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Since GMT's Labyrinth may be GotY material...

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14 Dec 2010 14:57 #82058 by Space Ghost
What a joke. Most of the time, people with PhDs rub me the wrong way -- unfortunately, that is who I work with all the time. Often times, it is usually because they are self-important and don't want to admit that what they are concerned about doesn't matter to anyone (at least I can willingly admit that my research is somewhat marginal)

And, a PhD in 1990? Really. The nature of terrorism has changed I am sure. Hell, I have a major grant from ONR for developing analytic methods for fragmenting terrorist networks and I don't have the slightest damn idea about how realistic the game is, simulation or otherwise --- but, I bet I would have a better chance than someone who has a 20 year old degree and doesn't work in the field. Like dogmatix says, the good money is on the dude who is immersed in the field.

It is one thing to state a fact. Like I have a PhD in counter-terrorism and then give a humble, thoughtful review (this is like knowing Barnes has some kind of artsy degree....it gives more legitimacy to what he says, but he doesn't wield like a blunt, arrogant hammer). Sag has a math background, so it makes his game theory stuff more interesting (as does MuMU and some of his comments).

It is another thing to put it out there like it makes your statements fact. All it does is provide context. I have been in many a meeting where Mr. No PhD asks a question that makes Mr. PhD look like a dumbass. The arrogance causes laziness, which results in arguments built out of wholecloth.

I need to go play some pinball to simmer down....

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14 Dec 2010 15:26 #82060 by Gary Sax
Dogmatix wrote:

Here's VR's bio blurb as of 2008: MS:Foreign Service, Georgetown, 1986. Deputy Group Chief CIA Counterterrorism Center. Previous CIA Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Science & Technology. (And, since my employer provides a huge number of staff @ CIA CTC, I'll have to ask around to see who knows him...)

Pulled from a Georgetown School of Foreign Service publication on getting a job in foreign affairs

I'm kind of guessing that Volko is kind of clued in to US thinking in the CT policy realm.

Just a guess though... ;)


Wow, yeah, clued in would be a massive understatement.

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14 Dec 2010 15:56 #82062 by MattFantastic
I can't even get involved here. I'm still too worked up about how unfairly represented hobgoblins are in the new DungeonQuest reprint. It totally ruins the game and is an embarrassment to serious goblinoid studies majors everywhere.
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14 Dec 2010 16:17 #82067 by Schweig!
The DQ reprint does however realistically portray the equal magical opportunities act. Finally trolls are allowed to cast fireball at their own will.

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14 Dec 2010 17:56 #82080 by Notahandle
Oh, please, Matt, DQ is a gem of a simulation, compared to that abuse of a rain forest, Stronghold. Did you know the designer attended the Gliwice School of Art? Hardly Oxford or Cambridge is it? And don't even get me started on the colour coding absurdity of which cauldrons affect which goblinoids. Red for trolls, green for orcs, and white for goblins, that's twisted and wrong in so many ways...

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15 Sep 2016 22:32 - 16 Sep 2016 08:30 #234362 by Gary Sax
I'm dredging this thread back up from deep in the ground to add some thoughts. God. This thread was 6 fucking years ago. Many of the people in this thread are gone or rarely post. :(

I dragged Labyrinth back up this evening to play solo and I have some additional thoughts. Rereading, I still stand behind MOST of what I said upthread about the game and its model. Some additional thoughts about the game, though---

1) Pleasantly surprised. The game engine in this one is very good, worthy of GOTY stuff it got. Go play your copy again! Forgetting everything else about the realism of the model, it's still a very fun if wristy game. Some of the key interlocked mechanisms STILL really work---prestige/rest of the world posture, funding levels, overstretch by the US. There are enough rolls to balance things, but the most key rolls could be rare enough that I wonder---in particular major/minor jihad attempts and moves from fair->good governance. I want to play it a lot more and am now very keen to get the expansion.

On to thoughts about the game model vs. reality---note that I'm not trying to be too critical of Volko or the game except in one or two spots where he should have known at the time (see 3). As a social scientist I know it takes some real serious fucking balls to actually put your assumptions on the table and put together a model of one of the most important events/phenomenon of the modern era before there is a "safe" consensus on the hows and whys.

2) As an overall comment, in hindsight, modeling the game as a 2 player game is silly. This game as reality is a solo game. The US and allies quickly disrupted most kinds of coordination in terms of large scale operations after 9/11. Little beyond coordinating periodic terror attacks in other countries, a relatively low difficulty activity, still exists. Similarly, the game does not model the endless proxy war in various places around the world that the US is conducting through other governments rather than direct intervention themselves---see the US strongly supporting the murderous Saudi conflict in Yemen. This game models a very direct United States, for the most part, which hasn't necessarily panned out.

