Since GMT's Labyrinth may be GotY material...

MattDP wrote: FWIW I have many problems with the assumptions of the model it projects. But those assumptions are clearly stated in the rule book. Just because it proved a bad model doesn't make it a bad game.

Absolutely. And I don't think it's a bad game. But I think parsing the term "historical" is a dodge. It's clearly set up as a representation of "real world" situations, but also distorts those situations to the point of being untenable. If I'm not recalling specifics in the rulebook that outline where he hedged in order to make the system work, then that's my mistake. It just strikes me that situations like a "terrorist" group in Mindanao flying to Cairo to perform another act of destruction is unrealistic to the point of farce if one is attempting to present setting and/or model as emblematic of reality. If we're talking about demon gateways in the world of Sanctuary (suspiciously all motivated by one monolithic entity and perspective unlike, say, humans), fine. Do what you like. If you're presenting your game as a model of how our own world functions, I'm just not as forgiving. But it also could mean that I'm just too close to the topic and have a harder time detaching myself.

Gary Sax wrote: BUT MOST OF ALL. I want to be productive here---I don't think this was inevitable. My biggest disappointment with the whole model Volko created for Labyrinth is that he underused the thing in the game that absolutely could have abstractly handled all of this with some style! It's such a shame that regimes have a governance quality and also have a U.S. ally/neutral/adversary rating---suggesting that, in fact, he did at one point have the thought that maybe there was more than one dimension to the political situation in the muslim world

Gary, I had a very very long reply that I just deleted (in the weeds on Egypt post-coup) because I wanted to highlight your quote above. While I think we would disagree on a lot of granular details, your point about the under-utlized alignment/governance interplay is exactly right. I want a game with more occurrences of good governance among adversaries or choices of when to prioritize alignment before governance. Do I want an adversarial Pakistan with good governance, or an allied Pakistan with a dictator that will allow me to keep troops there and protect their nukes?. Personally, I certainly prefer Trevor's expansion to the original game, it dispenses with regime change as the primary vehicle for good governance and introduces militias. civil war, and the notion that big shifts in governance can foment movements elsewhere in a region. Mostly, I think Trevor's version of Labyrinth is more fun, but the better simulation is probably only possible as a solitaire design. It is very very hard to create a historical game in the era it covers. Not an excuse. That being said, it could at least dispense with some of its more naive biases.

BTW- Cranberries idea for a design about shaping the historical narrative would be really cool.

Alright, so I played 3 games of this in the last 3-4 days, didn't finish them all but the 3rd one is about 3/4 of the way through. I still have the same gripes about the game being a bit worse and questionable re: history and politics.

BUT

If you accept those issues and, for me, don't think about them, the additions to the gameplay are pretty tremendous. The public support/opposition mechanic does serious yeoman's work. One thing that isn't obvious on your first play or two is just how persistent the effects of swaying public opinion are for the players. Many event cards place awakening and reaction markers, but those are the only place they come from. If you drop one or two down you have to do some serious event play to counteract them. Which is kind of nice, because one of the problems with the game sometimes is the serious seesaw effect where the US player can boost governance but in a few rounds the other player can easy cut down governance with an attack on the government... ad nauseum. The public markers are an addition to the game that makes it more strategic and long term, which is a positive since the game can be overly tactical. It also is a way to put more predictability in the game---one of the problems with the original game, IMHO, was that while the jihadi player rolled a lot of dice (usually 2-3 at a time) the US player made very few rolls that were incredibly high stakes, and there was a limited amount she could do about modifying those rolls. This provides a lever to create certainty by boosting your governance improvement rolls with public support.

AI is leaps and bounds better than the original. It might be worth getting for the improved solo play alone if you play it primarily solo.

