Here is a peek into the character of each role in Volume VI of the COIN Series, Falling Sky, that also will get you a step ahead of the competition when you sit down to play. In this first of a 4-part series, anonymous ancient authors presume to advise Caesar on his strategy for the reduction of Gaul….
For those of you who missed Part I of this article, you can find it here: Rendering Caesar’s COIN (Part I)
Welcome back to our answers to your questions about how our design Falling Sky adapts the COIN Series’ game system, originally about modern insurgencies, to depict the Gallic revolts against Caesar in the late 50s BC. In Part I , we attempted to address the larger questions you raised about the change in era, and about player roles, incentives, and capabilities. Now, as promised there, we delve further into the details of individual game mechanics, events, and aspects of war in ancient Gaul as explored in this upcoming COIN Series volume. Thank you for joining us once more! – Volko Ruhnke
How are Roman politics handled, when Caesar’s goal was power in Rome, and Gaul was just a way to achieve this? Can the Caesar player lose the game by losing the support of the Senate? If Caesar loses the Senate’s support, does it mean he has to go beyond the Rubicon?
Volko: As we touched on in Part I, the game treats Caesar’s exploits in Gaul as helpful to his power in Rome because they were an expression of Rome’s larger impulse to expand. So, the degree of Caesar’s success in subduing the Gallic and Germanic tribes will influence the degree of the Senate (and other Roman interests’) approval of Caesar. Each Winter, the number of subdued, dispersed, and Roman-allied tribes in Gaul—the Roman player’s victory score—can push Roman politics (a simple the “Senate” track in the game) from the usual intrigue to either adulation of or uproar against Caesar. Various events (for example, “Cicero”) can have a similar effect.
Andrew: It is definitely possible for Caesar to lose the game by losing the support of the Senate, although indirectly. Instead of loss of Senate support causing an automatic defeat for the Roman player, it instead causes several nasty, negative effects, such as decreased auxiliary forces and more limited access to legions. A Senate in uproar against Caesar will not take legions away from him, but will limit his ability to replace any legions lost.
We have also included an event card which, when played, will trigger a need for Caesar to cross the Rubicon and effectively end the Gallic War and the game and cause a final victory check. An effect this drastic will of course need a certain prerequisite to be met: that the Roman score exceeds a certain threshold. This represents significant opposition from Caesar’s political enemies and a slightly earlier than historical Roman Civil War. In this scenario, Caesar’s opponents have become alarmed enough by his military success to attempt to remove him as governor.
Before GMT had announced Falling Sky as an upcoming COIN Series volume, a couple images of our prototype posted on GMT’s Instagram site spawned a Boardgamegeek thread  contending that application of the COIN Series system to ancient Roman warfare was an unwise and awkward mismatch – a square peg in a round hole. I was a bit amazed that a few cropped snapshots could generate such an impassioned discussion.  Andrew’s reaction to the thread was simply “well, we are changing the COIN mechanics, of course.†Â
Thus, at first whiff, we faced the question of how the COIN Series would transition from modern to ancient. How indeed are we changing the mechanics? There is a lot to say to that, so to help us best address that question on InsideGMT, Gene back in August called for your questions. Since then, Andrew and I have been busy supporting playtest of the game. But now, finally, we have a chance to answer. Part I below begins with the larger questions you raised about the change in era and player roles, incentives, and capabilities. Part II later will delve into more details of individual mechanics and aspects of war in ancient Gaul. – Volko Ruhnke
Why the huge change in time period?
Andrew: It’s a combination of me being personally interested in the subject, and our thinking that it would be an intriguing change of topic, after four volumes that all take place within a few decades of each other, to go back a couple millennia. Gaul seemed like a good setting for the system, and a good system for the setting (as we will elaborate on below).
Volko: Also, by showing how the core system fits a topic so far back from modern insurgency, we wanted by example to open the door to other designers to look across the span of all ages of history for topics that they feel the COIN Series mechanics might give new expression. And that is happening!