3) I think it doesn't do enough with it in some ways, but my current take, similar to my take 6 years ago, is that terrorism IS essentially about flagging state capacity in various places around the world rather than specific ideological or religious material or something like that. So Volko's focus on moving governance up and down was, I think, fundamentally right. But I think he blew it by not including more mechanisms for domestic governments and movements to affect the game state outside of the arbitrary 2 player US vs. terrorists split. But I am led to understand the expansion thinks hard about this? Great idea and the perfect place to expand the game.

4) Woof, while MOST of the cards are insightful and considered, some of them are total US propaganda in their effects. And many people at the time knew it too, so Volko probably has no excuse. The Saddam event chain is fantasy (Saddam sets terrorism funding to 9 :rolleyes:) while something like the Al Jazeera 3 op terrorist event is a sad piece of false shit. There are some other ugly ones as well.

5) I think the thing to realize most about this game is to see it as a game of its time, embedded in its time. You can tell who made it, a US official speaking the received wisdom of the US federal government in the mid- late-2000s. Take, for example, its many events which simply take what the US did in post-9/11 and assume that it worked and make them positive events. Best example is its event chain on patriot act, rendition, wiretaps, and violations of personal rights in the US. These are positive events that do a lot to fight terrorism in the game, but can be countered with nasty opposite events. So in this model, torture must work because the US did it but exposing it did some damage to the US reputation (Leak card). However, in retrospect, pretty definitive government reports tell us that torture did nothing positive in the war on terror at all. No information was gained from it. All it was was nasty and then hurt US prestige. But a game must, understandably, set up tradeoffs: what if the US and extremists took actions that had no real positive benefits at all in a misguided attempt to do something? The game MUST assume that activities that had no real positive effect did for the whole thing to work.

6) At the heart of the model is that governance can change positively quickly, and that outside actors have a significant role in improving it. If there's one thing that the last 15 years have taught us, it's probably that doing a regime change action and spending the next 5 actions adding troops and then improving governance is simply a fantasy. Shit, even using soft power or diplomacy to support state governance may be a fantasy as well. The Marshall Plan worked because it was a) mind bogglingnly large in monetary terms and b) polities in Western Europe and Japan were well institutionalized states before the devastation of the war. It's not clear that even a Marshall plan commitment would improve governance in any appreciable way in Afghanistan, Somalia or the remnants of Syria and Iraq. So on some level the entire premise of the game, boosting or shredding state capacity quickly through ordinary actions, is probably not true IMHO.
Last edit: 16 Sep 2016 08:30 by Gary Sax.

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16 Sep 2016 04:14 #234372 by Matt Thrower
Timley, what with the new expansion. I'm interested on how this changes the political stance of the game.
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16 Sep 2016 08:29 - 16 Sep 2016 12:07 #234379 by Gary Sax
Me too! I think the fundamental idea, adding domestic groups and resistance to the game, is grand. But reading some of the Inside GMT entries last night gave me some GRAVE misgivings about the model.

www.insidegmt.com/?p=1819
www.insidegmt.com/?p=3537
www.insidegmt.com/?p=1657

Gameplaywise looks cool. Someone in the the board games played thread said that it added more modifiers to rolls to give more control and less randomness? Could help the game.

Don't want to judge without playing but saying that terrorist sides are basically universally allied with repressive governments and the US was freedom facilitating and always benefited from and supported popular movements... OUCH:

"Continuing our example from above, at the beginning of the next turn the Jihadist plays the Muslim Brotherhood card, and places 3 Reaction markers in Egypt; both sides now have 4 support markers each. With Egypt becoming a US Ally during the previous Polarization Phase, the Jihadist player fears that the US player might deploy troops to Egypt, and decides to use his second card to play the unassociated event Revolution and trigger a Civil War in Egypt."

Like, this shit is very complicated, but the reality is that the Muslim Brotherhood victory was the outcome of a very democratic process in Egypt in the aftermath of Arab Spring events---a democratic outcome the US was not happy with at all for policy reasons. The US then stood by (and basically supported) the coup by Egypt's military to overthrow that democratic government. How does that fit into this patriotic simulation of the US as essentially freedom supporting? If there's one region the US has shown its commitment to foreign policy goals over freedom, it is the muslim world. It's why I thought the pre-expansion version of Volko's game basically worked if you assumed that "good governance" was mostly about state capacity and effectiveness and not representation or freedom.

