After The Fall of Kabul

In the journal Rethinking History: Professor Thomas Ambrosio at North Dakota State University has published an article on the relevance and reception of A Distant Plain in the period during and after the collapse of the Afghan government in 2021.

Here is the abstract of the article:

Boardgaming after the fall of Kabul: player and designer (re)engagement with a distant plain
Thomas Ambrosio

Received 09 Feb 2022, Accepted 29 Mar 2024, Published online: 28 Apr 2024
Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2024.2339120

ABSTRACT
During summer 2021, the world watched the swift and, for some, surprising collapse of Afghanistan’s government. However, a Taliban victory was always a possibility for players of A Distant Plain (ADP), a boardgame about insurgency and counterinsurgency in post-9/11 Afghanistan. These events inspired many ADP players, and its designers, to (re)engage with the game, thus providing scholars with a unique opportunity to investigate in real time how historical practice occurs within the popular culture space. Utilizing primary sources, this article demonstrates that contemporary history games – those which depict current events or open-ended, unresolved periods, rather than ones designed to model what is seen as ‘settled’ history – are uniquely subject to external, out-of-game interventions which may prompt reevaluations of their assumptions and models, since players and designers are repeatedly challenged by changing circumstances to integrate new data into how they perceive and consume the historical representations found therein. These games are therefore exceptionally suited to engendering genuine and ongoing historical practice, through the use of evidence, argumentation and debate, retrospective reassessments, and counterfactual analysis. The broader discipline will greatly benefit from taking a more inclusive view of popular history by paying greater attention to historical games of this type.

The journal and article are available through Taylor and Francis Online, a site I don’t have access to but if you are connected with a post-secondary educational institution or a good library you might be able to access it.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2024.2339120?src=

Thomas Ambrosio has written several other articles in the same vein, good to see this interpretation getting some air.

Social Movements and Board Game Design

Happy May Day!

To commemorate the event, Fred Serval held a panel on this topic with a great selection of people: Richard Barbrook, Joe Dewhurst, Alex Knight, and Yoni Goldstein.

Excellent discussion on games, organizing, and getting organized with and through games.

Connections Online 2024 video playlist

The collected videos of the panels and events from the recent Connections-Online 2024 conference are now public and available to all!

Link to the panel on urban warfare above, the other videos are found here:

• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Introduction & Distributed Wargaming: Some opening thoughts
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Distributed Wargaming Best Practices
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Peter Perla and the Art and Science of Professional Gaming
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Zenobia Awards Panel Presentation
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory-Wargaming Division
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Using Discord to Provide the Kriegsspiel Experience
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ CNN Academy- Building Future Journalists (Rex Brynen!)
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Analytical Wargaming with SWIFT-G
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Human Factors and Cognitive Ergonomics
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Challenges with Online Multiplayer Events
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Your Successful Professional Wargaming Career
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Alternative Military Technologies at Gettysburg
• WATCH ON YOUTUBE ~ Teaching History with Wargames

I was not able to attend any of the other events due to time zone differences and work schedule. But anyone who wasn’t there, can now see and hear what it was like.

Gack, I hate my recorded voice….

“Resurrected to be killed (then maybe born again)”

(this space left blank)

OK, I admit I thought of the phrase first then found it in a song by a metal group called Protest the Hero.

But this has nothing to do with music, it’s about Boardgamegeek (BGG) shenanigans and it’s bothering me more than perhaps it should.

Some time last November, someone on Boardgamegeek.com started a thread called “The Israel-Hamas war as a wargame” or words to that effect. The OP (original poster) was not posting a trivial or sensationalistic question, their enquiry was how one would seriously explore the problem, and after the initial fluffing and clucking about designing on a current conflict there was actually some sensible back and forth about the merits of trying to address it, then the thread went dormant the following month.

This weekend, after four months of being buried the thread was resurrected (or “necroed” if you prefer) by a one-liner post saying this topic was a travesty and this thread should not exist… this post brought it up on the subdomain where it attracted a melodramatic post by someone else agreeing with the first poster, and stating that if the BGG admins did not delete it then they would delete themselves from BGG. Cue several posts in response by me and others who were on the original thread explaining in what I thought was non-confrontational language what the thread was originally supposed to address, professional gamer relevancy, game-based journalism, etc. and comment on how the war has in the last 4 months moved away from being worthy of ludic consideration like this. I went out to lunch and returned to find that the thread had been entirely deleted.

