Several months back, when preparing for the Spring semester course on wargaming, I wrote a blog post about the plans to use Stephen Rangazas’ The British Way in the classroom. The game has now made its debut at the university, and it is interesting to look back and see what worked and how.

Whenever introducing a new game in class, some issues must be considered to ensure that it can work in that specific environment. What gaming concepts will the students be already familiar with? How much time will the game take and how many games could be run and facilitated in parallel? Have they covered the topic of the game in their other classes? As The British Way was released in 2023, it was the first time to be used, and all these questions had to be answered.

First of all, The British Way was not the first game we used. While for a COIN game its complexity is on the lower end, for participants who do not have a more extensive board gaming experience, it is quite a steep learning curve. Thus, we climbed the complexity ladder before starting to explore The British Way, with students having explored functions of cards, player asymmetries, and other mechanics-related topics. Certainly, the whole gameflow of COIN games is specific, but after several weeks of wargaming, it hadn’t been a problem.

The class I have this year is quite small, with four games in parallel very suitable (there were at most two players per side per game, and only in a couple of cases). Since The British Way comes with four scenarios and two mounted maps, two copies of the game (thanks to the generous support from GMT Games) were enough. Based on the complexity of the different scenarios and the component requirements, two were selected – Cyprus and Malaya. This only required some additional cubes that I took from Cuba Libre, and all was set.

A big advantage of running a COIN game is symmetric information. This reduces the need to explain game situations to individual players (so as not to ruin a strategy) and therefore makes it possible to facilitate even four games at the same time, where all players are playing for the first time. I took up to 15 minutes to explain the key game processes and then I simply distributed player aids for the students to learn directly from them. I would of course be there for any questions on the details not in the player aids. This approach initially involved a healthy amount of walking from one table to another, but I believe this approach worked. It helped to save a lot of time. Explaining the game more fully and then going through the specifics of the two scenarios would have needed way more time (and also lead to attention attrition). This approach also helped students to learn at their own pace, engage in peer-learning, and, most importantly, actively engage with the game material in order to understand the possible actions and their requirements, interactions between the different mechanics, outcomes, and goals of the factions that they and their opponents represented. Of course, this led to some mistakes and misinterpretations of the rules, but this is what’s likely to happen when playing such a game for the first time in any case.

Finally, since students were also not very familiar neither with the topic of the evening of the British Empire nor with counterinsurgency in general, I recommended reading the Inside GMT posts on the Cyprus and Malaya scenarios and more general information about counterinsurgencies. Then, I also linked to some videos overviewing the game, to give the opportunity to learn more about the workings of the game. Finally, I booked the full three-hours class for the game – no slides, no lecturing, the full week’s work just playing The British Way and considering what and how the game portrays.

So, how did it go? To answer the question in two words – very well. The games fit within the timeframe (though, as expected Cyprus plays went a bit faster). They were also sufficiently tight and during the games discussions already focused on what they should have done differently. Most importantly, the students were engaged. Some have even borrowed the game right after the class to explore it more, which in my view is a great success.

What about the initial expectations from before the semester? The key expectation was looking at historical games as models of history. Here, The British Way provides a good level of complexity to discuss the model and mechanics in the introductory classes. Connecting the mechanics with dynamics represented by the game provoked thinking not only about this game but also what needs to be done in students’ own projects. The next week I got a question about the meaning of Political Will in the game. In the two scenarios that were played, the victory is counted a bit differently. The question then went, why does one scenario need a zero-level Political Will for the counterinsurgent victory, while the other is less restrictive and can also lead to an instant British victory? This opened the door to a discussion on both the mechanics and the conceptual interpretation of Political Will. Something I hoped would happen back when preparing for the course.

When walking across the room, I’ve also had a chance to listen to the conversations happening. Of course, most of the chatting was about what was happening on the board, but there were also talks about the story behind the game. The colonial legacy of the British Empire also emerged as a topic, as did other counterinsurgencies that could be modelled in the COIN system.

Overall, The British Way worked really well, and I will use it next year too. I’m also looking forward to Stephen Rangazas’ The Guerrilla Generation, which I am sure will also be an important addition to the course.

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