Interview at The Players Aid blog: Tupamaro
March 27, 2017 4 Comments
The ever-alert Grant Kleinheinz, one of the “Faithful Eight” (readers of this blog, that is) asked me some questions about Tupamaro, my game on the Uruguayan urban guerrilla movement that is coming out soon from One Small Step Games (Tupamaro available for pre-order from OSS Games!)
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I’m wondering if this system could be adapted to terrorist operations in Europe in the 1970s or 1980s. IRA in the UK and Ulster, ETA in Spain, the Brigate Rosse in Italy, for instance.
I am not sure it could be, at least not for the movements you have proposed.
I did adapt the system for a larger-scope guerrilla movement, the Sendero Luminoso, but the first thing that went away was the non-representational map.
In 2008, 14 years later, I did return to a strictly-urban setting in an experimental unpublished game, about an urban insurgency that arose in “Maracas”, the capital city of “Virtualia”, after the death or departure from power of the charismatic populist leader “Jesus Shaves”.
This one was Tupamaro really amped up, with many more moving parts and up to five different factions.
Perhaps too many moving parts for its own good, but I did adapt some of the ideas into other game designs.
What made the Uruguayan case so different was that almost all the action took place in just one city – there was not the usual urban-rural divide, and no extraterritorial sanctuaries. Even more importantly, there was no specific religious or ethnic divide as there was with the IRA and ETA, it was more of a war of group and class interests – which makes for a tempting comparison with the Brigate Rosse, except that the latter, while inspired by the Tupamaros, did not have the political dimension to their movement that the Tupamaros did.
No political party would have anything to do with them, least of all the Communists (Aldo Moro was killed by the Brigades partly because he was trying to draw the Communists into the government).
In any event, Italians knew that the greater threat to the Italian state was the neofascist right, which came close to launching a coup a couple of times during the “years of lead”.
I think if I did a Red Brigades game today, I would go more in the direction of a planning and intelligence game – something that got glossed over with this earlier, simpler system.
Brian
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