Line of Fire: a fast interview with Brian Train

 

 

 

Brian Train is one of those designers, like Mark Herman, Sebastian Bae and Clint Warren-Davey (I could go on – there is a big overlap), who have worked – in many cases currently work – in the complementary fields of “casual” or hobby wargaming and actual wargame and simulation development with military organisations. Mr Train’s specialty is broadly what gets classed these days as Small Wars (a short essay explaining the definition and scope of a Small War in real terms is available here), and specifically asymmetric warfare. He’s probably best known for his contributions to Volko Ruhnke’s COIN series, A Distant Plain: Insurgency in Afghanistan (GMT Games, 2013) and Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War,1954-62 (GMT Games, 2017) (probably my favourite COIN game, though to be fair, I haven’t got around to playing China’s War (GMT Games, 2025) yet), Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020), and Brief Border Wars 2 from Compass Games. Mr Train also has his on electronic imprint, BTR Games, that offers a selection of eclectic PnP games for the craft-enabled.

Mr Train was kind enough to answer several impertinent questions with good grace and humour. What follows is a very lightly edited record of our correspondence.

 

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A Fast Game: What was your first wargame experience? Was it a commercial boardgame or something you experienced in your time serving [in the military]?

Brian Train: My first experiences of wargaming were as a younger teenager. I was playing Risk (Parker Brothers, 1959) and Battleship (Starex, 1931) and rolling marbles at toy soldiers like anyone else, but when I was twelve, I saw a copy of SPI’s game World War 3 (SPI, 1975) on the desk of my friend’s older brother. The missile launchers on the cover, the world map and the mushroom cloud counters had me curious!

Tactics II (BGG, courtesy of Deb J)

When I was 15 my favourite uncle sent me a copy of Tactics II (Avalon Hill, 1958) for Christmas, and I was off to the races – I don’t think my parents ever forgave him.

I never had a chance to see or use a wargame when I was in uniform, though we would play them in our off hours.

I remember on my machine gunner’s course we got a copy of Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1977) and set up one small force with plenty of machine guns sited on the map according to the principles of placement (using the beaten zone, interlocking fields of fire, firing from cover etc.) and ran a horde of Russian riflemen at it, that was fun.

 

AFG: You work in the professional wargaming and hobby wargaming spaces. you’ve talked about your professional work in your blog. How much does your professional wargaming work influence your commercial game design or vice versa? Does one tend to bring more to the dialogue than the other?

BT: I don’t often design to order, more often I will come up with something that I’m interested in and try to find a place for it.

I first got into contact with the professional wargaming world back in 2007 when someone in the Military Operations Research Society, a US organization, contacted me out of the blue to say that he had used a game I had designed on the Algerian War in 2000 – Algeria (Microgame Design Group, 2000) – as the mechanical basis for a game he had done on the Iraqi insurgency that was then in full swing, and would I like to attend a workshop they were holding on irregular warfare to see what he had done?

Algeria: Battle for Independence (Microgame Design Group, 2000, and One Small Step, 2016)  

I had never heard of this organization but I went with alacrity, and found that more than one person had been using my games as a basis for their own work. Verily, I was a bit of a name among a small number of analyst nerds!

We need to remember that this was the middle of the Iraq War and the wheels were really starting to come off in Afghanistan too, and the bloom was truly on the counterinsurgency rose with the recent publication of US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency, which drew heavily on the theories of David Galula.

At that time as well, only two civilian game designers were being really productive in that end of the spectrum of conflict, both historical and contemporary: Joe Miranda and me.

Anyhow, after that nice welcome I started to go to the annual “Connections” conferences* that began in the late 1990s at the instigation of Matt Caffrey (author of On Wargaming (Navy War College Press, 2019), a very good book on the history and prospects of the practice and available free at https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/newport-papers/43/) and were intended to build bridges between the civilian and professional military wargaming worlds. These continue today and have franchised into several other countries: the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia to begin with. 

The reason that Matt created this conference was precisely that civilian/ commercial/ hobby wargame designers did not labour under the same kinds of restrictions that professional designers did, and could bring some highly imaginative and illustrative work to the table.