As I understand it, this is something that I believe only the BGG administrators themselves can do. Moderators on BGG lock threads, usually after one or more warnings. Even if an OP deletes their original question or post the replies to it remain. I’ve been on BGG for 20 years and one week and this is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen to a discussion, as I said normally threads are simply locked when the conversation gets ugly.

This is a pretty minor thing, in the great scheme of things. I’m not going to formally complain to the admins (it wasn’t my thread) nor am I going to engage with the drivers-by. But it bothers me that a drive-by posting on a serious discussion that quietened itself four months ago will get it not just shut down but removed from existence entirely… to assert, in this negative way, that no serious consideration can be, should be, or will be given to the topic. I wonder what was said to the admins?

Anyway, unlike the song the thread won’t be born again. Waste of time and too many keystrokes already.

Urban wargaming panel 17 April

(It may look like just rubble to you…)

The Connections-Online panel on urban warfare wargaming went very well, except that none of the military “end users” who were invited were able to make it… so it was three designers yakking at each other, moderated by Aaron Danis, who is an academic end user of our products.

Mike Markowitz spoke about the nature of urban combat and how that has been reflected in wargames graphically, I spoke about the 7 or 8 urban designs I had been working on the last couple of years, and David Burden spoke on his concepts of urban warfare and how they were reflected in his designs. David is far more sophisticated and technological in his approach than I am: he was showing his work and experiments in gaming in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, meanwhile here I am figuratively playing in the mud with decks of ordinary playing cards and some wooden cubes!

The Youtube of the panel will be up in a few weeks and I will post a link to that in due course.

Oh, before that happens though, I want to alert you to three things of David’s:

• His database of urban warfare games, with well over 250 entries in it, sortable and searchable by many different indicators. https://airtable.com/appHv9yJCjX7nqL1W/shreVPHaoJBpxGzFj/tblusKhwNCNcXmShS
• A wiki about his PhD in urban wargaming: http://taunoyen.com/wiki/doku.php?id=phd
• And a Geeklist on BGG for his list of commercial urban wargames: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/296982/urban-wargames

Meanwhile, here are my slides (PDF) and script (ODT, open from within your word processing program if you need to):

urban ppf 17 apr 24

urban pastpresentfuture 17 april 24

Connections Online 2024 – including panel on urban wargaming!

Most of next week will be taken up with the Connections-Online virtual conference.

The theme is:

Distributed Wargaming — Recent Lessons Learned
With the onset of COVID, distributed wargaming — always of peripheral interest to the professional wargaming community, but rarely its focus — suddenly took center stage. Thrown into the proverbial deep end of the pool, wargaming institutions adapted. Let’s discuss how it happened, what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned from the experience.

And what we do next time.

There will be three days of “core events” Tuesday to Thursday, and ancillary events on Monday and Friday. Core events include, among others:

• a tribute to Peter Perla, to whom the conference is dedicated
• panel presentation on this year’s Zenobia Awards
• a presentation on the new Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory Wargaming Division by Mitch Reed
• a report on gaming used at the CNN Academy, by Rex Brynen
• seminar on analytical gaming using the SWIFT-G software
• panel on “Your Successful Professional Wargaming Career” (too late for me, I’m afraid)

There will also be a playthrough of First Contact!, a megagame, and a Kriegsspiel hosted by Jan Heinemann.

Details

Event site: https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024

Get your badge to attend here – it’s $3.00 for 15 lucky early birds, $5.00 for everyone else. All the events are free once you have your badge. https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024/badgetypes

Events schedule is here: https://tabletop.events/conventions/connections-online-2024/schedule#?query=

Oh, and…

I’m going to be on a panel on urban wargaming that starts at 1100 EST Wednesday 17 April.

Urban Warfare Wargaming: Past, Present, Future
This experienced panel will look at the timely topic of urban board wargaming from the perspective of a graphic designer, a game designer, an academic researcher specifically studying this topic, and a military practitioner. It will survey from the earliest urban board wargames in the 1970s up through today. This promises to be a don’t-miss panel!

graphic designer = Mike Markowitz

game designer = me

academic researcher = David Burden

military practitioner = it’s a surprise!

Hope to see you there.

We Are Coming Nineveh nominated for a Charlie!

We Are Coming Nineveh has been nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award for Excellence in Conflict Simulation, in several categories.