Finally, the militia and civil war mechanics add some really nice interplay where there was not any. One of the bigger issues with the base game was trying to figure out, as the US player, how to affect countries outside a central core of countries where you put effort in and had troops. Lots of staring over the border and shrugging. The reality is that since troops are smartly tied to card draws, you didn't want to deploy troops to any questionable endeavors because it made you vulnerable and lost you card draws every turn. So you sat around and watched while small countries went up in smoke and there was basically nothing you could do that made any sense. Now, with civil wars and militia pieces, you can put pieces into play in more marginal countries and situations with less risk. They aren't super effective and they are still very expensive to activate (usually 3 ops in poor countries), but they don't lose you anything if they get plotted on/defeated---so it gives you turns where you take a shot at some marginal areas with militia rather than just rerolling your war of ideas roll on the gulf states and pakistan over and over and hoping for a 5 or 6.

Anyway, the additions are quite good---if you can get past the current events, this expansion gets a big buy from me. In terms of gameplay gripes, my first thought is that I think the events are not quite calibrated right. Some of the events have that classic CDG problem of just devastating the game state, almost resetting it in some cases. So there are cards that just drop like 3-5 cells in an otherwise quiet country. It feels pretty cheap, and there are a few of these big ticket events. I wish they were a little more contextual---devastating in the right circumstances but not so automatic in just opening up new crises because you drew an event.

I almost wish this game existed in software, so that players could select the assumptions and variables they wanted to use in each game. Actually, I'm pretty sure this game exists, but it's probably deep in the basement of a government facility in Langley, Virginia. Games are so static, and so hard to revise when they are flawed.

Wanted to pop in and say that this expansion, from a gameplay perspective, is still proving very good. Finished off a solo game.

Basically the new mechanics rethink a lot of things about the game for the better. You have a mechanism for making governance changes easier/more certain (swaying the public)---the old version of the game made sure even good conditions for governance changes were a pretty serious dice off for the US. Most interestingly, it channels regime changes into interesting civil war mechanics. One way to disrupt countries is to sway the public a bit, dump a few cells in, and start a multi-turn civil war. I've only played solo, but rethinking your strategy around civil war events and subsequent contests is a welcome change from only being able to regime change using a boatload of troops and two 3 ops cards.

If you want a fucking laugh, here's the neocon perspective of this game via the expansion. Here's the health 2014 Afghanistan (equal to the stable but autocratic regimes in the Gulf States), pretty much mission accomplished, that starts the Syrian civil war scenario. harr harr harr:



I played a solo game of this today with the expansion. It is still an *ace* game from a mechanics perspective, only improved by the expansion. It's frustrating and risk taking in exactly the right ways, and the mechanics interact really well---US/World opinion about military action, the new civil war mechanics, etc.

But. I mention this in the post (and rereading my posts from years ago) but all of this is just way too real now, it was getting way too real starting with the building Obama drone assassination campaign. It was real then during the early Bush/Obama years too, but I was able to abstract it away like it is with Twilight Struggle ("this is a viewpoint of how the defense department felt about internaitonal terrorism"---which ended up being totally wrong). But when you add the expansion, it is verging on getting too gross for me. I don't know. I've never played any game that I thought the mechanics were so tight but the theme/subject matter (and very specific neocon fantasy) ughed me so so bad. It's also maybe a part of me getting older as well as my changing politics? I can't tell. It's also the real world dragging through, and this unending money pit/proxy war called the war on terror, going on for almost 20 years now with no end in sight.

Something I also bring up is that it has me thinking a lot about what I will play without much question historically that gives me little pause. Twilight Struggle is a ridiculous, face value domino-theory of the brutal, deadly Cold War. But I'll play it and it doesn't squick me out as bad? Hypocrisy, probably.

Gary Sax wrote: Something I also bring up is that it has me thinking a lot about what I will play without much question historically that gives me little pause. Twilight Struggle is a ridiculous, face value domino-theory of the brutal, deadly Cold War. But I'll play it and it doesn't squick me out as bad? Hypocrisy, probably.

Twilight Struggle is quite different because domino theory isn't real and never was. It's an idealised political concept that's long since proven to be false.

I haven't played the expansion of Labyrinth, but as a mirror of a real, ongoing situation, it's valid in a way that few other games are. Sure there are presumptions and problems with the details of the model that it presents, but at a high-level abstract description, it works. It describes the vicious cycle of Hawk and Dove policy feeding and allowing terrorism respectively, and effectively models the taut balancing act required of Western policy to try and deal with the problem.