The two kinds of gaming have very different purposes but at the bottom of things they both have to be workable games in the sense that they are interactive experiences bounded by some reality-based rules with the intention of discovering problems and generating useful discussion or narratives about those problems or conflicts.

I have had only a couple of occasions to design games that were first and foremost for use by a professional military organization: the Quick Urban Interactive Combat Kriegsspiel for the California Army National Guard (2022-24), and Northern Sentinel for the Canadian Armed Forces (2026).

A map of downtown Manilla (coloured template over arial photograph) for 
Quick Urban Interactive Combat Kriegsspiel (QUICK).  

In both cases I drew on my knowledge of the many other civilian/ commercial/ hobby wargames I had designed in the past, to give them something that was quick to teach and play and satisfied the learning objectives of the occasion.

So the short answer to your question would be, “Yeah, commercial > professional but it doesn’t matter much”.

 

AFG: A History professor once told me that you should always get at least three papers out of any single research project, your published games often turn into series, like the District Commander series from Hollandspiel, or more recently Brief Border Wars 2. You also have form for revisiting situations through the lens of different systems (e.g. Algeria: the Struggle for Independence,1954-1962 (One Small Step, 2016) and Colonial Twilight; or notably BCT Command: Kandahar (co-design - MCS Group, 2013), Kandahar (One Small Step, 2013) and District Commander: Kandahar (Hollandspiel, 2020)).

There’s a question coming. Do you go into a game building a design to fit a particular historical situation – let’s take Shining Path: the Struggle for Peru (BTR Games, 1997, One Small Step, 2014) as an example – and work it up into a playable game, release it, then look at other situations that could be modelled the same way, or have you already noticed the similarities between the Maoist insurgency in Peru, the Algerian war for independence, and Taliban insurgency in Kandahar province during the Afghanistan occupation, or do you look for situations with broad similarities that might be modelled in a similar fashion and work up from there?

BT: I’ve designed around 70 games over the last 30+ years. About half of them belong to one or another of seven distinct “families” or systems I have made, as a general approach to a particular type of conflict.

You mentioned Shining Path That is one of a system I call “4-box” and includes other games on the Algerian War, the Greek Civil War, the Cyprus Emergency and Kandahar in Afghanistan.

I have another called “Between the Wars” which revolves around armies operating with fragile morale and organization, using mostly infantry with small detachments of supporting arms (examples include Finnish Civil War (featured in Paper Wars, Issue 84 - Compass Games 2016). , Red Horde 1920 (Tiny Battle Publishing, 2017), Strike for Berlin (featured in Yaah magazine, No. 11 (Flying Pig Games, 2018), and War Plan Crimson (Tiny Battle Publishing, 2016). Even within each family, there are considerable variations depending on the circumstances of the conflict.

But about another half of my titles consist of games using systems I have never used before or since (though I have grabbed interesting bits out of them for use in other systems later). I like experimenting; it doesn’t always work, but then at least you know.

Where do all these games and systems come from? Again to answer your question briefly, “it’s some of each”.

Every system began as an individual game that had to fit the particular situation, and it was only later that the mechanics in one game would suggest themselves to another and then grow into a system.

Besides using a system to fit broadly similar conflicts (for example the two volumes of the Brief Border Wars system, a total of eight small games on the general conflict type) I’ve designed enough that I don’t like to bend or warp a game topic to fit a particular system just for the sake of consistency or speed.

If it doesn’t fit and doesn’t transmit the kind of emphasis I want I will try another system, or come up with something new that might grow into a system on its own.

As an example of this, you mentioned three of my games that take place in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan in 2009-10, same place and time but three very different treatments, mechanically and thematically. (Actually I have done four - the fourth was a complicated design with multiple factions that I put together for a university class in 2010 but never published.)

AFG: For someone coming to one of your system "families" for the first time, do they tend to be mechanically similar enough for knowledge of one to help with assimilation of the next, or are they each their own beast with just a shared skeleton? And, which games would make for easier on-ramps to these systems for someone coming from a traditional hex-and-counter background?