I know, I normally do not post about awards – mostly selfishly because my stuff is not nominated as it’s too obscure, or because I have no interest in or experience of the games that are nominated. But this year We Are Coming Nineveh has been nominated, and its designers Juliette le Menaheze and Harrison Brewer have been nominated under the new “Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designer Award” for a first design by a new designer.

Juliette and Harrison’s initial work in putting this game together was so impressive as they had never done anything like this before! Their careful research, choice of mechanisms and presentation of the design’s intentions overall should be recognized.

You don’t have to vote for everything on the ballot, but you should vote for this one thing at least.

The game has also been nominated in the categories of Best Modern Game, Best Tactical Game, and Game of the Year.

Pick one per category, and those winners will be determined by the results of the public ballot, which is now open at https://forms.gle/SCPjWvDp7abnc9Ty5.

The ballot will be open until Midnight, Eastern Time, on May 13, 2024. Please vote, but only once!

Summer Lightning: on sale now!

Lock n Load Publishing is having a big sale!

For the next 30 odd hours Summer Lightning is marked down to just $11.23!

https://store.lnlpublishing.com/summer-lightning-2nd-edition-llp312001-p?sort=pd.name&order=ASC&limit=100

This is a print and play edition (though you can buy proper physical counter sheets for the game if crafting is not your strong suit; they are also on sale), marked down from $32.

QUICK Junior @ 1 PPCLI!

One thing that has been occupying my attention the past month or two has been the latest development of the Quick Urban Integrated Combat Kriegsspiel … QUICK Junior!

I was contacted by LCOL Cole Petersen, the commander of 1st Battalion PPCLI (Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, of the Canadian Army) in Edmonton. He has used simple games of his own design to do some professional military education with his officers in the past (see this Paxsims blog entry: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2022/09/01/1cmbg-homebrew-wargame-development/), and he asked me to design a scaled-down version of the QUICK to cover action by a single battle group (a task force built around a reinforced infantry battalion, as part of a brigade) instead of a division… two echelons down, so the maneuver units are platoons, not battalions.

I put something together for him quickly and it worked well I think, in the solo tests I gave it; the mechanisms are still much the same. I made a new map for it, a hex map (350 m per hex) of downtown Daugavpils, a city of about 85,000 in southern Latvia. A fair number of Canadian troops are stationed in the country, not far from Riga… right now they are the leadership for a multi-national brigade, but if things went sideways this is possibly the general area where the 1 PPCLI battle group would fight, against the 25th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade based in Luga. Daugavpils is the second biggest city in Latvia and there is an important rail junction and bridge over the Daugava river there. Otherwise it is not remarkable for anything except it was a Napoleonic fortress town, the birthplace of Mark Rothko (a famous American abstract painter) and its recently opened Museum of Smakovka (homebrewed alcohol, or maybe it’s disinfectant).

(yes, the counters are mounted on folded cardboard, with a thumbtack for a base… brilliant!)

Anyway, this week LCOL Petersen tried it out with his officers at a PD session and it worked very well! Five simultaneous games were going – one per company – with two Russian wins, two NATO wins, and a draw.

The officers were engaged in the game and talking tactics and planning processes shown in the game, from the initial CONOPS or CONcept of OPerations to understanding the cubes and matrix as representative of the limitations of time, attention and resources as well as the need to organize, prioritize and if necessary re-orient the plan. They also thought the game’s use of Enablers was an excellent mechanism for understanding the weighting of main effort and the balance between pushing resources down vs. centrally controlling them.

He will try it again at a later date with a larger scenario, but it worked this time. I’m proud and excited to have made something that’s of use to my own country’s Army!

Interview: Giochi sul Nostro Tavolo

Over at the blog Giochi sul Nostro Tavolo (Games on Our Table), Davide Clari has posted an interview he did with me a while back.

Go have a read of it! (Italian and English versions are posted)

Brian Train. L’attento lavoro del War Game Designer [Lavorare per Gioco – Around the World]

The post is illustrated with some covers of my games, and also the first “shelfie” I have ever done, and which is at the top of this post.

Bottom shelf is my folio, baggie and magazine games, plus a few copies of Guerrilla Checkers.

Middle shelf is boxed published stuff.

Top shelf is stuff I’m either working on or haven’t formally published yet, plus a box of miscellaneous game bits.