Gandhi ships soon and includes a brand new Solitaire system, called Arjuna, that replaces the flowcharts that have become a staple of the COIN Series. Players who play COIN Solitaire have asked many questions about how the system works – and don’t fear! – COIN Series Developer Jason Carr is here to walk through the design, ergonomics, and play of Arjuna. This installment serves as an overall introduction to the system and outlines some of the changes you can expect to see when you open the box for the first time.

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If you haven’t been following the development of Gandhi, you may be surprised to hear that the venerable flowcharts from COIN Series Volumes I-VIII are not present in Gandhi. Instead we have a new, Card-Driven Solitaire system, which we believe is simpler to use and provides an even better opponent than the flowcharts. Of course, Arjuna is heavily indebted to the work done to create the flowcharts by Volko Ruhnke, Örjan Ariander, and Vesa Arponen.

Our guiding principle while creating Arjuna also owes to another designer: Jerry White, designer of Enemy Coast Ahead and Skies Above the Reich, and whose games come with fantastic player aids. Jerry’s key insight was that much of the complexity in using a Solitaire system comes from the dispersal of needed information across many pieces of papers, cards, and boards. Moving that information onto the fewest number of components possible, and making it so folks do not have to flip between these player aids or set them down, makes it as simple as possible to know where to find the information you need when you need it.

When executing an Operation or Special Activity for a Non-player Faction in a COIN game, there are three decisions the bot is making: first, which Operation/Special Activity to execute; second, which options within that Operation/Special Activity to use (e.g. “Rally”: should I place a base or more guerrillas?); finally, where to perform that Operation/Special Activity.

In the flowchart bots of other COIN games, these three concerns are clearly seen. The decision diamonds determine the Operation/Special Activity (with fallback options if the selected Operation/Special Activity cannot be performed). Then, generally, the sequential priorities handle what options to use in executing the action, while the nested priorities help narrow down where the action will take place.

So, let me introduce you to Arjuna. Each faction has a deck of 6 double-sided cards which contain simple checks of the state of the board and corresponding Operations and Special Activities which should be taken if the board state is true. If the checked state is false, players are instructed to discard the card and draw a new one, or flip it over and check the state on the back. The cards for each Non-player faction are shuffled together at the beginning of the game, and when a Faction is ready to take an Operation/Special Activity, cards are drawn off the Arjuna deck until a card corresponding to the Eligible Faction is revealed. Then, conditions are checked and instructions are followed to select what Operation is performed.

Of course, this has never been the hard part about using the COIN flowcharts; the hard part is determining where to perform an Operation or Special Activity. Keeping with Jerry’s design input, we redesigned this element of the bot to get rid of the sequential and nested priorities for space selection, favoring much more information dense, but visual, charts. Each column in the charts corresponds to an action that can be taken by that Faction. Note that they do not correspond to an Operation or Special Activity (with the exception of Demonstrate, which is a special case) but rather to the actions taken within those Operations and Special Activities.

Not only does this remove the technical language needed to describe what spaces to select, but multiple Operations, and even Events, can use the columns to determine where to take an action! For example, the Congress Faction can use the “Remove” column to determine where to remove an enemy piece during the Persuade Special Activity, or use it to determine where to Remove a Muslim State during Negotiate. And importantly, any Event card that says to remove enemy pieces would use this column as well.

This also means that the space selection priorities for every Operation and Special Activity for every Faction fit onto a single page of the player aid. We will dive into how these charts work in later articles, but hopefully these two samples have given you a much greater sense of the difference between Arjuna and the existing flowcharts. We would be remiss if we did not give credit to Adam Zahm, the designer of the Solitaire system for Labyrinth: The Awakening, which uses a very similar type of chart to select spaces for actions, and was the inspiration for our design here.

In our next few articles, we will cover several connected examples of play showing Arjuna in action, ending with an article showing my personal setup to play Gandhi using Arjuna.

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Next Article in this Series: The Arjuna Chronicles #2: Setup and Overview