 

BT: Some of these families are more self-similar than others, it's true. Two that are quite explicitly this way are the Brief Border Wars and District Commander systems.

I thought one of the best ideas SPI came up with was the “Quadrigame” concept of a set of basic rules framed to model a particular set or type of conflicts, or historical period, with smaller sets of rules exclusive to each battle to show its peculiarities. These were not very complex games, but there is still an advantage to laying out the core concepts and mechanisms in a base set of rules people can learn, then as they explore the other games in the system there remains only a bit left to learn to reflect the particular circumstances of each situation.

The basic rules were usually four pages long and each set of exclusive rules another 2-3 pages, including tables.

They published 16 Quads between 1975 and 1979, for a total of 64 games ranging from Alexander’s Siege of Tyre (SPI, 1978) to a still-hypothetical Second Korean War (SPI, 1977).

I wrote an article [about] another 45 or so that were proposed in S&T or MOVES feedback sections, but were never published (at least not quite in the form they were proposed). So, I wanted to try the idea of publishing a quad of my own, with four games in one box, and Compass Games bit on that hook... twice!

The game system was inspired by how well The Little War (Hollandspiele, 2017) seemed to work. This was a game I designed in 2015-16 on the short but spirited one-week border war between Slovakia and Hungary in March 1939. Hollandspiele published it as part of a two-fer with Ukrainian Crisis in 2017.

The game system seemed to offer some potential to model other somewhat similar conflicts in a simple way, so I chose four short border wars (from many possibilities!) and got to work.

BBW II cover (BGG, courtesy of Jenar Oldic).

The first quad [Brief Border Wars (Compass Games,2020)] was modern wars: The Soccer War (1969), Turkish invasion of Cyprus (1974), Third Indochina War (1979) and the Second Lebanon War (2006). It was quite popular; people liked the short rules format and short playing time.

So Compass wanted another volume, and the second quad (Compass Games, 2025) was pre-1945 titles: Second Balkan War (1913), The Seven Day War (Teschen, 1919), the Nomonhan Incident (1939) and the Italo-Greek War (1940).

These games would be a good introductory path, but where the SPI Quadrigames were always hex and counter these are area-movement games with a card-driven system that models the chaotic, stop and start nature of these conflicts between not very good or prepared armies. This tends to trip up a few players who have a lot of experience with standard hex-and-counter fare, and sometimes they have to do a little bit of unlearning to shake out the ideas and rules they are porting over in their head... I see quite a bit of this, even with the COIN system games; the hobby has a lot of unwritten mental habits, implicit understandings and conventional wisdom.

Unprovoked Chinese aggression along the Vietnamese border (Brief Border Wars).

It seems I often do something and then insist on trying it again, but backwards... so with the District Commander series of games from Hollandspiele, there is a set of core rules and a further set of exclusive rules for each game.

But these were published as four separate games, one each in a box... mostly because I took my time designing each one, because Hollandspiele is a very small company that could not afford to put four modules in one box, and I didn't want to wait to reach the magic number of four before publishing.

The District Commander series has a longer history than Brief Border Wars. I started working on it in 2012, it had evolved out of  an unpublished but rather ornate game I did in 2010 called Kandahar I (the fourth, unpublished one I mentioned) that was in turn inspired by another unpublished game from 2008, called Virtualia, that was an amplification of many of the mechanics in my Tupamaro (BTR Games, 1996) game from 1995, and even some bits and pieces from Green Beret (1996-2015, in different versions). So my ideas might evolve, but my lack of talent for clever titles stays pretty much constant.

At first I had the vague idea that this could be a simple manual game I could give to the professional military, who could use it in classes to cover the “Clear and Hold” concept contained in US Army counterinsurgency doctrine (later it became “Clear, Hold and Build”) with no need for any technical gizmos more advanced than a glue stick.

But it was a silly notion.

Professional military people are usually far too busy and time-starved to indulge in anything like this – even if many of them do realize the value of manual games over computer ones… even if you get rid of the dice that make it seem a trivial exercise to some senior officers… even if you split it into basic, intermediate and advanced versions, etc. And by the time Hollandspiele published the first module in 2019, counterinsurgency was no longer top of mind for the military anyway.

