My Thursday nights are generally spent playing wargames of one sort or another. Of late, we’ve been playing some 3-player games, but with Jon away, Sarah and I decided to play some Netrunner instead. It’s a really great game, but it didn’t really take very long to get through five games and decide we needed to tinker with our decks some more. We’d brought in our Lord of the Rings decks, but neither of us was feeling in the mood for that. So, I went to the car and brought out a game that neither of us had played for a year: Labyrinth, the War on Terror.
This design, by Volko Ruhnke and published by GMT Games, is a good one. It pits the forces of the US against the forces that would undermine US influence in the Middle East. It’s not really a simulation of what’s really going on, but it’s an excellent game, deriving some of its mechanics from the line of Card Driven Games starting with We the People. Its most illustrious ancestor is Twilight Struggle, but the forces you handle are quite different to those in that game.
In this game, Sarah took the role of the US and I took those of the Jihadists. It was just after September 11, and the US’s attention had been forcibly turned to the Middle East. Sarah went straight for the invasion of Afghanistan and immediately captured Osama Bin Ladin. How different would have the history of the world been if that had really happened!
(Capturing Osama in the game requires the US player to hold the proper card and there to be no states under Jihadist control – it’s not too unlikely, but it’s rare to happen in the opening turn).
Although Afghanistan now had a lot of US troops there, the US hadn’t yet been able to install a US-friendly government. So, I kept the Jihadists active there whilst also infiltrating Pakistan and starting to move into Somalia which was friendly to my cause. Opinion in the rest of the world began to turn “soft” – preferring diplomatic manoeuvres to the US’s “hard” stance, and Sarah found it difficult to get the states of the Middle East to follow her lead.
In response to my greater numbers in Afghanistan, Sarah deployed even more troops, and began conducting military operations there which greatly reduced their numbers, though it was costly to Sarah in terms of time. An election in the US saw the fall of the “hard” policy and the adoption of a “soft” policy, but US world prestige had hit horribly low levels.
Sarah did manage to get Pakistan to a state where it was aiding the US fully, and thus helped stabilise Afghanistan. Meanwhile, I began building up jihadist numbers is Somalia.
One of the effects of having a high troop deployment in the game is that the US doesn’t draw as many cards; the number of cards drawn by the Jihadist depends on their Funding, which goes up with their successes and down with US successes and just generally due to inaction. I was able to keep my funding high, mostly through card plays – Sarah got it down to 4 from a top of 9, only to see Saddam Hussein step in and restore the funding.
The jihadists in Somalia managed to set up a government that supported them, and Sarah – frustrated by her lack of success in Afghanistan – pulled out. Her prestige was low and she wanted to try a softer approach. I took advantage of that to build up again and was able to turn Afghanistan back to jihadist rule.
The play of “The door of Itjihad was closed” destroyed my ability to plan my next turn – the order I played cards would be random. Sarah took advantage of this to recoup; I mainly spent my time recruiting and moving jihadists into Central Asia, ready for another governmental take-over there. Sarah managed to get the Gulf States on-side. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the Middle East was still pretty hostile to her advances.
At this stage I controlled three countries of moderately low resources, but one more would give me the game. Sarah, meanwhile, had the world behind her tactics and had regained a lot of prestige (making her attempts of changing the attitudes of the Middle East more successful). She was able to shift Iraq to being an ally without actually changing the government – it still wasn’t a good government in US terms – and was able to completely wipe me out of Lebanon after my first, failed coup attempt there.
Sarah suffered a sudden check in Pakistan as the current government was replaced by one hostile to her rule. My funding had collapsed due to some great plays from Sarah, and I was having trouble building up the requisite numbers to force another country to accept the jihadists. Turkey was my new target, as Lebanon was proving troublesome to move units into.
Despite the set-back in Pakistan, Sarah was able to finally make Iraq fully co-operative with her; this made it very likely that Saudi Arabia would then co-operate and she’d win the game due to controlling a goodly portion of the wealth of the nation. My first attempt to take over in Turkey failed, and I had to recruit new jihadists; this I was successful in doing, and the next attempt did not fail. Turkey installed a new government favourable to the jihadists, and I now controlled 6 resources – enough to give me the game. Sarah was pretty close to winning as well!
Labyrinth is a challenging game. There’s a lot of dice-rolling in the game, and though you can massage the probabilities, there are times when things just go against you; you can get quite frustrated with several failed rolls in a row. It’s quite likely for the US to fail a lot of rolls – it’s just the way it works, but every successful US roll makes their job easier and the job of the jihadist player more difficult.
Volko Ruhnke has some later games that build on the mechanics of Labyrinth – the COIN series, of which Andean Abyss is the first (set in Columbia). They’re four-player games and well worth looking at; Sarah and I enjoy them more than Labyrinth, but finding four players can be tricky. The next two in the series – Cuba Libre and A Distant Plain – should soon be arriving in my mailbox. Well, late August/early September at least.