Order & Opportunity is a 1 to 4 player game with a dedicated solo system about the making of the post-Cold War world order covering the first decades of the 21st century. In the game, the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union compete over control of the agenda and ultimately over victory points in the dimensions of economic, political, cultural, and security power projection. Order & Opportunity combines card-driven, asymmetric gameplay to produce a topical and thematic historical game on a global scale. The game offers a distinctive and captivating play experience at every one of its player counts. Order & Opportunity begins in the early 2000s and covers the next twenty years of global, multidimensional power competition. In that setting, the game aims at creating a thematic experience of the period as players are faced with historical and familiar crises, challenges, and opportunities as they emerge from gameplay.
Your readers might know me from my first published game: the COIN Series Volume X, All Bridges Burning. The game deals with the 1918 Civil War in my country of origin, Finland. It is a COIN Series game for three players from GMT Games.
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Before starting to design games, I did a bunch of solitaire system designs. You can play against my solitaire opponents in the COIN Series games A Distant Plain and Colonial Twilight and of course in All Bridges Burning. There is also a solitaire system of mine in the game Hitler’s Reich, also from GMT Games. Looking back, I’m such a GMT “fan boy”, aren’t I!
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In terms of its mechanics, Navajo Wars creates a multi-dimensional strategic decision space as you maneuver your families on the map, deal with the families’ sustenance and other needs, while trying to dodge raids and knock back intruding colonists.
Thematically, the game tackles the “colonialism” theme from an angle that is, I want to say, saturated by deep humanism --- and, remember, this game came out originally in 2013, way before the current “culture wars” and “colonialism” debates had started. Mr. Toppen puts us in the position of the Navajo families in their struggle against the odds. Thereby he shows us many things about the way of life and history of the Navajo people. Most importantly to me, the game conveys the Navajo history as a very relatable human tale of survival and tragedy, not as some exotic “other”. That’s why I think of Navajo Wars as coming from a place of “deep humanism”.
It came from a desire to form a “big picture” understanding of the post-Cold War period which, after all, has been for people of my age the “formative” period of our lives. There is the observation attributed to a famous historical personality, that if you want to understand someone, you must try to understand the world as it was when that person was in their 20s. For me that is the 2000s, which is where Order & Opportunity is set.
Even in absence of that autobiographical angle, the still young post-Cold War period simply is a fascinating period. One of its hallmarks, of course, is the end of the great ideological rivalry, the end of the “twilight struggle”, between Democracy and Communism. What followed has in many ways been a “post-ideological” period characterised by economic globalisation, and the sometimes unilateral “unipolarity” of the US-led, trans-Atlantic alliance, and the war on terror.
Each player side in the game has their own asymmetric deck of cards. During their turn, the player will nominate one of the four suits in the game, and play as many cards of that suit that they currently hold in their hand. The suits designate different “dimensions” of influence from economic, to political, to military, and cultural.
The world events are just one example of a number dimensions in which the area control mechanic features in Order & Opportunity.
A design aim of mine was to create a game world that had a certain “depth”.
One challenge here was that the game’s map features spaces that denote entire regions or subregions, like “Eastern Europe” or “Asia Pacific”. A high-altitude view like this is somewhat unavoidable in a game with a global geographical scope, but that scope can lack a feel for particularities.
To compensate for the global scope, the game contains other elements that occasionally have the players “zoom in” on more particular aspects, even down to the level of individuals.
To give an example, alongside the aforementioned world events, the game also contains so-called neutral events and opportunity counters that are drawn and placed in particular map spaces. These cards and opportunities thematically denote a wide variety of particularities of the period, from individuals like Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein to phenomena like ethnic tensions, emerging markets, or succession crises. Players engage with these thematic elements using event cards and actions that themselves are thematic. This creates decision spaces, dynamics, and “dramatic arcs” that in my humble opinion can feel very thematic and narratively rich.
-The World In 30 Minutes: podcast from the European Council on Foreign Relations
More seriously, though, I think of Order & Opportunity as a game with a highly contemporary and intriguing setting. It deals with that setting in a manner that feels rich and thematic, yet does so in a way that, for a historical game, is very accessible. The game has a play time of about three hours, give or take 30 minutes.
Also, when it’s said that the game is for one to four players, then the assumption can be that the game is a four player game first, and the other modes are an afterthought. For me this undersells the game.
Firstly, as someone with a history in solitaire design, I attach a lot of importance in the solitaire mode and have worked hard to make it a captivating experience in Order & Opportunity.
Secondly, the two and three player modes in the game, while surely offering different experiences than the four player mode, have their own unique attractions. The four player game features a semi co-operative dimension of fleeting and more durable alliances between the nominal “blocs” consisting of the Democracies of thge US and the EU on the one hand and the Authoritarians China and Russia, on the other. In the twthree-playerplayer modes these blocs are more durable (because controlled by a single player), which makes the game a bit more cutthroat and different from the four player game.
Recently, I’ve taken steps to introduce some of my hobby life expertise into my working life. I work in an academic research group with archaeologists and anthropologists. There I am in the process of devising an analog model that allows me and my colleagues to “play out” certain formative processes of the Central and Northern European Neolithic and early Bronze Age. You can find more information about this game here on our website
I don’t really have the bandwidth to actively work on more than one or maybe two projects at a time, so it is likely to take time for any of these designs to see the light of day, unfortunately.
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