NOTE: This essay was originally posted as the third Design Diary on the Pax Pamir: Second Edition Board Game Geek page. This essay refers to an older version of the game.
Introducing veteran Pax Pamir players to the new edition is a funny thing. Though the original game still has an active community and was received well, most of its fans haven't played the game in awhile. But, because learning the first edition can be a somewhat traumatizing affair, the rules tend to mostly stick. Teaching these old players is a breeze, made all the easier because the only the rules that they would have struggled to remember are the ones that got dropped from the design. Within five minute and a few questions and answers, one can generally get playing.
When we debrief after the game, it's common for these players to struggle telling the differences apart from the first and second edition. Obviously the victory points are new for those players that didn't play Khyber Knives. It's likewise the case that old players notice the changes in the action system I talked about in the last post. For all of the alterations, the game still very much feels like Pax Pamir.:strip_icc()/pic4291164.jpg)
There is one change that does not escape them: the new intelligence system.
The old intelligence system was one of my favorite elements of the design of Pax Pamir. Usually games about geopolitics emphasize the movements of armies or big economic endeavors over the other ways that states exercise power. When it comes to how states are constructed, how they function, and how they fall apart, armies tend to be the beginning and the end. This isn't a wholly bad impulse. I think Max Weber was basically right when he encouraged folks to understand government as the monopoly of legitimate violence. Armies and other tools for the projection of force. But, armies don't work in vacuum. They are supported by tons of auxiliary elements, such as logistics and intelligence systems that usually get short shrift in games.
Think about it. A World War II game will often go into outrageous detail about attributes of every weapon on the battlefield. But, intelligence gathering will get boiled down to a few special use cards or an event table.
When I was in graduate school, I encountered the work of a historian named C.A. Bayly. He was one of those rare historians who, for me, was able to connect what I knew and understood about the broad strokes of history and policy with the letters and reports and thoughts and feelings of those impacted by those policies. Usually a good academic historian will only struggle to connect a few small links together. Reading Bayly could be both dizzying and clarifying. It was as if you were looking at a wide-angle shot and a close up at the same time.
For Bayly, intelligence was central to the execution and projection of power. If you want to know how the British operated in India, you must read Empire and Information. Full stop.
The other thing that distinguishes Bayly's work is how wide-ranging and interdisciplinary it is. The arguments he's making really only come into focus when you don't think about the actions of the British in isolation. It is from Bayly that I first glimpsed into the complex relationships that existed among the Indian princely states. When I turned to Afghanistan and was reading the Sirāj al-tawārīkh, there was a clear relationship in how a government operated. Several big insights happened all at once.
First, it was clear that the management of intelligence operatives did not obey the logic of military force. You couldn't command a spy to move in the same way that you could command an army to move. Your distance from your operative is the thing that gave them value. By happy accident, this resonated with how I had designed Pax Pamir. On the board there were pieces that moved around and had battles and whatnot. But, an army couldn't fight by itself. It had to be triggered by a card in your personal row. In this way operational potential was divorced military resources.
This led me to the idea that spies should exist not on the board but instead on each player's personal row of cards. That way they could be sent to wreck havoc on the sorts of actions that players could take. A spy couldn't destroy an army, but it could stop it from moving or attacking. To facilitate this, I imagined that tableaus were connected and that players could move their spies either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the area of play. This allowed me to insert another, looser geography into the game to give players the feeling that their spies had some distance from handlers. If you wanted to move your spy from Kabul to the Punjab, it's possible he would find himself having to head to Herat first to take care of some obligation or loose end. The lack of logic was the point.
The old intelligence system was one of my favorite elements of the design of Pax Pamir. Usually games about geopolitics emphasize the movements of armies or big economic endeavors over the other ways that states exercise power. When it comes to how states are constructed, how they function, and how they fall apart, armies tend to be the beginning and the end. This isn't a wholly bad impulse. I think Max Weber was basically right when he encouraged folks to understand government as the monopoly of legitimate violence. Armies and other tools for the projection of force. But, armies don't work in vacuum. They are supported by tons of auxiliary elements, such as logistics and intelligence systems that usually get short shrift in games.
