We have been following the exploits of a newer designer V.P.J. Arponen over the past several years since his very unique entry into the COIN Series called All Bridges Burning broke in 2019. Since that time, he has been working on his new game called Order & Opportunity, which was announced by GMT Games in February 2023 and takes a look at the post-Cold War world order set in the first decades of the 21st century with the major powers of the United States, Russia, China and the EU controlling the direction of the agenda. Since that time, we have hosted an interview with Vez and also highlighted some of the cards in the game with our Event Card Spoilers Series.
If you are interested, you can check out that interview at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2023/08/21/interview-with-v-p-j-arponen-designer-of-order-opportunity-from-gmt-games/
If you missed the Event Card Spoiler entries covering the game, you can catch up on the posts to date by following the below links:
#12 War on Terror/Operation Enduring Freedom
#43 Belt & Road Initiative/Dependencies Created
#15 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act
Recently, Vez reached out to see if we would be interested in hosting a Designer Diary Series where he would go into the background on the design and how it has progressed over the past year. Of course we were interested and are excited to share the following with our readers.
My game Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order is currently available for preorder with GMT Games. In these design diary entries I will be writing about various design choices that were made while developing the game over the past several years.
Crises and Overreach
In the first installment to this series of design diary entries on Order & Opportunity, I talked about some of the main lines of the post-Cold War period as I was experiencing it in my personal life. As the contours of that picture were still unfolding in real time, I began to ideate a game that would eventually become Order & Opportunity.
From the design perspective, it felt important to represent, both, the threat of an implosion of Western Democracy from within as well as the kind of pressures it was coming under from the outside.
Mechanically, the pressures from within came to be represented by the Consequences mechanic. I’ve written about this mechanic extensively elsewhere and you can read that at the following link: https://insidegmt.com/order-opportunity-a-perspective-to-the-post-cold-war-period/
In a nutshell, playing more cards, while attractive for obvious reasons, can impose penalties on the player in the form of Consequences. Whether and how the penalties hit is down to the random “headline” card draw at the start of each turn. This heightens the sense of a threat that may or may not materialize.
All in all, the mechanic feels like a self-inflicted wound, an ax hanging over the head threatening to drop. I thought this neatly recreates the post-Cold War mood in the West of a hegemon wounding itself a little with every move it makes. There are different types of Consequences, each simulating a dimension of the hegemon’s self-inflicted wounds.
One dimension is the military dimension represented by the military suit. The legacy of the post-Cold War US-led interventionism in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya weighs heavy on the scales today still. In the “global South” these interventions did a lot to reinforce an imagery of the West as a ruthless neo-colonialist Goliath. For some among
the Western audiences these interventions represent radical failures of the political elite engaged in “forever wars” for shady, perhaps economic or other self-aggrandizing motives.
For the enemies of the West, the interventions gave a rhetorical weapon of the first order to argue what Western “democracy” meant for others in practice.
Represented by the Consequences of playing the economic suit in the game, the 2008 financial crises did similar damage in the economic realm. For many the toxic “sub prime” financial instruments that enabled excessive risk taking were a symptom of economic elites and economic globalization gone out of control. Again, for many in our societies it added to the insult that, over the years that followed, very few were held legally responsible for their excesses.
The third type of Consequence is the rising Terror Threat level. Many of us will remember
the phase of increased threat of terror attacks in the homeland across Europe and the United States. In a way the 9/11 attacks marked the start of a period of brutal attacks of various scales. The emergence of the Islamic State terror group in the Middle East lead to a renewed wave of such attacks. The feeling of a constant threat of such attacks set the public mood in the first two decades of the 21st century.
In the next few installments to this design diary we will discuss the card play design in Order & Opportunity.
If you missed the first part in the series, you can catch up on that at the following links;
If you are interested in Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order, you can pre-order a copy for $55.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1027-order-opportunity.aspx
-Grant
The Players' Aid 