With this new My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.

Card #16: NEST (Nuclear Emergency Support Team) from Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games

Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? from GMT Games is a 2-player asymmetrical Card Driven Game that pits the mighty and powerful United States military and all of its various antiterrorist agencies against the Jihadists in the Middle East whose sole goal is to spread terror, sow the seeds of deceit and ultimately destroy Western civilization.

One of the Jihadist’s greatest tools are the Terror Plots, which can be placed around the globe and generate resources for their efforts if they survive and are not discovered by the United States player. But much more dangerous than the typical Terror Plots are the Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMD’s. Once these have been obtained by the Jihadists from either Pakistan or Russia, and are then in the open, the game state changes a bit and the tension really ratchets up as they can become the source of an automatic victory if they ever get placed in the United States and go off.

Omniscience is a power that would make our lives easier as we would know everything that is going to occur before it happens. Just as that would be powerful in real life, in the game if the US player has played the NEST card and has the ability to know if Terror Plots placed by the Jihadist player in the United States will end the game or not (because they are WMD’s), that is powerful. While this card will not help you in being able to get rid of any face-up discovered WMD Plots on US soil (you will still need to play a 3 Ops card to do that), I think this card is still very important; but it becomes absolutely vital, in my humble opinion, if the Jihadist player has acquired WMD’s. A side note, it is also absolutely deflating when you can see what is coming at you and know you are about to lose, but in looking at your hand have no 3 Ops cards available to help get rid of the problem! I know how this feels as I have had that scenario in the game before.

The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), formerly known as the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, is a team of scientists, technicians, and engineers operating under the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA). NEST is the umbrella designation that encompasses all DOE/NNSA radiological and nuclear emergency response functions; some of which date back more than 60 years. NEST’s responsibilities include both national security missions, particularly; finding and countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), both biological and nuclear, and preserving and protecting public health and safety, including responses to nuclear reactor accidents. NEST’s task is to “be prepared to respond immediately to any type of radiological accident or incident anywhere in the world”. NEST’s motto is “Scientifically Informed, Operationally Focused” and reflects the technical underpinning of its diverse operational missions.

In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at North Korea Launches Missile from Flashpoint: South China Sea from GMT Games.

-Grant