Order & Opportunity

Sadly, we all learned that the end of the Cold War was not "the end of history." Mankind would find new ways to divide itself. While the threat of nuclear holocaust disappeared, newer and more sinister forms of conflict would take its place. Where once superpowers bestrode the globe, decentralized networks and even individuals now command the world´s attention.
- Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, Twilight Struggle

Order & Opportunity is a 1 to 4 player game with a dedicated solo system about the making of the post-Cold War world order covering the first decades of the 21st century. In the game, the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union compete over control of the agenda and ultimately over victory points in the dimensions of economic, political, cultural, and security power projection. Order & Opportunity combines card-driven, asymmetric gameplay to produce a topical and thematic historical game on a global scale. The game offers a distinctive and captivating play experience at every one of its player counts. Order & Opportunity begins in the early 2000s and covers the next twenty years of global, multidimensional power competition. In that setting, the game aims at creating a thematic experience of the period as players are faced with historical and familiar crises, challenges, and opportunities as they emerge from gameplay.
The first decades of the 21st century have seen events with long-lasting consequences. In the year 2000 in Russia, Vladimir Putin became president, and the question was: would he be the young reformist that many in 2000 still had hopes for, or would he choose hard imperialism of a personalist authoritarian ruler and strongman seeking to restore Russia to its former glory? In Order & Opportunity, you decide. Over the same period, China´s “peaceful rise” will gradually turn the communist party controlled hybrid state into a global economic superpower, but again, to what ends will China use that power? You decide.
During the same period in the West, despite the global war on terror and increasingly visible signs of climate change, global capitalism seems to know no limits as the United States and its European allies continue to enjoy never before seen material prosperity and something of a “unipolar moment” of world domination.
In the West, economic globalization combined with rapid automation and offshoring of work begins to create a gulf between those who benefit and flourish and those “left behind” by these developments. Simultaneously, a number of unilateral military adventures eat into the credibility of the Western model of freedom and democracy. Did the end of the great ideological rivalry of the Cold War create an ideological vacuum characterized more by economic and other opportunism than values and convictions? In such an environment, can alliances last, or do they decline in conflicts of interest? Who will be the force of order? Who will be the force of opportunism? Order & Opportunity allows the players to explore such possibilities.




Order & Opportunity is a game about global and domestic fragmentation and confrontation but also about alliances, amidst ever deepening interconnections between the global powers. Through the development of reaction abilities, players’ moves become interconnected with one another as actions by one player may be met by reactions from other players. Alliances are tried and tested as the powers now compete over economic and other opportunities in what might increasingly begin to look like a zero-sum game.

Alongside economic competition, gray zone conflicts proliferate in a world of unequal traditional military power, new information technologies, and resurgent authoritarianism, giving rise to a war of ideas between democratic and authoritarian visions of a world order, both home and abroad. Domestically, the excesses of economic globalization and technological change cause polarization that may weaken powers from within. Globally, terror threats seem ever present and preoccupy people and their leaders. Tensions may destabilize entire regions, but flashes of color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and other civil society-based movements seem to show that, ultimately, people want make up their own lives.

Gameplay
Card Driven Play
Order & Opportunity adapts the familiar card-driven game mechanic to introduce different types or suits of action cards (cultural, military, economic, and political) in place of the more traditional operations points. The players each hold a hand of action cards. During their turn, they select a suit and play any cards of that suit they wish. The number of cards played determines the consequences per the selected suit. These include growing domestic polarization (economic actions) and stress being put on the collectively maintained rules-based world order (security actions)
Each card is played either for its event text or for an action associated with the suit. In a game of area control and presence, card plays are used to pursue economic and other opportunities that award players more actions, fuse or defuse crises in the form of major world events on the map, and place political, economic, or military influence and alignments on the map.
Each power in the game makes use of their own associated deck of cards that they cycle through during the game. Many of the cards have effects specific to particular powers, creating asymmetry in the game.
The game also features a light deck building mechanism whereby, once at the end of their turn, powers may “build” their own deck by adding and/or removing cards from it. This enables the players to tune their decks to the strategy they have chosen.
Cards are also used to afford players reaction abilities that enable them to take actions outside of their own turn. Reactions are activated by playing cards onto the map then using them to respond to actions from other players as occasions arise.




A Living Game World
Alongside card-driven play, a developments deck of event cards is used to simulate a living game world that generates openings as well as threats for the players. These developments occur in the form of cards with immediate effects as well as lingering events placed onto the map.
The developments deck also contains check cards that lead to periodic checks of the terror threat level, domestic polarization, national debt, and the situation in the global war of ideas between democracy and authoritarianism. The war of ideas is pursued by dedicated cultural actions against regional tensions and destabilization resulting from aggressive contestations. Terror threats and polarization enter the respective home spaces as consequences of excessive economic action and political power projections.
For each game, a set of world event tokens is drawn and placed on the map. These tokens represent over two dozen major historical events from the period. World events are opportunities for aspiring global powers to address and resolve. Will you lead the world out of the crisis―or sink into an ever-deepening quagmire?
In the course of play, players may also build up institutions, institute policies, and adopt political orientations, as well as create political and other alignments on the map, such as free trade agreements, expand the EU membership, and more. These afford the players various bonuses including transforming certain card suits into wild joker suits and increasing hand size.

Victory
The winner is the power with the most victory points at the game end, or if playing with two or three players, the game is won or lost by democratic or authoritarian blocs of powers.
The game can be played in constellations of two, three, or four players or solitaire using a dedicated, easy-to-use solo play system. None of these player counts is an afterthought; they have been part of the game’s development from the very beginning.
Scoring uses a two-step, Agenda and Victory Points based system. Gaining Agenda Points represents short-term control of political and media attention. However, Agenda Points count towards your true, tangible legacy only at the game end when one type of Agenda Points will be converted into VPs. Players may also choose to spend valuable cards and actions during the game to convert Agenda Points into VPs as they go, one at a time. At every point, Order & Opportunity poses the question: who will be the force of order and a tangible legacy? And who will be the force of fleeting opportunism?

Components:

• One 22" x 34" mounted map board
• 109 Event cards
• 22 half-size World Event cards
• 80 wooden pieces
• Two six-sided dice
• Two counter sheets
• Rules of Play, Playbook, and Solitaire Play booklets
• Four Player Aid sheets