Soundtrack to Civil Power

In the new year a revised version of Civil Power, a tactical-level game I designed on urban riots and mayhem, will be published by a company called Conflict Simulations. I first designed this game back in 1991-92, and it came with a set of scenarios taken from history and then-contemporary headlines… this new version has a lot of changes informed by over 25 years of designing in between, and a whole new cast of global angst and violence.

https://www.consimsltd.com/shop/civil-power

So I thought, why not make a playlist to serve as a sort of soundtrack to playing it? The above is 78 minutes of anti-authority music of many genres (most of them loud and snotty), in an easy-to-handle 44K VBR. Hope you enjoy, even if you don’t order my game!

 

Track listing:

Glory to Hong Kong – anonymous student rebel orchestra
Tommy Gun – The Clash
Fist – Test Department
Solidaritätslied – Ernst Busch Chorus (film clip)
Landlord – Test Department
Ready to Blow – KMFDM
Babylon’s Burning – The Ruts
Wake Up – Rage Against the Machine
Riot – Dead Kennedys
Ghetto Defendant – The Clash
All That I wanted – Belfegore
Smash It Up – International Noise Conspiracy
Kick Out The Jams – MC5
Fight The Power – Public Enemy
Rise Above – Black Flag
Killing In The Name – Rage Against The Machine
Guns of Brixton – The Clash
Police Truck – Dead Kennedys
Wild in the Streets – Circle Jerks
General Strike – DOA
Clampdown – The Clash

 

Obligatory end-of-year review, 2019

Well, another year has zipped by. A busy year too, though day job stuff dominated my busy:

Game publishing

• January: Hollandspiele partnered with Second Chance Games to make copies of my games available across the pond. Hollandspiele + Second Chance Games = $ales$ !!
• July: The Brief Border wars quad went up for pre-orders at Compass Games. Brief Border Wars quad now available for pre-order!
• August: Kashmir Crisis, a very small and fast abstract card game, went up on the free games page. New game: Kashmir Crisis China’s War 1937-41 went up for P500 and made the point in about three days. China’s War is up for P500! And even though I would not get my designer copies for a while, Nights of Fire was starting to thud onto people’s tables! Nights Are Falling
• September: District Commander Maracas was published by Hollandspiele! I took down the PnP module and replaced it with the Algeria 1959 module, District Commander ZNO (Zone Nord Oranais).  New free game: ZNO (District Commander module) I also made up a few more copies of Balkan Gamble. Revenge of the Balkan Gamble
• October: A revised version of Civil Power was announced for pre-orders, to come from Conflict Simulations LLC in I guess the first half of 2020. “At man in purple suit waving axe, one round, FIRE!” – CIVIL POWER now available for pre-order from Conflict Simulations Ltd.  Also, in reaction to the results of the federal election, I made up a “Qwexit” scenario for Canadian Civil War. Qwexit: a scenario for Canadian “Civil War”
• November: Nights of Fire finally arrived! Very pleased with the result. Nights of Fire here at last!

Game design work and future publication

Work and or testing continued throughout the year on some of the following:

• China’s War: testing testing, and hoping to get into development in early 2020. Almost 900 pre-orders now.
• Strongman, an extensive rework of Caudillo that may be a while coming, and publisher not completely confirmed. Really need to spend some time on this but it needs multiple people to play it.
• Brief Border Wars Quad, from Compass Games – up for pre-order and probably will come out in the first half of 2020: not sure what conditions they apply to pull the trigger.
• District Commander series, from Hollandspiele – Maracas is out, Binh Dinh is coming next; maybe Kandahar might be out in 2020, or maybe not. Meanwhile, the Algeria module is available for free PnP.
• Semi-abstract urban counterinsurgency games: I have been working on two of these for some time now, can’t get time to finish them off. Will likely put them up for free PnP as few people seem interested in this kind of thing.
• Civil Power: This was one of the first games I ever designed (1991-92) and revising it after 25 years is proving almost as much work as doing a new one. Like the original version, this will have a lot of new scenarios based on contemporary headlines: Hong Kong 2019, duelling mobs in Caracas, Violent Demo USA, etc..

