We have been following the exploits of a newer designer V.P.J. Arponen over the past several years since his very unique entry into the COIN Series called All Bridges Burning broke in 2019. Since that time, he has been working on his new game called Order & Opportunity, which was announced by GMT Games in February 2023 and takes a look at the post-Cold War world order set in the first decades of the 21st century with the major powers of the United States, Russia, China and the EU controlling the direction of the agenda. Since that time, we have hosted an interview with Vez and also highlighted some of the cards in the game with our Event Card Spoilers Series.
If you are interested, you can check out that interview at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2023/08/21/interview-with-v-p-j-arponen-designer-of-order-opportunity-from-gmt-games/
If you missed the Event Card Spoiler entries covering the game, you can catch up on the posts to date by following the below links:
#12 War on Terror/Operation Enduring Freedom
#43 Belt & Road Initiative/Dependencies Created
#15 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act
Recently, Vez reached out to see if we would be interested in hosting a Designer Diary Series where he would go into the background on the design and how it has progressed over the past year. Of course we were interested and are excited to share the following with our readers.
My game Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order is currently available for preorder with GMT Games. In these design diary entries I will be writing about various design choices that were made while developing the game over the past several years.
In this entry I will talk about the card design process.
The CDG Family
Setting out to design a historical tabletop game with GMT Games as my target publisher, there were certain classic games that immediately came to mind.
GMT is closely associated with the term “card driven game” or CDG, among friends. GMT’s catalog contains a long-list of classic CDG’s — games like Twilight Struggle (2005), and a range of Mark Herman titles from the “first CDG” We the People (1993) to later classics such as Empire of the Sun (2005), to name just a few games in the constantly expanding CDG universe.
Technically any game in which cards “drive” the game play could be referred to as a CDG, but really, historically a quite specific set of paradigm examples of CDG’s and with that a specific set of mechanics characterize the CDG family.
More specifically, classic CDG’s in the “GMT tradition” involve the dual structure of cards with an operations point value and an event effect. Typically, the player may choose to play a given card for one or the other effect. There exist various variations and added spice to the basic formula — such as that some event effects are associated with the opponent and automatically triggered when the card gets played by the other side — but the ops points and the event text are the core elements.
Not only are there classic games made using the CDG suit of mechanics, but these games are incredibly popular among historical gamers. The mechanic simply works very very well. It produces historically flavorful and captivating game play with a surprisingly low rules overhead.
Therefore, as I was ideating Order & Opportunity, the obvious question was, “why not use the CDG mechanic?”
Well, I did use it. Or better said, I tried to use it.
The thing is, if you think about the CDG line of games, by far the majority of them are two-player games. By contrast, from the start Order & Opportunity was going to be a four-player game.
As I was trying out the CDG mechanics for four-players, I seemed to run into an interesting problem about information. In classic CDG’s, the players hands of cards are typically hidden information from the other player. In two-player games this means, 50% of the information as to where the game might be headed within the space of the next turns is hidden. Use the CDG mechanic in a four-player game and the hidden information increases to 75% as each player only knows their own hand.
In practice this meant, in the early prototypes of Order & Opportunity, the players seemed to have too little information as to where the game was realistically headed to. The players did not only know what event effects could possibly be unleashed upon the game state during the three plays following theirs, but also cards with large amount of ops points could possibly be used in the intervening three turns causing swings in the board state. As a result, for any individual player, planning and strategizing felt severely limited.
In a two-player CDG the same problem does not easily arise because the overall amount of hidden information is decidedly less, all the while the ability to respond to the other player’s actions in the “I go, you go” structure of the game is high. In a game structure of “I go, three others go”, the situation is somewhat different.
In the next installment of this design diary we continue to follow the development of the card system in Order & Opportunity.
If you missed the previous parts in the series, you can catch up at the following links:
Part 2: Representing the Forces From Within
If you are interested in Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order, you can pre-order a copy for $55.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1027-order-opportunity.aspx
-Grant
The Players' Aid 