New solo game: Dislocated

A few weeks ago I put together Dislocated, a simple and fast abstract game for one player about some of the problems posed for military, government and non-government organizations when they are tasked with assisting large numbers of people on the move. The people shown in this abstracted model are moving away from some kind of threat – a battle or invasion, a disaster, a violent mass movement, some kind of monster protected by copyright legislation, etc.. The United States Department of Defense calls these people Dislocated Civilians or DCs; the Department of State calls them Internally Displaced Persons, and other organizations variously call them refugees, evacuees or other descriptive terms.

The game is played in turns. In each turn cards representing groups of DCs will be drawn from a deck of ordinary playing cards and placed at the top of a notional grid of spaces arranged in rows and columns, while other card groups move downwards towards the bottom of the grid. The Player will move their unit counters representing organizations and services to place them with groups of cards, and then roll dice to obtain a score that will allow all, some or none of the cards in the groups to be removed from the game (signifying that their primary needs have been addressed, so that in the short term at least they may be considered safe or healthy or settled).

But the needs and demands to be satisfied are larger than the resources and services available, so some cards will exit off the bottom of the Field; these cards are “lost”. The game is over when all the cards have made their way through the Field, and the Player’s level of success depends on the total values of cards that were lost.

From the Designer’s Notes:

This game is of course a hideous abstraction and generalization of the activities of organizations that work in Humanitarian Action and Disaster Relief, and the elements of the military that work in Civil Affairs and Civilian-Military Cooperation (CIMIC). The designer’s hope is that it may give some insight to a player who does not have experience in these fields and gain appreciation for their efforts to help and protect people.

The game attempts to present the player with the following points or dilemmas:

• Dislocated Civilians are groups of vulnerable people who arrive in the area with a variety of needs.

• These needs normally vastly outweigh the services available but must be matched with those services as efficiently as possible.

• Through a combination of frictional events, swamped resources, and chaotic movement of people, some DCs will not be helped – “lost”, in game terms. You can’t catch ‘em all, but you need to try.

Components needed: the rules file, one deck of ordinary playing cards, 12 six-sided dice (player can make unit counters or use the face cards in the deck).

Rules file: Disloc rules 30 April 2024
Playing time less than 30 minutes.