I've said before and I'll say it again. Labyrinth is one of the few games that provoked an acute physical response in me. The first time I played as the Jihadists and put down a Martyrdom Operation card I felt physically sick. It has moments that are far too close to the bone.

You know how it is, police brutality and protest in Ferguson was a real impediment to our otherwise clear eyed and successful effort in the war on terror.

I had the same feeling as Gary even without the expansion. It was too close for me to be entertaining. It's interesting, but as I noted earlier, "I don't want to play the Janjaweed in some Somali Conflict wargame. That's not really fun."

TWILIGHT STRUGGLE works because it's over. You know how the Cold War turned out and the game is an exercise in alternate history. The GWOT is still happening, and LABYRINTH feels like some kind of weird wish-fulfillment engine and/or nightmare machine depending on your politics/background. With the world what it is, I don't need to dwell on what might happen in the GWOT to somehow make it worse.

It's definitely a individual thing. And obviously contingent on your personal politics/assessment of the GWOT.

Yeah, my reaction was personal too. First off, Labyrinth was the first CDG I played, so the novelty definitely helped me enjoy the game. In fact, my first play of Labyrinth was something of a peak gaming experience. And I came to the game as a long-time fan of Nuclear War , the satirical game of global thermonuclear holocaust. I guess if you can swallow that as a game at the height of the 80s nuclear paranoia, then Labyrinth as a simulation goes down relatively easily. I'm sure part of it too was a greater sense of distance from the whole dirty business here in Britain, but I also respected Volko Ruhnke's professional knowledge of his topic, even if I didn't necessarily agree with his perspective.

Funnily enough, my opinion on Ruhnke's expertise was shaped by a Marxist on BGG, who wrote an excoriating critique of the very notion of the game, going so far as to argue that it was a game that shouldn't have been published. My own political outlook notwithstanding, I thought that our critic's censorious opinion was just plain dumb, to the extent that I was undoubtedly left more sympathetic to Ruhnke's authorial voice than I might otherwise have been.

FWIW, I could stomach the original. It really did read as the relative fantasy that was being passed around in Washington DC, esp the defense department, about what was happening. I think thematically it's the expansion (and time and changes in the way I think) that pushed it farther.

That said, it's definitely still on the shelf for now. And I think it's a very good game mechanically. In some ways better than Twilight Struggle.

Gary Sax wrote: You know how it is, police brutality and protest in Ferguson was a real impediment to our otherwise clear eyed and successful effort in the war on terror.

Not sure I quite understand the point being made here. I am British, after all.

I'm not sure, but the tone of some of the posts after mine suggests I'm been taken as some sort of neocon hawk? Maybe just paranoia. Either way, I'm not. I would have thought that the idea that combating terrorism required a balance of hard and soft power was fairly uncontroversial? And that's what the mechanics of the game model well.

I had labyrinth for a while and played it twice, once solo and once with an opponent. something about playing a situation where I and others close to me were present was really difficult. We haven't even tried to put A Distant Plain on the table, with multiple Afghanistan Campaign vets in the group.

MattDP wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: You know how it is, police brutality and protest in Ferguson was a real impediment to our otherwise clear eyed and successful effort in the war on terror.

Not sure I quite understand the point being made here. I am British, after all.

I'm not sure, but the tone of some of the posts after mine suggests I'm been taken as some sort of neocon hawk? Maybe just paranoia. Either way, I'm not. I would have thought that the idea that combating terrorism required a balance of hard and soft power was fairly uncontroversial? And that's what the mechanics of the game model well.

Naw, you're right. It wasn't addressing your points and not fair.
I'm sorry.

To contextualuze my comment, the Ferguson event speaks to the viewpoint of the game, that US could "win" the war on terror if it wasn't distracted from all this darn domestic political stuff (e.g. conflict around police brutality in the US). I reject that notion as completely as it is possible to at this point. I would argue the US has been at "hard" for 20 straight years with a comically sized military budget with almost nothing to show for it.