Or another example... to say the Obama administration is/was "soft" is LAUGHABLE. If anything, there's universal consensus from right and left in the US on a "hard" policy of drone strikes, vigorous military action, etc. Look at our current election; one of the (only?) areas that both parties agree with one another in most ways on is defense and security policy. I worry about some of the judgment on events from what I've seen.
Last edit: 16 Sep 2016 12:07 by Gary Sax.
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04 Jan 2017 21:53 - 04 Jan 2017 22:38 #241835 by Gary Sax
I set up the new labyrinth expansion and played a turn or two. Fears confirmed from a current events perspective. I think the original design actually reflects an inaccurate but much more considered view of the conflict overall than the expansion (made by someone else).

The good is that the bot is better, so this is a great purchase if you play it solo. I also think gameplaywise adding the public opinion part and the militia pieces makes the game much better. These goods aren't minor, the game really benefits from these additional levers. I think the expansion is worth getting if you like the gameplay.

The bad is that the game's model has cracked at the seams. The last few years haven't been super kind to it, and I feel like they've been even *worse* to the way the game decides to model the arab public, introduced in the expansion. Basically, the assumption that the US government is acting at all times to achieve good governance and democracy looks increasingly insane and, even more than that, the idea that public demonstration for representation and democracy during the Arab spring was on balance strongly pro-US is truly laughable.

All you need to do is look at Egypt. Technically, in game terms, the Egyptian public came out for democracy (gained +3 or +4 awakening markers) which in the game automatically makes them allied with the US and US goals in addition to improving governance through successfully facing down the repressive Egyptian dictatorship (makes "war of ideas" actions performed by the US player, which are just governance improvement efforts, easier).

Of course, as I discussed above months ago, in reality, the Egyptian public overthrew the authoritarian regime and elected the popular Muslim Brotherhood in reasonably free and fair elections---move to Fair Governance in game terms, perhaps. But in the real world the US then completely turned their back on Egyptian democracy because it did not align with US foreign policy goals and the US stood by semi-approvingly as the Egyptian military retook Egypt and installed a new dictatorship that the Obama administration liked better..

Put simply, the idea that domestic public's thirst for overthrowing repressive regimes and US foreign policy naturally align in this game is a joke, and it is the very underpinning of the entire design of the expansion, as if designed by some sort of right wing superpatriot who makes the US Navy recruiting ads which give it the truly laughable moniker "a global force for good." Making this game single dimensional on a variety of dimensions (US likes: good governance, allied regime, awakened publics demanding their rights and overthrowing autocrats) just doesn't work and it makes the game narrative cringeworthy at times.

I can actually more easily accept the two player game fantasy associated with the game, that there is any meaningful coordination between the world's associated Islamic extremists, than I can the above bit.

BUT MOST OF ALL. I want to be productive here---I don't think this was inevitable. My biggest disappointment with the whole model Volko created for Labyrinth is that he underused the thing in the game that absolutely could have abstractly handled all of this with some style! It's such a shame that regimes have a governance quality and also have a U.S. ally/neutral/adversary rating---suggesting that, in fact, he did at one point have the thought that maybe there was more than one dimension to the political situation in the muslim world---but almost no cards or mechanics play off the 2nd dimension, the ally/neutral/adversary stuff. The game could totally model this problem---have awakening/reaction markers try to improve/degrade governance but have uncertain or at times hostile effects (awakening) or desireable (reaction) on the country's alignment. Give the US and jihadist players some uncertainty about the effects of popular domestic will---does the US support and cheerlead the Arab Spring? Even if it could create civil war and overthrow very nasty but allied regimes (i.e. akin to"our" dictators from the Cold War)? Perhaps allow a country to move to "good governance" but also be an adversary after the public mass movement takes power---a well governed, transparent country that the US does not like, doesn't deal with well and can't influence or perform many actions in. Perhaps even allow that adversary country to have militia that fight for local representation but in a country the US doesn't cooperate with! But the mechanic is really unused/underused here, same with the base game. It is SUCH a shame.
Last edit: 04 Jan 2017 22:38 by Gary Sax.
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05 Jan 2017 00:31 #241837 by Cranberries
Great post. The mechanism you mention doesn't seem to be used in real life either.

