Gary Sax wrote: Naw, you're right. It wasn't addressing your points and not fair.
I'm sorry.
To contextualuze my comment, the Ferguson event speaks to the viewpoint of the game, that US could "win" the war on terror if it wasn't distracted from all this darn domestic political stuff (e.g. conflict around police brutality in the US). I reject that notion as completely as it is possible to at this point. I would argue the US has been at "hard" for 20 straight years with a comically sized military budget with almost nothing to show for it.
That's fine, I understand now: thanks for the explanation. It's a fair point. I haven't played the game in several years, but my recollection is that its model of the limitations on US "hard" power was as much about cajoling foreign nations as they were domestic.
You know, maybe? FWIW, I see it as a pitch perfect rebellion simulation, as I understand it better than Volko's later COIN which I have not played but generally has 4 players and a lot of back and forth cube pushing. The thing that never fit thematically with the real world to my mind is that the GWOT was never coordinated in nearly the integrated way that the game imagines by having the extremist player pulling strings effortlessly on rebellions in like Afghanistan and then popping over to Indonesia for a terror plot, then back to Egypt to stir up things. By contrast, many rebellions *are* coordinated in the way that the game imagines by having a rebel player and have a similar geography to the game re: governance and government control.
Two months ago, I traded for a copy of this game--I have yet to open the box. Because of the recent discussions, I ordered a copy of the expansion since it was on-sale at MM.
What's the best way to dive into learning how to play?
Oh, and, yet again, thanks to the dark forces on this site, especially Gary Sax, I'm now invested in playing yet another game.
I learned by using the 2-player Example of Play in the Playbook. This takes you through a few turns in detail, at the end of which you can play the rest of the game by yourself. This took a long time- 4/5 hours IIRC- but it definitely helped us get our heads around what were, to us at the time, completely unfamiliar game mechanics.
Example of play is really solid. It's not a super hard to game to get onboard with, I would just go right into it. The base game isn't that complex. I might start with the base game, to be honest, in your first few games. Then add the expansion mechanics. If you can play two player, that's probably better at first than to juggle with learning the solo spreadsheet and the game simultaneously.
I think my role on this site is to create shelf toads. To be fair, though, I don't see this one being a shelf toad for you. It's easy to get to the table from a mechanics perspective.
btw, if you choose to play solo I would probably start right off using the bot from the expansion rather than the base game.
Oh, one hard bit is the game is fundamentally quite asymmetrical. So that can be a problem re: learning.