In October 2020 Fred Serval (designer of GMT’s Red Flag Over Paris, and A Gest of Robin Hood) organized a ConSim Game Jam sponsored by GMT.  Participants had 3 days to make a game. As participants, we had to use a pre-existing GMT COIN game at its core and make something new from it. We weren’t able to use any more wood pieces than were boxed with the original game. We  were, however, permitted to apply stickers to the board, or to any of those wood pieces, and were able to add any amount of cardboard tokens and decks of cards  we might want. Initial discussions focussed on geographical milieu, and narrowed our choices down to India (Gandhi), France (Falling Sky), and Great Britain (Pendragon), and the latter won out. So from  Morgane Gouyon-Rety’s Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (2017) we  derived a game called Boudica’s Revolt.

Our ConSim submission was a COIN-like 2-player game, using asymmetric factions (Rome and Boudica’s Iceni tribe) with a menu of set commands, and an Event deck tied to an initiative track. Yet it also had a number of non-COIN design elements, such as opposed roll combat, buildings (which could be burnt), and hidden presence of Boudica herself, so Rome couldn’t be sure where on the board she was, unless she appeared in combat. When the curtain came down on those three hectic days of designing and transatlantic conversations (Daniel was working from the UK, while Maurice was working from the US) the assembled judges – Volko Ruhnke, Morgane Gouyon-Rety, and Jason Carr – placed Boudica’s Revolt in second place, behind the game that would come to be Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398, the first in GMT’s Irregular Conflict COIN-adjacent series. Also placed as finalists in the same competition was the game In The Shadows: French Resistance 1943-1944, now also on GMT’s P500.

Buoyed by our success in the competition,  the enjoyment of working together on the project, and the encouraging tutelage of Jason Carr, GMT’s Development Director, we spent some time exploring designs as possible expansions to Pendragon in a range of scenarios, covering not just Boudica’s Revolt, but also the Claudian Invasion, and Rome’s tussle with Caratacus (of the Catuvellauni and later the Silures) and with Cartimandua (of the Brigantes). All these designs were rooted in some form of COIN mechanics, but increasingly they were pulling away in some key areas – combat in particular remained entirely different from Pendragon.

Checking in with Jason after a few months, after reviewing what we were up to, he presented us with a choice. We could either move closer to Pendragon and sit closer within that game system as a fully endorsed expansion working alongside Morgane, or we could move away from Pendragon and COIN and the design could find its own identity, where it might become a title in the nascent Irregular Conflicts series. The latter was, after all, the path of other ConSim designs. Further, Jason suggested that our Roman Britain design work might ultimately develop in such a direction that it become foundational to an entirely new series – not COIN, not Irregular Conflicts, but perhaps something distinctly different from both. Some head scratching accompanied some soul searching, as we considered the privilege it would be to work with Morgane and to have an endorsed expansion of such a highly-regarded game. Ultimately we headed off in a new direction – enticed by the prospect of what a whole new series (or, at least, the aspiration of a series) – by us, published by GMT – might look like. Retaining the focus on Roman Britain we knocked everything down and built the design back up again.

We were interested in the asymmetric design elements found in COIN to help us address distinctly asymmetric military situations. We were  interested in the asymmetric modeling of political/non-kinetic situations found in the work of Brian Train, whose work Volko has noted as a major influence on his COIN engine. We were also interested in the untapped potential of numerous topics in history that were yet to receive a game treatment. We decided we wanted to focus on rebellions – they were often complex with a great deal of political context and asymmetric military nuance to unpack, and yet they were often ignored by game designers. Even when we decided on the title Rebellion: Britannia we still initially found it hard to move away from modeling the Roman invasion – it’s such an evocative topic – and from Agricola’s campaigns in the north of England and Scotland – the game system provided us with the ability to model these alongside the key rebellions. However, as we began to work closer with Ken Kuhn, our Staff Developer at GMT , his insights helped us realize we needed to distill the game down further, and to lose the notion of delivering a range of scenarios. This allowed us to retain focus on rebellions, and to create a game that would set-up fast and be playable in 60-90 minutes. Losing distinct scenarios would allow us to take a turbulent 14 years (47-61 CE) and present it as a single ‘game space’ so the game could accommodate anything from 1 to 4 players with barely any rule revisions and no additional cards or pieces, whilst retaining the essence of the larger scenarios, the conflicting considerations that are inherent to the COIN model, and the historical flavor that is so important in games of this type.

In the next blog we’re going to look at the history of the period the game explores.

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