies on external support and foreign sanctuaries to operate. Nicaragua also features alongside El Salvador in the “Resisting Reagan” Campaign scenario, which will be covered in my next InsideGMT article.
I specifically chose the Contra war in Nicaragua over the earlier Sandinista insurgency that toppled the Somoza regime in 1979 because I wanted to maximize the variation in the types of insurgencies featured in the multipack. The Contra war provides an opportunity for COIN players to explore an insurgency that heavily relied on external support, largely launching raids from external sanctuaries in Honduras and Costa Rica. Keeping Contra Commandos within Nicaragua will often prove difficult, particularly when faced with US Aid cut-offs. The Contra player aims to inflict as much damage as possible to the economy of Nicaragua through Sabotage and tying down Sandinista Troops. Contra Commandos frequently launched attacks on civilian targets associated with the government or economic development, such as transportation infrastructure, schools, or agricultural cooperatives. The nature of the Contra insurgency also shaped the Sandinista counterinsurgency response, which largely focused on mobility and firepower to counter raids by marauding Contras. Given the Contras’ more limited reliance on the local population, Sandinista counterinsurgency generally used less civilian victimization than other Governments in the multipack or broader COIN series. I hope these dynamics together give a very different feel than any other insurgency yet included in a COIN multipack or main series volume.
We intend to offer up our design notes regarding our simulation of the 2nd Russo-Ukrainian War, beginning with Volume 1: Miracle on Dnipro: Kyiv & Chernihiv campaign, from time to time. Given that we are designing a simulation regarding an ongoing conflict, it’s a first draft of history. Consequently, at least you’ll get some insight into why we got some items wrong. 🙂 Feel free to break out a beverage of your choice. We’ll also include a recipe for a cocktail, mocktail or appetizer at the end of each bit.
Billboard outside of Kyiv…March 2022
To knock out Russian vehicles, Ukrainian teams lie in wait along roads — sometimes for days — before firing their missiles and sprinting away to their own vehicles for a quick escape.
That’s the basic tactic the Ukrainians have worked out as Russia’s wider war in Ukraine enters its sixth week. Ukrainian missileers packing foreign-supplied anti-tank guided missiles, such as the American Javelin, as well as locally made ATGMs such as the Stugna-P and Corsar, have plucked at the Russian invasion force, knocking out a vehicle here and a vehicle there until the losses have become unsustainable for the Kremlin.
The exact numbers are impossible to pin down, but Ukraine’s fast-moving ATGM teams undoubtedly have taken out hundreds of tanks and other vehicles. Missile ambushes probably account for a significant proportion of the roughly 2,200 major pieces of hardware that outside analysts can confirm Russia has lost since widening its war in Ukraine starting on the night of Feb. 23.”
Welcome to the inaugural InsideGMT article for Firefight Tactical (FFT), and the beginning of Firefight Fridays. I am going to start putting out a small article every week to give more insight into my design process for FFT, along with some previews of scenarios, units, and mechanics. I wanted to put these together to drive interest in the game (of course), but also shed some light on the more unfamiliar aspects of Firefight Tactical. For this first article I want to focus on the heart and soul of Firefight Tactical: the dice draft.
In the first two InsideGMT articles on The Guerrilla Generation I covered the conflicts in South America, featuring an urban insurgency (Uruguay) and one of the most violent insurgencies in the region’s history (Peru). In this InsideGMT article we move on to the first of the two conflicts set in Central America. The Central American civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 1980s also combine in the “Resisting Reagan” Campaign scenario, which will be featured in the fifth InsideGMT article in this series. Unlike the two previously covered games, which include only minor references to United States involvement, the US played a major role in the two remaining conflicts. This article, on The Guerrilla Generation: El Salvador, covers the most complex multipack game yet designed. With a larger number of pieces, Pivotal Events, and new special decks, the game introduces several mechanical changes to cover the complexity of this conflict. Given the use of mechanics such as Pivotal Events in several previous COIN volumes, El Salvador serves as a good stepping stone to more complex multiplayer COIN games, such as Fire in the Lake, Liberty or Death, or Pendragon.
The Guerrilla Generation: El Salvador covers the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)’s insurgency against the government of El Salvador. The FMLN is attributed with possessing the strongest military capabilities of any insurgent group in Latin American history, including the use of special forces, spectacular raids on military bases, and two major offensives analogous to the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. The FMLN player will often be able to match the military capabilities of their Government opponent, unlike many of the other insurgents in this multipack. However, unlike Castro’s far militarily weaker July 26th Movement featured in Cuba Libre, the FMLN did not succeed in overthrowing the government of El Salvador and had to settle for a negotiated settlement in 1992. Unlike the Batista Government in Cuba Libre, which faces drastic US aid cuts leaving them barely able to operate by the end of the game, the Government player in El Salvador will receive vast amounts of US assistance, particularly if they pursue reforms, enabling them to often beat back the best efforts of the FMLN insurgency.
All four games in The British Way COIN multipack are only two-player and relatively short, so we hope that finding a partner to play with won’t be too difficult. However, we understand that many COIN players enjoy playing solo, and indeed this is probably how Stephen and I have spent the most time playing the other games in the series (both during testing and purely for personal enjoyment). Furthermore, and unlike previous COIN series games, The British Way does not come with a dedicated solitaire system, and so we have decided to provide some additional guidance for multi-handed solo play.
Playing a game ‘multi-handed solo’ simply means controlling all sides to the best of your ability, which can be somewhat tricky for a CDG with hidden hands (although even here the CDG Solo System provides a solution), but is very easy in COIN series games with no hidden information. The COIN series sequence of play also provides you with a limited set of options each turn, especially in The British Way where you have only two Factions and one Event card to consider, which makes these games especially well-suited to multi-handed solo play. You can just flip over the new Event each turn, check which Faction is first eligible, and then evaluate the current board state to determine what move they should take.
