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 is the first in a sequence of connected examples of play covering Setup and basic principles of Arjuna.

Gandhi’s Solitaire system, Arjuna, introduces a number of new concepts and repurposes some old concepts, so let’s explore the system while playing an entire campaign of Gandhi. In these examples, I will be playing as the British Raj, seeking to generate support for the British Viceroy throughout India, while maintaining Control over its Cities and Provinces. These two goals are somewhat in tension, as we will see.

My opponents will all be controlled by Arjuna:

• The Indian National Congress led by Gandhi, who desire Opposition to British rule and a unified India (Victory Condition: Total Opposition).
• The Muslim League, a coalition of Muslim leaders willing to offer limited support to the British Raj in exchange for autonomy (surrender of Control). They also desire Opposition in Muslim provinces (Victory Condition: Opposition in Muslim Provinces plus twice the Population of Muslim States).
• The Revolutionaries, an amalgam of many violent nationalists, most notably Azad Hind and the following wave of revolutionary forment in India, who seek to create Unrest and create Bases of operation across India (Number of Bases plus the total Population of spaces with Unrest markers).

We recommend that players play the Short scenario (1930-1947) when playing with Arjuna. The illustration below shows the map at setup for the Short scenario with Gandhi and a Protest starting in Bombay Presidency, and a Strike on the adjacent Railway, in the immediate aftermath of the Dandi March. As the Raj, I begin resource rich and Support-poor, with moderate Control of India. I have deployed most of my forces, with a smaller reserve and many pieces Out of Play.

The Muslim League player has a Protest in Punjab (note that Protest markers do not belong to any player, but generally Protest markers in Muslim Provinces benefit the Muslim League player), and the Revolutionaries have a strong position in the north and east of India.

Before we dive into play, a word about rules exceptions.

Other COIN titles have generally allowed the Bots to ignore the restriction on “Limited” Operations, instead allowing them to perform an Operation and Special Activity instead (Colonial Twilight is the notable exception). This simple change has a great impact on the competitiveness of the Bots, allowing them to compete with much more creative and flexible Human opponents. Arjuna does not use this exception, and will honor Limited Operation and Operation Only selections in the Sequence of Play.

Arjuna does have some rules changes, however. First, if Arjuna is controlling the Congress Faction, it will place a Protest marker on the board at the end of each Campaign Round. This ‘greases the skids’ for Arjuna, allowing Congress to be a bit more flexible. Second, Arjuna does not track Resources for any Non-player Faction. This is a major departure from previous systems, and drastically lowers the bookkeeping needed to run the bots, as there is no resource maximum for Operations, no need to track Resource expenditures, and no need to use the Aid Operation to generate Resources for the Revolutionaries Faction. This also removes the player’s ability to take advantage of a Bot without Resources – something that good Human players carefully avoid. We will cover this in depth in the next article.

Finally, Arjuna has two design innovations that impact the ease with which players can operate the system. First, when designing Arjuna, we tried very hard to move all rules governing the placement and removal of pieces and markers into the player aids and cards, so that players do not need to refer back and forth between the play materials and rules once they are familiar with the system. There are a few rules that players will need to internalize, but we tried to make them extremely simple.

Second, Arjuna has no table of instructions for resolving Event cards. This was something that we worked very hard to enable early on in the design. Instead, each Event can be resolved using the Space Selection Priorities tables mentioned in the last article. We will give examples of this in action in further articles, but this gives the Events maximum impact and flexibility, and allows them to be resolved using the same priorities as Operations.

So, with that, we are ready to play! Our next article will begin our game with Jawaharlal Nehru Rises to Prominence!

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Previous Article in this Series: The Arjuna Chronicles #1: An Intro to Gandhi’s Arjuna System

Next Article in this Series: The Arjuna Chronicles #3: Jawaharlal Nehru Rises to Prominence