New Cold War is a game about geopolitics that takes place from 1989 to 2019. It begins with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and ends with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Players (from 1 to 4) take the role of the great powers fighting for the new world order: Russia, China (forming the Red Bloc), the United States and the European Union (Blue Bloc). The allied powers will have to cooperate with each other (exchange of cards, media marker…), but victory will be individual. There are two victory conditions: a power must declare two of the hidden objectives on its agenda during the game or lead the victory point score at the end of the last turn of the game. The game consists of nine turns divided into three decades with a game duration of 150-180 minutes.

New Cold War is a Card Driven Game (CDG) featuring the 135 most important events of the 30 year period covered by the game. Your power’s cards can be played as an event or as operations, while opponents’ cards and your own negative cards are played as OPS and the event is executed for or against the power to which it belongs. OPS can be played in six different ways: 1) placing or removing influence on countries on the map (based on their stability, geopolitical value and initial alignment), 2) by staging a coup d’état, 3) stabilizing or destabilizing countries to protect or favor access to them, 4) advancing on the prestige marker, 5) advancing on the media marker, either alone or in cooperation with your ally (it is a track that is contested by blocks) or 6) creating a reserve of OPS to play in later rounds or game turns.

In this series of Event Card Spoilers, we will cover several different types of cards included in the game and from the different Decade Decks and give their details so that you can understand how the game works and how it incorporates the historical narrative of the new Cold War struggle between super powers from the end of the first Cold War through 2019.

Card #38: 1st Decade Deck – Battle of Mogadishu

This is one of the three Negative Events that the United States must face in the first decade (along with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Rwandan Genocide). The start of the game is usually quite favorable to the American player due to his starting position in 1989 after his victory in the Cold War. This card comes to hinder that comfortable initial path, by pushing back both the Prestige and Media Tracks as a reflection of the disastrous outcome of the Battle of Mogadishu. This was part of the civil war in Somalia that began in 1991 and in which the US participated, under a UN mandate, to try to protect humanitarian actions. On October 3, 1993, an operation to capture several leaders of rebel groups met with fierce resistance and ended with two Black Hawk helicopters shot down and 19 casualties, the bloodiest battle for US troops since the Vietnam War. The images of US soldiers being dragged through the streets were a hard blow for American public opinion. In addition, the political consequences were relevant and caused President Clinton to have to modify the intervention policies in subsequent conflicts, the most obvious being the case of Rwanda, which was one of the great failures of the international community.

This is end to this series and I wanted to give a thank you to both of the designers of the game, Andoni Orive and Igor Plaza, for their effort in providing these Event Card Spoilers. I am very much interested in this game, after having played a bit at WBC in August 2024, and I am excited to get this one to the table with our group.

You can catch up on the series to date by following these links:

Card #7: 1st Decade Deck – The Tibetan Conflict

Card #105: 3rd Decade Deck – Annexation of Crimea

Card #82: 1st Decade Deck – Warsaw Pact Dissolved

Card #134: 3rd Decade Deck – Rise of the Far Right

Card #41: 2nd Decade Deck – Afghanistan and Iraq Wars

Card #25: 3rd Decade Deck – Xi Jinping

Card #61: 1st Decade Deck – UNSC Presidency

Card #30: 1st Decade Deck – Gulf Monarchies

Card #63: 1st Decade Deck – Counter-Insurgency

Card #64: 1st Decade Deck – War Lords

Card #132: 3rd Decade Deck – Trading of Mineral Oil Products

Card #76: 3rd Decade Deck – Erdogan

Card #77: 3rd Decade Deck – Fake News

Card #19: Objective Card – Russia Objective

Card #135: 3rd Decade Deck – Brexit

Card #90: 2nd Decade Deck – Chávez

The game has recently been put up for pre-order and you can secure a copy for $68.00 from the VUCA Simulations website at the following link: https://vucasims.com/products/new-cold-war

-Grant