A Very German Revolution – offside report from Jur

See the other on- and offside reports by Jaap and Nick Drage for background.

I think the briefings were enough to work with for a 1.5 hour session, of which part was used to get up to speed.

As the member of government responsible for Finance, I set my short term aims to maintain law and order and financial stability, and I favoured cooperation with military and policy to ensure that (as well as guarding bank buildings). I figured the soldiers’ and workers’ councils would be a good counterweight to a possible coup by the military, so we should try to keep them onside as long as possible.

Also principally (as per my brief) I would want a roll back of the repressive legislation that had turned Germany into a military dictatorship as soon as possible. But as long as there was no armistice nor peace, the German army needed to remain a credible force in the field during negotiations with the enemy, These were very short term goals, but that seemed to be the horizon of the game for me.

So I envisioned the game to be a kind of high powered, practical meeting based on the question: what do we need to do to consolidate power? It never quite got there. Although as a gamer, I can see why we yearn for ‘structure’ and ‘an agenda’, it is also clear that there is no official manual for a revolution, and the situation is inherently up for grabs of the actors that act. You have to figure out the agenda yourself.

There were several interventions during the game of players that wanted to get back to decision making, but it was always too easy to revert to daydreaming of the Neues Deutschland, instructions to our emissary to the enemy (who we couldn’t contact) or discussing the legality of our government.

Whatever our historical counterparts failed to do, according to 20/20 quarterbackers (see Jaap’s post), they definitely were more decisive. As revolutionairies, I’m afraid we failed, although we may have been quite representative of all those failed revolutions and coups throughout history.

So, I think this format and these briefings were, if not perfect, at least very fitting to the game limits of time, preparation and historical setting.

There are indeed several ways you could expand the game’s time frame. When I read The King’s Depart by Richard Watt, I thought of a German Revolution game based on the board game Junta, with players holding cards of various factions in parliament and ‘on the street’. The coup/revolution resolution of Junta is rather clunky, but if the coup/revolution is the final act of a game, that might actually not be too bad. (In Junta it is problematic because you have several coups during a game, and some coups are so one-sided it’s tedious).