Gandhi 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 shows Arjuna in action as we begin our Campaign.

Note: I assume a familiarity with the COIN system throughout this example of play, and gloss over some details of the Operations/Special Activities to focus on the Arjuna system. Other Gandhi Chronicles articles have covered these topics in depth.

Now that we’ve been oriented to the Arjuna way of doing things, we can begin our game. Before playing the first card, I shuffle together the 6 Arjuna cards for each Arjuna Faction, forming a deck of 18 cards. The first card of our game is Jawaharlal Nehru Rises to Prominence – and the Congress is first Eligible. Arjuna uses a simple matrix to determine what action a Faction will perform when eligible, considering whether the Faction is first or second Eligible, whether the Event is a critical Event for that Faction, and whether it has the option of an Operation and Special Activity or Event/Limited Operation.

In our case the Event is not Critical so Congress takes the Operation and Special Activity. I take my deck of Arjuna cards, and begin putting the top card on the bottom of the deck until the top card is a Congress card. We always put the top card on the bottom, even if the top card is a Congress card, because the Arjuna cards are double sided and we don’t want to be able to peek ahead. Arjuna ends up with Congress card J. Each Arjuna card has blue boxes which check various game states to determine what Arjuna should do, plus square boxes indicating Operations, and rounded boxes indicating Special Activities.

Card J checks whether any Protest markers are Available – since Restraint is 3, there are two Available Protest markers so we follow the green arrow below that box – then whether any Congress pieces (Gandhi or Activists) are in spaces without Protest. Both of these are true, so Congress will perform the indicated Operation, Civil Disobedience. The Arjuna card has shaded numbered circles indicating a list of sequential instructions for Arjuna to use while performing Civil Disobedience: in this case, “Select spaces using Place Protests.” The bold text is important as it tells us where to look on our Space Selection Priorities table to find the locations in which Arjuna will execute the Civil Disobedience Operation. That table deserves a bit of explanation:

Each column represents an action (not Operation, except “Demonstrate”) that Arjuna may perform during the execution of an Operation. In our case we care about the “Place Protests” column. Starting at the top, we look at each row with a dot in it, in this case, “not at Active Opposition”, “2-Pop”, “non-Muslim space” and from within those, “one random space”. These criteria apply within each other, so first we will eliminate all spaces at Active Opposition, then from all remaining spaces we will eliminate all spaces that are not 2 Population, and so on. If we ever have only 1 space remaining, we know where to perform the Operation! Then, we start the process again.

You may recall from the previous article that Arjuna does not track Resources for any Factions. Instead, each Arjuna card specifies in the top right a maximum number of spaces in which to perform an Operation. For the Congress, that limit is “max [Protests + Gandhi + Restraint]” (it is the same for all Congress cards). That means we can Operate in all spaces with Protest, plus the space with Gandhi, plus selected spaces up to Restraint. We cannot place Protest in spaces with Protest markers already, and there are only 2 Protest markers available, so we will use the Space Selection Priorities table to select 2 spaces, if possible, then continue to our Special Activity.

Right away, we see there are no spaces at Active Opposition, so the first condition does not apply. If a condition eliminates all spaces, we skip it and continue to the next one. There are 5 2-Pop spaces on the board that do not already have Protest markers, and only 2 of them have Congress Activists in them, which is a requirement for Civil Disobedience. So, we’ve selected our 2 spaces for Civil Disobedience: I place a Protest marker in each space and flip all Activists there (Congress and Muslim League) to their Active side. Since we have selected the most spaces we can, we return to the Arjuna card for further instructions.

Our next instruction is a special one – it is prefaced with a red checkmark and condition, and is only performed if that condition is true. Since the Raj is a Player, we will execute the instruction: “From space with 3+ INC, get 1 Activist onto a Railway, highest Econ first”. There is only one space with 3 Congress pieces, so Arjuna will move an Activist from Bombay Presidency to an adjacent Railway without a Strike already (Arjuna never moves Activists onto Railways unless the Raj is a player, and the Railway doesn’t already have a Strike). Arjuna selects randomly from among adjacent Railways with the highest Econ, and moves an Activist onto the Railway adjacent to Madras.

Next we interrupt the Congress’ Operation to perform a Special Activity by following the arrow out of the Civil Disobedience box on Arjuna card J and find that they have two options for a Special Activity: “Negotiate to Release Gandhi from Jail” or “Satyagraha to Move Gandhi then: Add 1 Activist”. These are a lettered list, so we will perform the first that applies. We can’t release Gandhi from Jail because he isn’t in Jail! So we will perform Satyagraha instead.

Looking at the Move or Release Gandhi column of the Congress Space Selection Priorities, Gandhi will first try to move to a space that is not at Active Opposition. We already know there are no spaces at Active Opposition, so we skip that priority. Instead Gandhi will look for a 2-Pop space, and within that, a space with Raj Control. Let’s see how many of those spaces there are before we continue checking priorities. There are seven 2-Pop spaces in India (note that Gandhi can use Satyagraha to “move in place”). Of these, all but United Provinces and Bombay Presidency are under Raj Control. So we continue checking priorities to select among these 5 spaces. The next priority is to move Gandhi to a space with Unrest and only 2 of our 5 candidate spaces have Unrest: Punjab and East Bengal. Our next two priorities do not help us select between those spaces, as they have the same number of cubes (“fewest cubes”) and neither space is at Support (“most Support”). The final priority is to select among remaining spaces randomly, so we assign probabilities and roll: 1-3, Punjab; 4-6 East Bengal. After a roll of 6, Gandhi heads off to East Bengal.

Now that Gandhi is moved, we complete the Satyagraha Special Activity per the instructions on the Arjuana card. Arjuna does not instruct us how to perform the Operation or Special Activity, only what choices to make when multiple possibilities are offered. The Arjuna card instructs the Congress to “Add 1 Activist”: If the Congress had no Activists to place, Arjuna would have moved Gandhi and done nothing else. But, the Congress does have an Activist, which we place in East Bengal.

Finally, we return to our Operation that we interrupted. The only instruction left to carry out is to place a Protest in Gandhi’s space if we executed Satyagraha. We did, but there are no Protest markers available, so we skip this step. The bottom of this box has the “Stop” icon, so we are done with the Congress Operation and Special Activity.

My Raj are up next, and the Event provides a good opportunity to get some of my pieces from Out of Play onto the map, as well as restore Raj Control in United Provinces. So I opt for the event and move 2 Sepoys into United Provinces, and 1 Sepoy each into Assam, Baluchistan, and Northwest Frontier. This is an aggressive and risky strategy to seize Control across such a broad part of India, but I’m willing to assume that risk since I did not have to deplete my reserve of pieces or Resources in order to do it.

Next week: The Revolutionaries and Muslim League are up for Khadi Spinning Wheels.

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Next Article in this Series: The Arjuna Chronicles #4: Khadi Spinning Wheels