DC Kandahar cover (BGG, courtesy of the publisher).

Unlike Brief Border Wars, this is a more complex system with a topic and treatment not often seen: operational (campaign) level counterinsurgency, where many games are strategic in scale (like GMT COIN system games) or tactical (Boots on the Ground (Worthington Publishing, 2010), etc.). The two sides have asymmetric menus of operations, force structures, methods and objectives and games are quite open-ended in terms of time.

It's also diceless: each player holds a hand of Chance Chits that influence operations when played. These chits will be expended during play as players perform (or defend against) certain Missions. Note that while chits initially are drawn randomly, the chits you play during the turn are selected deliberately.

It’s like being able to choose many of your die rolls in advance; the randomness comes from the initial random selection at the beginning of the turn, and the decisions made by each player because of the unequal ratings of the chits for different types of activity... you might want to play a chit that is not good for one particular situation, in order to save a better one for a different situation later.

Again, these are area-movement maps and action in the game consists of task forces moving about activating and conducting operations, to score points according to a scheme that is dictated to you by your senior commanders and keeps changing during the game.

There are also sub-systems for intelligence and a lot of optional rules for the core rues as well as the exclusive rules, so there can be a lot of variation in play.

A couple of the games also feature autonomous factions like Non-State Militia and organized criminals. Foreign forces are also included, they are more effective militarily but can be difficult politically, and sometimes also act autonomously.

All of this adds up to something not quite usual and different even from the COIN system, which is unfamiliar enough to many. But the system has proven quite flexible, and I continue to work on modules that use it... so one might like it, if one liked that sort of thing to begin with.

If you want to find out, I still offer the first module Maracas, about counterinsurgency inside a large city for free print and play (Vassal modules are out there too).

 

AFG: You’ve designed dozens of games and game systems, and you’ve come up with your share of innovations in wargaming over the years. Is there a game or a mechanism by another designer that you’d put up on a pedestal, something you’d point to and say “Now, that’s what I call quite good!”?

BT: Without a doubt, James F. Dunnigan is my favourite wargame designer.

The highlight of my wargame design career was in 2012 when I sat next to him at a panel discussion at a Connections conference and he said, “I like what you’re doing”.

Squeeee!

He is well known for two great notions:

“There are two overarching rules for game design. They are: Keep It Simple; and Plagiarize.” (he also said, “use available techniques” when he wanted to be a bit more euphemistic).

and;

“If you can play them, you can design them.”

He designed or developed many of the wargames that I consider Damn Clever: Berlin ’85 (featured in Strategy & Tactics, issue 79 (SPI, 1980), Canadian Civil War (SPI, 1977), Lost Battles (SPI, 1971), Minuteman: the Second American Revolution (SPI, 1976), NATO Division Commander (SPI, 1980), Plot to Assassinate Hitler (), Russian Civil War (SPI, 1976), Year of the Rat (SPI, 1972).

What do these all have in common?

They all point out that he was never afraid to experiment – well, he had little choice but to try new things since SPI was the first really adventurous wargame publishing company but he pushed that to the hilt.

 

AFG: One last question - Paranoid Delusions (BTR Games, 2006) – what’s with that?!

The Spanish-language cover of Paranoid Delusions (BGG, courtesy of THE MAVERICK).

BT: Hah! That was something I spun up for one of the Microgame Design Contests that used to be run on Boardgamegeek but I don’t think are continuing, at least not under that name (to be fair, I haven’t looked either).

It was the 2006 contest and there were only two entries: mine and Nemo’s War (Victory Point Games, 2009) by Chris Taylor. We called it a tie at the time, but while my game languished, Chris has had several expanded and improved editions of his!

Paranoid Delusions counter mix (BGG, Courtesy of Federico Galeotti).

I used to do mail art and was into ‘zine culture back in the 80s and was familiar with conspiracy culture and other forms of “high weirdness” before the Internet, [and] I also read my share of Thomas Pynchon.