The choice of Gaul, as opposed to any other ancient campaign, for me was simply an irresistible co-design opportunity that presented itself (as it has been with each of my other COIN Series co-designs). Andrew had just read a translation of Caesar’s Commentaries and was redesigning to his liking the setup for the River Sabis battle from Commands and Colors: Ancients – Rome & the Barbarians. We played the new setup and reworked it a few times, aiming for results as faithful to Caesar’s description as we could get them. Andrew’s attention to the project told me that he had a focused interest in the topic, and we had done a lot of design work together for ourselves at home before. So I knew that we could pull off a fresh co-design about the Gallic War. With that, our conversations about the scope, roles, and victory objectives for a new COIN volume began….
Volko and Andrew Ruhnke, the designers of Falling Sky our newest COIN Series game to hit the P500 list, are preparing an article for you guys that gives you a look inside the design. 
In what is a first for InsideGMT, they’ve asked me to involve you guys in the process of article creation.
Volko and Andrew want to tailor their article to give you the information you’re most interested in. To facilitate that, we are requesting that you guys give us your questions, input, and comments in advance.
So here’s your chance to help shape the Falling Sky article. Please leave us a comment with your questions, suggestions, and curiosities about the game.
Thanks much for helping Volko and Andrew craft a Falling Sky article that will give you the information that most interests you!
On a day when we added three new games to our P500 list, I wanted to post something here on our blog to advertise the additions. But the more I thought about it, adding a “We just added three new games to the P500 list!” post here, after we’ve already posted information on all three games across all of our social media and in today’s Customer E-Mail Update, seemed a little redundant and not really in keeping with our “InsideGMT” theme for this blog. So I thought I’d try something a little different – a post about our process, and how one of these three games came to the P500 list. So here goes. I hope you guys find this interesting.
By way of background, all of our designers and design teams know that I routinely add games to our P500 list near the end of each month, to coincide with the release of our Customer E-Mail Update. So as games get close to “ready” for the P500 list, there’s a lot of preparatory conversation back and forth with those designers and teams about whether their game is going to be ready for the list this month. For the games that are going to be ready, the designer or team sends me text for the P500 writeup and an exact component list. I then send the component list to Tony Curtis, who figures out the retail and P500 price points for those components, and the text to Rodger MacGowan or my daughter Rachel Billingsley, who use it to make cool banners for each of the new P500 games. Meanwhile, I create the P500 page itself on our website. This all usually happens about a week before we launch the new P500s near month-end, but there have been times when a writeup came in at the 11th hour and we decided to go with it, when Rodger and Tony did REALLY quick turns to help get the game ready for launch. (It’s always nice to work with professionals – guys who stay cool when things get hectic.)
So let’s talk about how we came to add Falling Sky to the list today. Usually, I know about games in development for months, sometimes years, before they go on our P500 list. But Volko REALLY surprised me with this one. About a month ago, as I was on a long drive home from Stanford Medical Center (fun with shoulders and back!), Volko called and told me, rather casually, that he had a new game in the COIN series, and that it was almost ready for P500!! What?!?! That was stunning but awesome news to me, as Volko and I had just a couple months back laid out an overall strategic plan for the next couple years of COIN P500 additions, and I thought I had a good handle on what was coming. But an ANCIENTS COIN series game!?! Oh, MAN!!!! (Given that about half of our customer base loves ancient games, the “sales guy” part of me was drooling at the potential appeal of COIN doing Ancients.) Wow! It was a bonus that Volko said it was a co-design with his son Andrew, a young man I think very highly of, and one of the savviest COIN series players I’ve met. I think this father-son design team approach is just really cool. And I love seeing younger designers cutting their teeth in the hobby, especially with games that say “GMT” on the box.
So, after discussing all the details and weighing pros and cons (ok, there weren’t that many cons!), we decided to move Falling Sky to the front of the COIN series line and move back a couple other games that we thought we’d be adding later this summer (At least one of those you’ll probably still see on the list later this year.) The rest of the process went smoothly, and the rest of our team was as excited as I was to see this evolution in the COIN series.
Why do I want this game on our P500 list? OK, beyond the “doh! Volko!” aspect, I think this period is PERFECT for COIN! Also, I think that this is going to open up some potential COIN co-designers’ minds to other non-modern possibilities for the COIN series and that we may see some applications of this system to periods and situations that Volko and I never envisioned when we first discussed the possibility of this series several years ago.
If you’d like to read more information about Falling Sky or place a P500 order, please visit our Falling Sky P500 page. Thanks!
Enjoy the games!
Gene
