Future Procurement Game

Offside report on James Halstead’s game by Jim Wallman

James brought his slightly delayed game about a number of polities seeking to collaborate on purchasing key military equipment.  The players represented five different polities in a science fiction setting.  The science fiction background was to distance the gameplay from the complexities that might arise if this were set in a more recognisable real-world setting.  I believe James was seeking to explore the tensions, trade-off an complexities inherent in joint defence equipment projects.

Players had information about their allocation of resources in terms of industrial capacity, finance and R&D.  Each player has slightly different mix of these things, and also had a ‘military requirement’ for the future system.  The balance of resources and capability requirement meant that although, in theory, each polity could develop their own sovereign capability, a better outcome was possible by collaborating with at least one other polity.  And throughout this, the perfect solution was unattainable – each player was seeking to arrive at the ‘least worst’ outcome and have a piece of kit that met as much of the military requirement as possible.

The other polities were played by one player each, and I was part of the hybrid team comprising me, Nick D and Nick L.  This, I think would be my preferred way of playing the game because even though the decision we had to take were fairly simple the discussion was interesting.

In terms of gameplay I found that the decisions required were actually fairly easy to arrive at – the constraints and trade-offs were tight so it made it easy to min-max the outcome with little in the way of grey areas. It didn’t detract from gameplay overmuch because it meant we could agree and move on quickly.

A number of thoughts occurred to me that James might consider:

a.  Make the trade-off less obvious,  This is, of course a balancing issue.

b.  As an entirely personal preference I’m not a fan of victory points as a metric of success.  And I’m not sure they’re necessary here – our objective was to deliver as much of the military requirement as possible within the resources constraints.  Regardless of arbitrary points, I would be happy just knowing we got a ship actually built in sufficient numbers that could deliver ‘terror from the skies’ (in our case).  Abandoning victory points might also make the game simpler?

c.  The political capital points were a bit stingy, and there could be something that gains us PC as well as costs us (achieving project milestones, for example).

d.  The game could have consequences to completely outsourcing Industrial production or R&D (though I see that as an optional complication).

Overall a great subject and I liked the way the game was balanced, and look forward to seeing the next version.