Brant tackles GMT’s latest COIN series game, A Distant Plain, and reports from the front.

GrogHeads has covered A Distant Plain with an interview with the designers, and the photos of the unboxing.  All well and good, of course, but how does it play?

There are several reasons why A Distant Plain can be tough to review.  That said, they are all the same reasons that make it a compelling game.  How many multiplayer wargames have you played where the players are not simply extensions of a team, but rather working at cross purposes as often as not?  How many wargames have you played with an elastic time scale?  How many wargames eschew anything resembling unit factors or quantified values?  And now take all those tweaks and roll them into a single game, and drop into an ongoing conflict whose outcomes are not yet truly determined.

The Story

There are four players: The Coalition, The Government, The Taliban, and the Warlords.  Of these, the Taliban are the only one for whom you can draw a reasonably straight line directly from the real life organization in Afghanistan directly to a game role.  The Government essentially represents the Karzai administration, but there are game effects that seem to clearly outstrip the existing government’s capabilities.  The Coalition is a mix of ISAF, the US, some NGO capabilities, and other external actors attempting to influence actions in Afghanistan.  Finally, the greatest amalgam – the Warlords – are the ultimate ‘floater’ faction representing a collection of decidedly non-aligned ‘real’ actors who nevertheless represent a unified set of goals within the mechanics of the game.

The varying scenarios allow you start the war in 2002, 2005, or 2009, but all tend to end around 2013 or so.  Obviously, the 2009 scenario is the quickest of them, but any of them will take most of an afternoon, if not more.

Opening the Box

We’ve covered the unboxing before, but to save you jumping to the link, here’s what you get: a solid, 8-panel, mounted, folding map with a ton of useful marginal tracks, boxes, and record-keeping tools; a single sheet of mounted, die-cut counters that are virtually all administrative in nature; a bag of Euro-game-ish markers for the players, representing bases and forces; some dice and pawns; a bunch of plastic bags; the deck of cards used to drive the game along; and a ton of very clear, useful, and well-designed player cards that clearly lay out what players can do on any given turn. Continue reading →