Think about it. A World War II game will often go into outrageous detail about attributes of every weapon on the battlefield. But, intelligence gathering will get boiled down to a few special use cards or an event table.
When I was in graduate school, I encountered the work of a historian named C.A. Bayly. He was one of those rare historians who, for me, was able to connect what I knew and understood about the broad strokes of history and policy with the letters and reports and thoughts and feelings of those impacted by those policies. Usually a good academic historian will only struggle to connect a few small links together. Reading Bayly could be both dizzying and clarifying. It was as if you were looking at a wide-angle shot and a close up at the same time.
For Bayly, intelligence was central to the execution and projection of power. If you want to know how the British operated in India, you must read Empire and Information. Full stop.
The other thing that distinguishes Bayly's work is how wide-ranging and interdisciplinary it is. The arguments he's making really only come into focus when you don't think about the actions of the British in isolation. It is from Bayly that I first glimpsed into the complex relationships that existed among the Indian princely states. When I turned to Afghanistan and was reading the Sirāj al-tawārīkh, there was a clear relationship in how a government operated. Several big insights happened all at once.
First, it was clear that the management of intelligence operatives did not obey the logic of military force. You couldn't command a spy to move in the same way that you could command an army to move. Your distance from your operative is the thing that gave them value. By happy accident, this resonated with how I had designed Pax Pamir. On the board there were pieces that moved around and had battles and whatnot. But, an army couldn't fight by itself. It had to be triggered by a card in your personal row. In this way operational potential was divorced military resources.
This led me to the idea that spies should exist not on the board but instead on each player's personal row of cards. That way they could be sent to wreck havoc on the sorts of actions that players could take. A spy couldn't destroy an army, but it could stop it from moving or attacking. To facilitate this, I imagined that tableaus were connected and that players could move their spies either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the area of play. This allowed me to insert another, looser geography into the game to give players the feeling that their spies had some distance from handlers. If you wanted to move your spy from Kabul to the Punjab, it's possible he would find himself having to head to Herat first to take care of some obligation or loose end. The lack of logic was the point.
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A lot of this has been maintained and developed in the second edition of Pax Pamir. Spies still move in basically the same way. They can still betray cards for loyalty prizes and to trigger loyalty changes. They can still get in fights with other spies. But, among experienced players of the first edition, the intelligence cards were easily the most powerful cards in the game because of a little rule I added into the rules of the first edition right before it's publication.
In the first edition of the game, spies could serve as informants, sitting atop certain cards with strategic value and generating influence. The original intent of this rule was to allow your cards to be taken compromised by enemy operatives and to neutralize any influence points they might otherwise give you. This worked in practice, mostly, in certain game states players would spend all of their time moving spies around trying to adjust their influence portfolio. This lessened a player's commitment to their own coalition, and created game narratives that were truly bizarre. It essentially allowed players to avoid ever changing allegiance if they had enough spies in the right places. I wanted spies to be important, but their ability to farm influence had sucked out a lot of the game's central drama around loyalty.
Thankfully, the game still functioned just fine, even with this weird balance. But, playing the game during the development of Khyber Knives and afterwards, I couldn't help but think I had missed an important chance to get it right.
When I started working on the second edition, one of the first priorities was to get the balance between the four modes of power right. It was obvious that I needed to get rid of the informant rule both for thematic reasons and to help make the game state more transparent. But, this was not a change that players of the first edition cheered. In fact, more than even the victory points, this was one adjustment that folks tended to complain about. Even if they understood the logic, they missed dancing their spies around to spy on the patriots of their opponents.
But those players were missing an important advantage to the system. Once they adjusted their strategies to the new system, the dance still happened, but it was organic. Loyalty is a lot more important in this new edition, and spies allow for diplomatic flexibility by staging timely betrayals. Though it's quite possible to win the game by sticking by one coalition, there are important advantages to being able to stay flexible, and spies are a critical element to this.
