Strategy Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 422

A STRATEGY GAME OF DIPLOMACY: BALANCE OF POWER
Chris Crawford's Balance of Power ranks among the most brilliant games of diplomatic
strategy ever created. The setting is the Cold War between the United States and the
USSR. You take one side or the other and try to increase your own nation's geopolitical
prestige and sphere of influence at the expense of your opponent by supporting the gov-
ernments of friendly smaller countries and destabilizing or even overthrowing the
governments of unfriendly ones. The actions you can take include giving economic aid to
friendly countries, pressuring unfriendly ones through threats, signing defense and other
treaties, and giving direct military support, including sending in troops. If a smaller
country has an insurgency or a civil war going on, you can choose which side to support.
If the government of a hostile country falls and is replaced by a government friendly to
your side, you gain prestige. The victory condition is a net gain in prestige after eight
years have passed in the game world.
The real excitement, however, is not in manipulating smaller countries, but in what hap-
pens when the other side finds out about it — particularly if you interfere in a country
that traditionally lies in the other side's sphere of influence. For each action that one
superpower takes, the other superpower has a chance to object. Whoever initiated the
action must then decide whether to insist or to back off. These events, called crises , raise
the stakes enormously; tremendous prestige is lost when one side backs down in a crisis.
However, if you push your opponents too far, the result is a nuclear war that instantly
ends the game. The trick is to know when you are on firm ground and when you had bet-
ter let the other side have its way. It's poker with nuclear weapons.
Each side has limited resources with which to undertake its activities. The game is asym-
metric; the United States has more money, while the Soviets have more troops. More
subtle tactics, such as signing treaties and diplomatic pressure, don't cost anything but
aren't as effective. At the highest difficulty level, however, they are really the only way to
win; sending arms and troops is too likely to provoke a holocaust.
Balance of Power simulates geopolitics with a depth and subtlety never before seen in a
computer game and it is so good that, for a brief time, the U.S. State Department used it
to train diplomats. Crawford has written an excellent book called Balance of Power:
International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game that describes the core mechanics of
the game in detail, right down to the equations that govern particular behaviors
(Crawford, 1986). The topic is out of print but is available online in ASCII format; see
“References.”
Challenges
As the definition says, strategy games may include economic and exploration chal-
lenges, but strategic conflict generally dominates in strategy games. A game that
includes only economic challenges without any fighting is more properly a