Offside Report – Yevinsgrad

These are a few thoughts on one of Evan’s sessions at the January meeting. I’ll link to more details about the game if they’re made public. In the meantime, as a very brief summary, this was a committee game set if a very soviet-like state, with the players acting as members of a Politburo – vying for influence and funding.

This was interesting and useful to critique as a half-complete game – which I should stress is the feedback the designer wanted. Unlike the designer’s intentions, as soon as we started getting into this I was struck how suitable it felt for a student audience, say undergraduate and above. There’s such a crucial difference between reading about history, or even current events, and being “in” those situations in some way, in having to make those kind of decisions under pressure. This is exactly the kind of game I would have loved to have played at college, to give me a better idea of what was going on, and to create some kind of hook for the knowledge I was trying to retain.

But I don’t think is Evan’s intention, he sees it more as an introduction to megagaming and wargaming. I’m not sure it works in that respect, as shown by the discussion we had afterwards around the definitions of those terms. In discussion Evan said the game was about backstabbing / betrayal, but in any game I like the idea of those not being a forced options, otherwise you’re just playing Among Us or The Traitors at a larger scale. I think it’s more interesting to be in a scenario where co-operation, through negotiation, can potentially help everyone get through a situation. Then you see who fights hard to make that work, and who takes a different path … and also how estimations of the chances of success differ between players.

Also, in an educational context, I think it would be useful to inspire the players to discuss what kind of game it is; and although the game was based in a fictitious country, where the game differs from real world practices. The game is openly only based on limited research of real world events, which leaves lots of scope for informed players to demonstrate the knowledge they have by suggesting improvements. I think that’s a useful exercise in and of itself, but also to those who don’t game a lot it makes the point that a game’s rules are malleable, something that can be changed with an aim in mind, rather than an immutable decree from a designer or publisher.

Especially with a context not literally based on a real world country, and aimed at players not used to this kind of game – I think it needs a lot more structure to act as guardrails, and also much simpler and more immediate introductions on how they game should be played, the options available to the players, and the expectations of them.

Without Evan specifically running this I think the game is incomplete in its current format. But this worked well on the day, having something half complete brought to the group to give us all something to think about. And reflect on our own systems too. For example it’s a minor point, but in the game advantages and disadvantages stack, so if you have a single dice roll with double disadvantage you roll three dice and pick the worst out of all three – it was interesting to consider what that meant for gameplay, as well as what message that conveyed to players about the nature of the situation they were in.