Many of the other advantages to intelligence, like being able to provide logistical support to armies, was built into a far more flexible system whereby spies could hold cards hostage. This system was adapted from Pax Renaissance's religious system where bishops could silence their host cards. For the new edition of Pamir, I opted for a more granular approach, essentially extending the way tribes can demand bribes to spies. Basically, if you had the most spies on a player's card, they would have to pay you a bribe to use any of the card's special actions. Spies therefore could essentially parazlyze the cards of your enemies and allow for dramatic reversals.
In the first edition of the game, spies could serve as informants, sitting atop certain cards with strategic value and generating influence. The original intent of this rule was to allow your cards to be taken compromised by enemy operatives and to neutralize any influence points they might otherwise give you. This worked in practice, mostly, in certain game states players would spend all of their time moving spies around trying to adjust their influence portfolio. This lessened a player's commitment to their own coalition, and created game narratives that were truly bizarre. It essentially allowed players to avoid ever changing allegiance if they had enough spies in the right places. I wanted spies to be important, but their ability to farm influence had sucked out a lot of the game's central drama around loyalty.
Thankfully, the game still functioned just fine, even with this weird balance. But, playing the game during the development of Khyber Knives and afterwards, I couldn't help but think I had missed an important chance to get it right.
When I started working on the second edition, one of the first priorities was to get the balance between the four modes of power right. It was obvious that I needed to get rid of the informant rule both for thematic reasons and to help make the game state more transparent. But, this was not a change that players of the first edition cheered. In fact, more than even the victory points, this was one adjustment that folks tended to complain about. Even if they understood the logic, they missed dancing their spies around to spy on the patriots of their opponents.
But those players were missing an important advantage to the system. Once they adjusted their strategies to the new system, the dance still happened, but it was organic. Loyalty is a lot more important in this new edition, and spies allow for diplomatic flexibility by staging timely betrayals. Though it's quite possible to win the game by sticking by one coalition, there are important advantages to being able to stay flexible, and spies are a critical element to this.
Many of the other advantages to intelligence, like being able to provide logistical support to armies, was built into a far more flexible system whereby spies could hold cards hostage. This system was adapted from Pax Renaissance's religious system where bishops could silence their host cards. For the new edition of Pamir, I opted for a more granular approach, essentially extending the way tribes can demand bribes to spies. Basically, if you had the most spies on a player's card, they would have to pay you a bribe to use any of the card's special actions. Spies therefore could essentially parazlyze the cards of your enemies and allow for dramatic reversals.
:strip_icc()/pic4291175.jpg)
I also changed the way spies were deployed. In the old edition, when you played an intelligence card, the new spies were deployed right on the played card. This worked fine, but created weird problems in games with lots of players. A player could play a Persian intelligence card that would put two spies into play, but, because of the number of cards already in play, they could be an impossible distance from a Persian card on the other side of the table. Because spies were so powerful in the first edition, I considered this a necessary balance, but it did create some strange player count dynamics. Now that spies were somewhat muted, I could put in place a new rule that allowed the to be placed on any card of that location currently in play. This made the map smaller and ratcheted up the pressure that a good intelligence operation could place on someone's tableau.
It also forced players to play more geographically. There were lots of advantages to developing a power base around only one or two regions. This engendered a much greater sense of place in a player's position. I think this is a welcome addition to the Pax games in general where often players feel a little disconnected from the cards on their tableau.
I also tried to emphasize those connections with the Honeymoon system, which partially resets the game after each dominance. That, of course, is another topic entirely and likely the subject of my next post.
It also forced players to play more geographically. There were lots of advantages to developing a power base around only one or two regions. This engendered a much greater sense of place in a player's position. I think this is a welcome addition to the Pax games in general where often players feel a little disconnected from the cards on their tableau.
I also tried to emphasize those connections with the Honeymoon system, which partially resets the game after each dominance. That, of course, is another topic entirely and likely the subject of my next post.