I don't think I could enjoy playing that game after having lived in the ME, seen the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and read this post. Are there any CDGs that do the Middle East more accurately? It seems like the punchline of any realistic ME game would have to be something like the ending of Chinatown, with General Sissi or some corrupt new dictator driving off into the sunset with the hoodwinked voters in the seat next to them. [sneak in a Trump reference but make sure SuperFly is not around]

What if you re-skinned the morally ambivalent Android so it was a game about the Middle East, and your job is to build a narrative that makes your country look good regardless of what actually happens?
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05 Jan 2017 07:33 #241838 by dontbecruel

cranberries wrote: What if you re-skinned the morally ambivalent Android so it was a game about the Middle East, and your job is to build a narrative that makes your country look good regardless of what actually happens?


This is a fantastic idea. A political game that undermines the protagonists' delusions of agency.

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05 Jan 2017 09:29 #241850 by Jackwraith

Gary Sax wrote: The bad is that the game's model has cracked at the seams. The last few years haven't been super kind to it, and I feel like they've been even *worse* to the way the game decides to model the arab public, introduced in the expansion. Basically, the assumption that the US government is acting at all times to achieve good governance and democracy looks increasingly insane and, even more than that, the idea that public demonstration for representation and democracy during the Arab spring was on balance strongly pro-US is truly laughable.


This has been the case for a very long time ("The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." - Simon Bolivar, 1829.) and was kind of the root of my disaffectation with the game to begin with. If it's a simulation, at least try to simulate reality/history, rather than just argue your political angle. All games must simplify. Not all need be simplistic. GMT has done a good job of that in the past, as any number of games (Twilight Struggle, 1960, Here I Stand, Sekigahara, etc.) have demonstrated. Yes, TS assigns too much agency to the US and USSR for certain world events, but it doesn't create outright fantasy in the manner that Labyrinth does.

Is it a game designer's obligation to try to represent reality in an historical simulation? I think so. If the game doesn't, then at least present an overt disclaimer about why particular mechanics work as they do (Sekigahara has one of these, for example.) It's not a national crisis if games have a slant anymore than it is if other forms of entertainment (like movies) do, but it's nice that when something is presented as reflective of history (even if it's "just a game"), it at least tries to use a decent mirror.

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05 Jan 2017 11:07 - 05 Jan 2017 11:41 #241855 by Gary Sax
Man, some of these cards... fuck.

Jihadist event Ferguson with picture of rioter, "Domestic concerns distract POTUS." Really? Couldn't you have just used domestic issues as a card or something? Man. Volko's original deck had some questionable stuff but the designer here is much more cringe worthy.

That said, still think this addition of militia is great and the AI is leaps and bounds better. Also civil war is an interesting mechanic that doesn't inherently serve either side, good design for effect IMHO. But ugh. Don't know how to feel about the expansion since the game seems better---early days yet, of course---some of the events may be unbalanced as I play more, we'll see... like Jackwraith said.

One of the few times I've wanted to sit down and modify a system myself and do some game design. In this case to make the game cards and events key in on the many times the contradictory 2 dimensions of countries (virtually unused in the game!), us ally and good governance, conflict.
Last edit: 05 Jan 2017 11:41 by Gary Sax.
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05 Jan 2017 11:27 #241856 by Msample
I have not seen the final product, but the designer of the expansion posted some cards early on that had a number of people saying "WTF are you serious?" . IIRC one was a picture of an American woman who was killed on an event card. I think after that GMT stepped in to try to guide him and I think that particular one got removed. But overall I don't get the impression Volko had a huge part in the expansion, I could be wrong.

I really like the original as a game and will pick up the expansion at some point. I don't read too much into the political slant of the design intent; the game is pretty abstract as it is.
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06 Jan 2017 07:26 #241882 by Matt Thrower

Jackwraith wrote: Is it a game designer's obligation to try to represent reality in an historical simulation? I think so.


You may recall that I've spoken to Volko about this for various features about political games: more than once IIRC. His stance is that a game should not attempt to be predictive. Rather, it is a model of something which allows you to test the potential outcomes of that model. It's not the game's job to determine whether the model is accurate: that requires soft, human analysis.

It's unfortunate for Labyrinth, if perhaps predictable, that its subject matter went on to become so pivotal in world events. From what Voloko told me, it seems it wasn't ever really intended to be a "historical" game at all. It's a model of the potential effects of soft vs hard power on the Muslim world. If that model hadn't become so crucial to current affairs, I doubt we'd be discussing its realism at all.

FWIW I have many problems with the assumptions of the model it projects. But those assumptions are clearly stated in the rule book. Just because it proved a bad model doesn't make it a bad game.
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