Kris Hall: Volko Ruhnke and Labyrinth

I believe one of the most fascinating games in development at the moment is Labyrinth, a card-driven game about the War on Terror by designer Volko Ruhnke which will be published by GMT Games.  It is hard to imagine a game more relevant to our time, or one that might be more of a lightning-rod for controversy.  Not only does Mr. Ruhnke have to make an ultra-complicated military-political-religious-ideological struggle into a fast-paced game, he is doing it while the conflict is still on-going. 

Mr. Ruhnke recently agreed to discuss his project with me in an e-mail interview.

Kris: Labyrinth is a card-based game.  What modifications or innovations have you made to the standard card-based design?

Volko: There are several twists, but the most important, I think, are:

Two-card Action Phases.  The CDGs that I know are “you play a card, I play a card”.  In LABYRINTH, each side plays 2 cards for either operations or events before the other side responds with 2 cards.  That amps up the opportunities for creative combos, one-two punches, and hit-and-run attacks.

Asymmetric Operations.  Rather than both players’ choices for how to use their cards being the same menu of operations, LABYRINTH depicts an asymmetrical conflict by providing each side its own unique types of activities.  The US “War of Ideas” and the extremists’ “Jihad” work quite differently in the game, for example.  The result is a very different feel between playing the two sides.

A Solitaire CDG System.  A hidden hand of cards on the other side turns out to be a wonderfully varied driver of actions by a robot opponent, but I don’t know how many CDGs have taken advantage of that to create a replayable solitaire experience.  LABYRINTH provides a jihadist AI to guide their actions off of their cards, while the solitaire player takes on the role of the US.

Kris: Does each player have their own deck of cards in the game? 

Volko: LABYRINTH uses a single deck of cards for both sides.  Several event cards are usable by whichever player receives them, often with different effects, depending on which side is playing them.  Use of the other side’s event cards for operations triggers the event--this is the one mechanic drawn almost in whole cloth from TWILIGHT STRUGGLE.  The first card each turn that the jihadists use to plot ignores any US event.  The US can chose to discard its final card to ignore a jihadist event.  One twist is that the other side’s events under the right timing and circumstances can be neutral or even benefit your side--so one aspect of game play is to manage your card hand to find those circumstances and make lemonade out of the opposing events you are dealt.

Kris: How do you define victory in this game?  What is each player trying to achieve?

Volko: The central premise of the game is that the “War on Terror” ultimately is about governance, specifically, governance of the Muslim world.  The jihadists want to reestablish the Islamic Caliphate of old—they win principally by establishing Taliban-style Islamist rule over a large enough chunk of Muslim countries to form the kernel of the Caliphate.  The United States and its allies are seeking the opposite—to spread effective, representative governance throughout the Muslim world and thereby ease discontent and choke off extremism at its roots.

For each side, there is also a separate route to victory.  If the US side can eliminate all jihadist forces (“cells”) on the map, they win by extinguishing the extremists’ ability to recruit and build for jihad.  If the jihadists can set off a weapon of mass destruction inside the US Homeland, they win by causing enough damage to the US to cause it to retreat from interference in the Muslim world.  (The latter victory condition does not necessarily represent how the US really would react, but rather models the mindset of the jihadists and forces the US side to worry about defending against such extreme damage.)

Kris: So the quality of governance is a key factor in nations in the game.  How does this mechanism work?  In real life, it seems very difficult for the USA to improve the quality of government in a foreign nation.  How easy is it for players to impact governance in the game?

Volko: Each space in LABYRINTH is a country or cluster of countries.  Markers in each Muslim country, filled in as play progresses, show the quality of governance, “Good”, “Fair”, “Poor”, or “Islamist Rule”, as well as alignment toward the US (“Ally”, “Neutral”, or “Adversary”).  The game has a simple mechanic that makes everything the US wants to do in a country harder the worse the governance, and the opposite for the jihadists. 

It works like this:  Good=1; Fair=2; Poor=3.  Cards have ops values between 1 and 3.  The US needs to use a card of at least the ops value of the target country’s governance, so under Poor governance, only a high 3 card will do.  The jihadists can operate anywhere on any card, but must roll the governance number or less to succeed.  The value of the card tells the player how many dice to roll.  In this way, the extremists exploit poor governance, while good governance greases the skids for the US.

“War of Ideas” operations are the main US means of attempting to improve governance, representing the constellation of Western means of influence over Muslim governments and populations, including aid, advisors, public diplomacy, and the like.  But the War of Ideas is highly dependent on US prestige in the Muslim world—which the extremists or US military action can do much to upset—and on consensus among non-Muslim powers regarding US tactics in the war on terror. 

Jihadists have two means to influence governance.  Their cells can covertly plot terror attacks in hopes of spurring a government overreaction.  But that only worsens governance to poor.  Ultimately, to put in place Islamist rule, they will have to take the more dangerous step of guerrilla warfare—“jihad”—to topple secular regimes.