I wanted to have some kind of free-form game where you could get away with attacking yourself, for the sake of the greater goal of solving the mystery to unlock the world and what was happening in it.

Nowadays of course this kind of stuff is so bog-standard and pervasive it’s barely funny anymore – if indeed it ever was.

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I wanted to thank Mr Train again for his time and sharing so much of what goes on under the hood of wargame design. If you've enjoyed or got something out of this interview, do yourself a favour and subscribe to Mr Train's blog.

* For more information on the international network of Connections conferences, you should check out Rex Brynen's PAXsims blog.

 

 

Stripped Down for Parts: China's War 1937-1941

 

 

At the end of last year, I won a copy of Italy ’43 (GMT Games, 2025) in a prize draw, part of Grant Linneberg’s fourth birthday celebrations of his Pushing Cardboard podcast. The only thing was, I’d just been billed for a copy of Italy (along with a couple of other games) a week earlier. I suggested to Grant that he redraw the prize, but he was reluctant to do that. Instead, he said he’d talk to GMT and see if they would swap it out for a game I didn’t have.

To cut a long story short, a replacement game arrived earlier this week and I couldn’t be happier. China’s War: 1937-1941 (GMT Games, 2025) was a preordered game I had to drop at the last minute due to budget constraints. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the COIN system, but desgner Brian Train’s second contribution to the series, Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 (GMT Games, 2017) is my favourite in the series. That, along with an abiding interest in the subject, put China’s War on my “opportunistic purchase” list.

In 1937, Japan had already occupied Manchuria for more than five years, setting up a puppet state, Manchukuo. Throughout that time, incidents sporadically flared between the Japanese military and the Chinese National Revolutionary Army. In 1937, such an incident occurred at Wanping, roughly ten miles south-west of Beijing, involving a missing Japanese soldier. The situation escalated quickly, and the event came to be known as the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Some historians point to this event as the true beginning of the Second World War, but most agree it was the starting point of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It’s this conflict that the game covers.

The box cover makes a bold, no-nonsense statement about what to expect. The picture captures so many aspects of the conflict in a single image. It shows members of the Eight Route Army – on paper a part of the National Revolutionary Army (the Nationalist military, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek) – readying for battle with Japanese forces along the Great Wall of China. The unit was a product of the Second United Front, the alliance of convenience between the Kuomintang (the central Nationalist military command) and the Chinese Communist Party, but while nominally part of the NRA, the Eighth Route Army was separate to the Kuomintang, taking orders directly from the CCP. China’s War could not have a more appropriate cover illustration.

Along with a reproduction of the game map, sample cards, and counters, the box back offers a brief note on the historical context and scope of the game, and places is in the broader framework of the COIN series. The playability graphics tell us the game is intended for players 16 and up (this is more legalistic for a COIN game, I think, than the usual 14+), that it can accommodate one to four players (and features a dedicated solitaire system), and that the game should play out inside of four hours. The Complexity rating it five out of nine (I would be inclined to nudge that up a notch) and the solitaire playability is rated at a full nine, due to the bespoke solitaire system included.

The Rulebook. As always, all forthcoming pictures come with the boilerplate apology
 for the shoddy, underlit, David Fincher-esque photography.  

GMT have seemed to standardise their booklet printing in recent times, though that could just be an artifact of the types of games I buy from them. All the GMT games I’ve purchased in the last year or two have had the same (very good) quality matt paper stock across rulebooks and any additional booklets, and China’s War is no exception.

Rulebook - sample spread.

The Rulebook is 24 pages in length. The rules are clear and readable and well laid out, with lots of box-text Design (beige) and Play (blue) Notes. The rules themselves cover just fourteen pages. The remaining pages are given over to the scenarios (five pages, which include a shot column of Optional Rules, a two-page Key Terms Index, a reproduction of the counter sheet, and Cover/Table of Contents page. The back cover has is blank. A blank page always feels like a missed opportunity but in this case, I can’t think of anything you could fit into a single page that would be of benefit to the game.

The Playbook.