Conferences and conventions

Not so busy year on this front:

• February: I attended Connections North for the first time, at McGill University. It was a great but short event: I made a presentation, met some nice folks, role-played CDS John Vance in the megagame about a zombie outbreak, and spent some quality time talking with Jim Wallman! Into the White
• April: I went to Marine Corps University at MCB Quantico April 2-5 for a special MORS event on urban warfare. I presented on the different games I had worked on to cover urban conflict at the operational level. There were some really imaginative analyses but it seems to me that the professional military is still consumed by the likely problems of standing armies fighting “peer” forces in an urban environment, not the far more likely and nastier irregular warfare. Studies in Concrete
• June: Consimworld Expo at Tempe, AZ. High point was meeting and spending time with Nick Karp and Mark Herman, two Gods of Design, and a long, fun interview with Harold Buchanan for his podcast! Back from Consimworld Expo 2019
• July-August-September: no Connections conferences for me, in any flavour, as Day Job kept me too busy. I intend to attend as many as I can in 2020.
• November: BottosCon was fun as it usually is, though I got there rather late. Still, got some testing of China’s War and Kashmir Crisis in, and picked up a couple of nice games in the flea market. BottosCon pictures  .

Writing

• Not a productive year, as far as writing about war and games. Nothing formally published, just the usual torrent of wise-guy stuff on blogs, sites and social media.

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Near-meaningless digest of site statistics:

• I seem to be cruising still at just below 2,000 views per month, but about 3,000 fewer than 2018. About 8,000 visitors. The five most curious countries were: US (by a very wide margin), UK, Canada, Italy and Australia. One guy clicked in from Ghana! Don’t know what to make of that.
• Besides the then-current post, popular pages or posts included the BTR Games, Free Games and Scenarios and Variants pages. No surprises there.
• The most clicked-on and/or downloaded documents (WordPress started measuring downloads in July 2019) were the files for the free games District Commander,  Ukrainian Crisis, Third Lebanon War and Battle of Seattle.

The Afghanistan Papers

Starting today, the Washington Post is running a series of articles on the aims and conduct of the conflict in Afghanistan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents

It will come as a surprise to no one that the war was a muddled, aimless, expensive and bloody mess. What may come as a bit more of a revelation is how the US military and government worked to “polish the turd”: to misrepresent, embroider, creatively omit, or just lie that the war was being won, somehow… not that this was being done, but how extensively and thoroughly, under two administrations.

The Post obtained these documents through FOI requests and a three year legal battle involving two lawsuits. No purloined photocopies as with the Pentagon Papers, and no hand-wringing over whether to publish them, so no Tom Hanks movie but these are important documents.

Playtester call: Civil Power

Provisional cover art, by “seado3”

Comrades, the time has come to render aid.

Civil Power, my tactical “sandbox” game on civil unrest will be published by Conflict Simulations Ltd. next year but first it’s time for some concerted playtesting.

Kevin Conway has made up a Vassal module, and we are looking for people to take the game and its scenarios for a spin. If you want to get involved, here are the requirements:

• Have Vassal on your machine, and know how to use it.
• Know what Basecamp3 is and how to use it, or have rudimentary experience with some similar web-based project management software (mostly leaving messages and downloading files).
• Email rweiss@consimsltd.com to get onto the site.
• Don’t be a flake. I appreciate your time and help; let’s make it worthwhile.

I’ve been doing some more work on this game the last while, overhauling language and revising mechanics. This is one of the first games I designed (technically the second; my very first was in 1982, a very derivative game on the Pusan Perimeter) and I’ve written a lot of rules since then.

I’ve also been revising, dropping and adding scenarios: currently there are 13.  Back in 1991/92 I was drawing them up based on newspaper headlines, so there are scenarios for things like the LA riots and one based on keeping Afrikaner neo-Nazis out of a hotel… but these are restive times we are in, so I have added 2019 Hong Kong and Caracas protest-counterprotest scenarios for 2019. It won’t be difficult for players to make their own.