Admittedly, in game terms, neither side in the real world has achieved its objectives—we don’t see effective democracies spreading across the Middle East, nor is the entirety of even a single country under al-Qaeda’s sway.  Some games in LABYRINTH may go that way—a stalemate in the game is a US defeat, since the jihadists are in far less a hurry to see results—but the game provides the possibility of the antagonists making discernable progress on their goals within the decade after 9/11.  Arguably, governance in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, say, Turkey, is better today than it was in 2001, so measurable progress over that period of time strikes me as plausible.

Kris: It often seems to me as if terror attacks in Western countries are entirely counter-productive to the terrorists’ goals.  If Osama bin laden wanted to decrease American meddling in the Islamic world, his 9/11 attacks certainly did exactly the opposite.  Can the Jihadist player plot terrorist attacks in the West in the game?  And if so, what does he hope to achieve in game terms?

Volko: As implied above, to capture the authentic strategies in the conflict, the game has to account not only for real results but also for what antagonists expect.  LABYRINTH tries to do both.

The jihadist side in the game can plot terrorist attacks anywhere in the world that it can reach with cells, and there are important incentives to do so in Western countries.  Terror attacks first and foremost draw the attention of Islamist donors and provide Jihadist Funding.  Funding in the game determines the size of the Jihadist card hand and how many cells can be recruited and trained.  Terror attacks in Western countries provide substantially more funding than those that kill mostly Muslims.

Terror attacks in Muslim countries under US “occupation”—where US forces are held responsible for what happens—are a primary means of hurting US prestige.  Terror attacks also can degrade Muslim governance, as noted above, and can undo the effect of Western aid, as aid workers are scared off.  As mentioned, a WMD attack in the US is a game winner for the extremists.

Finally, terror attacks divert Western attention and resources:  the jihadist side gets to cancel one US event in its hand each turn if it uses that card to plot terrorism.  The US side can alert to mitigate or thwart terror plots, but that takes high value cards to pull off.

Kris: What are plots in the game?

Volko: Plots represent extremist planning and execution of political violence against noncombatants.  Plotting in the game is a jihadist operation, so it requires die rolls (or certain events) to place plot markers, and it is easier to do the worse the local governance.  Placed plot markers have hidden values (1, 2, 3, or WMD), representing the scale and therefore impact of the plot—a “Plot 3” represents a particularly sensational attack.

The US side during its Action Phase will have the opportunity to spend cards to Alert—meaning to remove plots that are in progress (drawing markers from the map blindly).  At the end of the US Action Phase, any remain plots go off, with the effects described above.

The jihadist effort to acquire WMD provides a sub-game, with various events and map locations affecting whether or not the US side faces such a terror threat.  If Pakistan falls to Islamist rule, for example, the jihadist side receives several WMD Plot markers to use, representing access to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

Kris: I understand that one of the key game mechanisms is the American posture in the conflict (hard or soft) and how it relates to the world position on the war on terror.  Can you explain how this mechanism works?  How do players impact or change the posture of the USA or the rest of the world?

Volko: Posture represents a non-Muslim country’s overall preference for the US use of hard or soft power against terrorism.  The US has a posture—starting out at Hard in most scenarios—and so potentially does every other non-Muslim country on the map.  If the US is out of step with world posture, it becomes much harder to sway the Muslim world—the premise being that concerted international action is necessary to influence Muslim governance.

The US can affect other countries’ postures directly, through its diplomacy.  The trick is that it is twice as hard to convince a country to back US exercise of hard power than soft, so it’s much easier if the US is soft to get the world on your side. That would seem to make a soft posture more desirable for the US side, but military invasions (“Regime Change”) is only possible if the US is hard, so the tradeoff is stark.

The US can carry out a rather expensive “reassessment” to shift its posture, and there are events (such as “Quagmire” and “US Election”) that also might do so.  So LABYRINTH depicts the US and allied political to and fro over how to wage counterterrorism.

The jihadists can affect the West’s posture as well, not only through events but also through terrorist attacks in non-Muslim countries, that might change that polity’s CT response.  So attacking US-world relations over counterterrorism is an important way for the jihadist player to try to stop the US “War of Ideas” in its tracks.

Kris: The American player can invade nations that have fallen under the sway of the Jihadist player.  But I believe only the American player has conventional military forces.  How does the Jihadist player battle an American occupying force?

Volko: The US if at a hard posture can invade, but there are only enough troops to fight two or at the very most three wars at once, invasion might get global approval but more likely will cost the US prestige, occupation opens up a number of vulnerabilities in terms and events and jihadist operations, and the more troops the US side has committed overseas, the fewer cards the US player draws each hand.

The jihadists can launch terror plots in occupied countries to hurt US prestige further—or tank if it they can get off a WMD attack against US forces—and reverse any gains there in governance.  They also can risk their fighters in guerrilla operations—“jihad”—for an even better chance at hurting governance in the occupied country. 

A substantial effort at jihad, typically in places where there are no US troops to protect the regime, can pull off an Islamist revolution to create a new Islamist state, stretching the US even further if they then invade to reverse Islamist gains.

Kris: How long does it take to play the game?