The Playbook runs to twenty-eight pages and offers everything you might be looking for that didn’t make it into the Rulebook. This includes an eight-page Game Tutorial (example of play), a one-page Faction Interactions table, another single-page offering a pronunciation Guide for the unfamiliar Chinese location names and significant historical figures (including Wade-Giles and Pinyin transliterations), and eight pages of Event Tips and Background.

Playbook - sample spread (Extended example of play). All three booklets are lavishly
illustrated and full colour throughout.

A three-page historical background essay, three pages of designer notes, a one-page bibliography and list of production credits round out the booklet.

The solitaire rules guide, but you can call him Sun Wukong.

China’s War comes with a mature solitaire system. I haven’t kept up with the development of solitaire models in COIN games (my most recent is All Bridges Burning (GMT Games, 2020)), but this feels like a big step forward. The engine for the AI is a short tarot-sized card deck, which I’ll come back to later in the post.

Sun Wukong - sample spread (example of play).

The solitaire-system guidebook, which carries its title, Sun Wukong Card-Based Non-Player Rules and Reference Booklet like a mortar plate, shares its layout style with the main Rulebook. The booklet is comprised of six pages of rules (including a one-page list of important terms exclusive to Sun Wukong), Four and a half pages covering the Operations, Special Activities, and Events for the solo system, and thirteen-page Non-Player Example of Play, which will, no doubt, be crucial to understanding how the system works.

Faction Operations and Special Activities PACs. Nationalists (NRA)
and Japan, front and back.

And the Warlords and Communist Party of China (CPC), inside the fold.

The game comes with a plethora of player aids. There are four duplicate, bi-fold Player Aid Cards. Each panel offers the Operations and Special Actions options for the four factions – the Nationalists, Warlords, Communist Party of China (CPA), and Japan. These are pretty standard for COIN games and are printed on a nice weight of cardstock.

The two Propaganda (left) and General Assault Procedure PACs.

The game also comes with two duplicate single-panel PACs, covering the General Assault Procedure on one side and the Propaganda Round procedure on the reverse. You may be at odds with all the other factions, but you’ll still need to learn to share. The font is a little small for easy reading, but it has to be to keep the card’s parameters down to a single panel.

Event PAC (external - front page to the right).

Event PAC (internal).

A single Event Actions bi-fold PAC is also included in the game. This PAC covers the forty-eight separate events that appear in the Event deck and includes a procedural for dealing with Non-Player Factions during Propaganda rounds on the back.

Sun Wukong PAC (external).

Sun Wukong PAC (internal).

Finally, there is a single Sun Wukong Non-Player Aid Sheet. This PAC brings together the tables needed to run one or more NP factions through the game, including the Effective events for each faction, Piece Selection, Space Selection and Move priorities and Capability and Momentum instructions. It also features a listing of the Sun Wukong Golden Rules, so you don’t have to constantly refer back to the Rules and Reference Booklet.

The mounted game map. There's still a little lift in the seems. I usually put a couple of
other games on top for thirty minutes or so to get the mounted boards flat before
shooting, but this one was pretty good out of the box.

The game map is 22” by 34”, mounted and covers the roughly the eastern-most part of China from the coast to Yunnan and Gansu provinces. The board looks great, and references many classic COIN boards, like Andean Abyss (GMT Games, 2012) and Cuba Libre (GMT Games, 2013). The artist Matthew Wallhead has been responsible for cover-art and PAC and card artwork for several GMT games in recent years, including the most recent additions to the Levy and Campaign series, Inferno (GMT Games, 2023), Plantagenet (GMT Games, 2023), and Seljuk (GMT Games, 2025), and he was the cartographer for the sixth edition of the Pendragon RPG (Chaosium, 2024). This is his first game map for GMT. I’m keen to see what comes next from Mr Wallhead.

Twenty-two provinces are featured, varying from plains to rough terrain, and Lines of Communication are railroads and rivers. The play area is defined to the north (left) of the map is Manchukuo (Japanese-occupied Manchuria), which cannot be entered by any Chinese forces, and to the south by French-controlled Indochina, which is off-limits to all factions. As you might expect from a COIN game, the map-board also includes a Sequence of Play matrix for faction order, holding boxes for factions’ available units, Overflow boxes for crowded provinces, and a Victory Point track running along two sides of the board.