Volko: Our more experienced testers are reporting games as fast as 45 minutes per deck, with solitaire games playing faster than 2-player.  I suspect that an hour or so per deck will be more typical.  Most players will play just one-deck games, which offer a rich experience and plenty of narrative development.  Two-deck and three-deck games add more interaction among events (several events block or unlock other events, and many only occur once and are removed) and allow the narrative to develop even further.  Sudden death can shorten a game, sometimes during the first deck but more commonly in the second.

Kris: Labyrinth will come with a solitaire scenario.  Can you tell me how this works?

Volko: There are four scenarios, and any of them can be played either 2-player or solitaire.  In the solitaire version, the player takes the US side, and a simple, 1-page flowchart guides jihadist actions.  For the jihadist Action Phase, the player flips the top card of the jihadist hand and executes or the event or the appropriate operation generated by the flow chart, with occasional die rolls or chit pulls to determine the target country.  To give our robot jihadists a better chance, some rules are adjusted in their favor, including an escalating scale of US difficulty to keep players challenged as they master the game.

Not all the scenarios are equally balanced:  the mid-2003 scenario starts the US in the midst of two difficult Regime Change situations.  So any solitaire players who have mastered the 2001 and 2002 scenarios at the highest difficulty level will still have the post-OIF mess to take on.

Kris: What aspects of Labyrinth’s design caused you the most trouble?  What aspects are you the most proud of?

Volko: LABYRINTH has involved a great deal of delicate balancing, not just to give both sides an equal chance to win, but to make hard and soft postures both viable, to put the effectiveness of various operations on roughly equal footing, and to ensure that no single strategic path is the obvious one for either side. 

Development continues—and I’m blessed with an excellent development team and active and creative testers—and we are still working on making Regime Change situations sufficiently challenging for both sides.  The US side must feel to the pressure to risk invasions but also see some light at the end of the tunnel.  The jihadists have to think hard about whether to commit the effort to contest an occupied country at the risk of getting caught on the “fly paper”.

I’m proud that the core, governance- and posture-based mechanics have yielded credible narratives.  Nothing occurring in the real world since my original design of the game—the new US administration’s policies, discovery of more extremists inside the US, escalations in Afghanistan and Yemen, or the failed 12/25 plot—has led me to alter the way LABYRINTH works.  So, while I won’t claim that the model is predictive, it has held up.

Kris: Which cards in the game are you the most proud of?

Volko: With over 100 distinct events, it’s hard to pick a favorite card.  A family of interrelated events that comes to mind is a trio representing controversial US counter-terror programs—“Renditions”, “Enhanced Measures”, and “Wiretapping”—and two “Leak” cards in the deck that respond to them.  Each of the three US events is capable of yielding powerful short-term benefits for the US side, but if “Leaked” can wreck alliances and shift US posture.  So the US player faces a rather realistic choice of whether to risk aggressive, clandestine tactics against terrorists.  I’ll be curious to see how players judge these event cards once the game is out.

Kris: How would you respond to those who might say that it is in bad taste to make a game about wars in which American soldiers are currently fighting and dying?

Volko: That sort of reaction has been one of the most fascinating aspects of this project.  Taste is what it is—it’s personal, so there is no gainsaying it.  I would want to know how folks who respond that way would answer a number of questions.

My father as a 14-year-old refugee survived the Allied bombing of Dresden.  He still has vivid memories of that time.  Is it in bad taste for me to play games about World War Two, while he is still alive?

Would it be in better taste to play games about World War One, simply because fewer veterans are still around?

One of my favorite cooperative games is PANDEMIC.  People are still dying of H1N1—and of many other diseases.  Does that make PANDEMIC in bad taste?

Are board games in some especially sensitive entertainment category?  Should I not allow my teenagers to play “Modern Warfare 2” on their Xbox, just because of the “Modern”? 

Should we shun books and movies about current wars?  Is US SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s best-selling Afghanistan memoir “Lone Survivor” in bad taste?  Is the film “Hurt Locker” in bad taste because it’s set in Iraq?

GMT Games asked me to design an “intelligent” game about the struggle with Islamic extremism.  Without pulling punches, I’ve attempted in LABYRINTH to represent a spectrum of views.  I’ve tried to respect Islam.  I don’t hope to change anyone’s mind about the “War on Terror”, but I do hope to provide a model of the conflict that—while fun to play—also can help us think through the issues in a structured way.  I feel that I owe that kind of serious approach to the soldiers currently in the fight against extremism, not just Americans, but all of NATO, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and many more.

Kris: What is the earliest that gamers could see Labyrinth in print?

Volko: Continued strong preorders will be the key to getting LABYRINTH high in GMT’s production queue.  My goal is to have the game in players’ hands by September 11th, 2010, which GMT thinks is realistic if orders are strong.

Kris: What game projects would you like to work on in the future?

Volko: Thanks for asking.  I have a number of LABYRINTH variants and expansions in mind, if folks like the game and want more.  I also intend to keep working on COMBAT COMMANDER scenarios—I have three coming out in the Normandy Battlepack, another already submitted for the first CC:PACIFIC Battlepack, and a second in work for it as well.  Finally, I have an accessible multiplayer design about joint operations in the Falklands War that GMT is interested in, involving simple block mechanics and option and event cards and covering the naval, air, and ground campaigns.

Kris: Thanks for the interview.

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