The counter sheet. There's a lot of redundancy built in, with twenty-seven of the
counters marked as "Spares," but that's better than a whole lot of unused board.

COIN games use a mixture of wooden pieces and cardboard counters in game play. The wooden cubes, discs and cylinders represent the forces and resources available to each faction, while the counters the status of popular opinion in the provinces, civil unrest and terror, and NRA/Japanese control over provinces, and of course each faction’s Victory Points and Patronage level on the VP Track.

The counters for COIN games are traditionally a mix of pre-rounded larger counters, other shaped counters (mostly circles, which I guess are technically also pre-rounded) and die-cut, half-inch punch squares that inevitably retain their corner tufts. The counters for China’s war are no exception. The counter sheet is a thick brown-core cardstock. The registration is good and the counters pop easily, even the die-cut squares.

Guerrillas and Action markers (left), Forces and Bases (right), and the
factional dice (top). I like the muted colour pallet of the pieces.

The wooden tokens included in China’s War are many and varied. The Japanese faction has blocks of two colours representing Troops and Police. The Nationalist faction has blocks representing troops, disks that represent bases (headquarters, supply dumps, etc.), and cylinders representing Guerrilla forces (guerrilla units are stencilled at one end; stencil end down means the unit is inactive, stencil up means it has been activated, which puts it in danger of being discovered). The Warlords also have Troops and Base markers. The Communists have no troops, only bases and Guerrillas.

In keeping with established COIN conventions, eight Pawn pieces are also included, four Black and four white. These can be used as mnemonic markers to remind the active player of Operations taking place in multiple locations on the board. Each faction also gets their own colour-matched die. This are a little small for my preference but given how much stuff is already packed into the box, I can appreciate why these were chosen. To be fair, they are quite good colour matches for the factions.

Sun Wukong AI cards (left), and the Event card deck. Sun Wukong is a reference
 to the Monkey King from the Chinese epic, Journey to the West.

China’s war comes with two decks of cards; the 52-card Event deck will be familiar to those who have played earlier COIN-series games, with 48 Event cards and four Propaganda cards. I’m not going to get into the functions of the cards here; I’ll go into that in greater detail when I write up an AAR. The second, shorter deck of 24 Tarot-sized cards is the engine for the Sun Wukong non-player system.

Both sets of cards look and feel nice. They are printed on the same weight of cardstock and are comparable to good commercial playing cards in terms of quality. Graphically, the Event cards are gorgeous. I’m always astounded at how many usable and thematically appropriate photographs are discovered for the modern-era COIN game decks. They are clearly presented and shouldn’t prove difficult at the table (unless you have a player who insists on picking up each freshly-turned card and examining it for three or for minutes before placing it back on top of the deck for the other players to view).

The Sun Wukong cards are a deck of twenty-four, divided into four sets of six, one set for each faction. These are printed on both sides, each set providing twelve possible AI response selections to a given game state on that faction’s turn.

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I’ve talked elsewhere on A Fast Game about coming up to a point where, due to the storage limits of our apartment, I have to start making some choices about collection development and shedding some of my games, but I’m beginning to realise now that the time to make those choices is already here. I’ve been pulling back from multi-player games in the last twelve months or so, concentrating mostly on acquiring and keeping solitaire (or solo-able) and two-player games. While COIN games have made great leaps in solitaire playability, they really are best experienced with four players. Luckily, I still have a weekly gaming group that is happy to occasionally indulge in multi-player wargaming.

Like I said at the start, China’s War was practically an auto-buy for me (budget permitting) for the subject and for the design pedigree. I’m really grateful to Grant Linneberg at Pushing Cardboard for the giveaway prize (and if you’re not already listening to Grant’s podcasts, do yourself a favour and check them out) the good folks at GMT for swapping out a game I’d already bought (directly from them) for one I had really wanted.