Representations of International Relations: Why I Re-Designed Robert Simpson’s ‘Supremacy’
I think we all have a somewhat irrational bias towards childhood nostalgia. Whether it’s an all-time favourite singer, movie or type of pet, rose-tinted glasses play a strange role in the judgements we make about what we love. Not that this is a bad thing, of course. Fond memories are fond for a reason. I think about the time when I got into Pokemon games. The first one I played was White, a 2011 release for the Nintendo DS. While many feel that it doesn’t top older entries to the series, I was enamoured by this game. In fact, when I went on to play other Pokemon titles (including the much-vaunted Soulsilver), I still had a soft-spot for White and quietly felt that it was the superior game. That original first love can go such a long way in influencing how we feel about a broader subject.
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All of this is to say that my favourite board game as child was Risk. You’ve probably heard of it: players push little plastic troops around a map of the world and roll lots of dice until one player emerges as the sole hegemon, the Earth slathered in their chosen shade of coloured armies. It’s a classic and one which is well-known in many Western households. Nowadays, I feel slightly lukewarm about it. Yet, without Risk, I would never have embarked on a project to try and iron out my gripes with the game. That same project lead me to Robert Simpson’s Supremacy, which then lead to an investigation of a little talked about but very interesting intersection between politics, economics and tabletop gaming. But I’m getting ahead of myself, why did I like Risk so much in the first place?
When I first started properly getting into board games as a teenager, Risk was a game which my friends and I returned to happily. As a child, my family operated under a strict ‘no-alliances’ ruling, table-talk was to be kept to a minimum and it would be pure strategy which would define our fates. Once I started playing it with friends, the alliances were free-flowing. Playing at my friend’s house, a trip to the fridge to grab another beer might be accompanied by a diplomatic rival with a plan to thrash out a deal to secure the fate of, say, South East Asia behind closed doors. Here, one of Risk’s weaknesses became its greatest strength. Instead of long and complicated methods of resolving combat, Risk just uses a dice roll and largely reduces down to who rolls highest wins. Of course, there’s some statistical nuance, but individual battles (especially when only one or two units are involved) are heavily driven by chance. What this means is that Risk’s complexity is neatly hidden by fistfuls of dice, so as a game system, Risk is very straight-forward to teach. Of course, here lies its weakness: any strategic planning in Risk is necessarily plagued by the spectre of randomly generated numbers.
I loved the simplicity of Risk’s system but eventually grew tired of its heavy reliance on luck. For sure, some luck in a game can be exciting and helps create game states which can be unusual or unique, but in over-abundance, that vital link between player decision-making and in-game outcomes is ruined. This was something which bothered me for a long time. While my gaming group moved on to different titles (in particular, Cole Wehrle and Patrick Leder’s excellent Root), I kept thinking about Risk. Maybe it was those rose-tinted glasses, but I wanted to find a game which married that beautiful simplicity with a system which rewarded strategic planning and the opportunity for maximum interaction between players.
Now, some of you might be thinking that a game like this already exists, the elephant in the room being Allan B. Calhamer’s venerable Diplomacy. For me, Diplomacy suffered the same crisis as Risk, everything was focussed on combat. There is only one negotiating chip, territory (which cannot easily be handed over at a whim). That’s not to say I don’t like Diplomacy (in fact, it’s one my favourites), but the thing that I was yearning for in Risk was a sense of economy. My general musing was that if there was another dimension to Risk, deep enough to be tactically engaging but simple enough so as to not melt the brains of its players, there could be room for all of the fun player interaction while avoiding the frustration of the dice-fest the game could become. It was around this time I discovered Supremacy during the summer of 2019.
I thought I had found my perfect game. From the title image, you might be mistaken for thinking it was a variant of Risk with navies and nuclear bombs. However, what Supremacy had that Risk or Diplomacy didn’t was a market — an actual analogue market! I was in nirvana, for about 5 minutes. Then I read the rulebook. It was, to be charitable, complicated. Now before the grognards descend from ASL towers to tell me that I should “git gud”, my appetite for heavy strategy games is pretty healthy. The issue is translating my enthusiasm for these games to my friends who, while sympathetic, are not always dying to tackle marathon brain-burning gaming sessions. Nonetheless, Supremacy had one useful advantage — exceptionally generic components — and thus I set about tweaking the rules to bring it in-line with what I was looking for.
Without going into excessive detail, my initial design objective was to boil the Supremacy system down into a more consolidated ruleset, while maintaining the flavour of the original. In practical terms, this meant keeping the original’s promise of adding nuclear warfare and naval battles to the Risk formula while simultaneously embedding a resource market structure to underpin all of the fighting and diplomacy across the world. There are three key resources in the game: oil, minerals and grain. Every territory is assigned a card which has a resource value between one and five and these cards could be activated and the player would gain the resources listed on the card. For instance, Arabia might have an oil card worth five, while Poland (which has a more mild climate) features a grain card worth three. Oil is the most straightforward of the resources, it is used to move armies and navies around the board. Minerals are used to build more units and a unit of grain would need to be paid for every territory under your control. That last rule provided a nice negative feedback loop against over-expansion, with growing empires needing more and more grain supplies to keep up with their burgeoning population. These resources provided the spine of the game’s system and the basis of all interactions.
I made a hasty prototype of the rules and ran a playtest in July with some friends. The result was decidedly mixed. I was still ironing out the victory conditions and my market system where players could trade resources against a market price which would fluctuate depending on supply and demand was under-developed and fiddly to evaluate. I put design work to one side as the university term began and more or less forget about Supremacy until November. When a friend asked me how the whole the project was going, I was rather embarrassed to say that things had stalled somewhat! I was struggling to make mechanical aspects of the game tick while slimming the rules down to create the well-oiled machine I was hoping for. It was around this time that I stumbled across an article about my beloved Risk which fundamentally changed the nature of my project.
Perhaps it was my ignorance more than anything, but it never crossed my mind to inquire about exactly what my design was trying to represent. Reading Michael Marks’ “Using the Game of ‘Risk’ to Teach International Relations” (1998) captured my frustrations with Risk, while also answering my problems with Supremacy. Marks highlights how Risk provides a neat simulation of realist security dilemmas, with players joining together to form non-aggression pacts to target an incoming hegemon while struggling to maintain a balance of power. However, he draws attention to how Risk reflects a world where foreign policy is exclusively focussed military security, an ultimately limited depiction of reality. If I was to make Supremacy a satisfying experience (which more faithfully captured international relations), I was going to need to make my game far more pluralistic about the types of political narratives it could tell.
Reinvigorated, I started to dedicating more and more time towards understanding the ways in which the plastic tokens and paper money of Supremacy could be used to build a believable global economy. While I would love to write about how I went about creating the market mechanism, I think this might be better saved for a separate article on its own. Instead, I’ll share my thoughts about some of the questions this design has raised for me, and perhaps some directions which could be explored in this unusual space between politics, economics and board games.
One thing which seemed fairly obvious is that in this process, the game designer is far from a neutral arbiter. Particularly with a game like Supremacy which intends to have a simulationist element, the designer must take a political stance when they interpret the world they’re trying to re-create. For example, what sort of narrative about colonialism did I want this game to tell? This was brought into even sharper focus when you consider the economic dimensions of the game. Players might expand their borders to bring new, valuable territories under their control so they can extract resources, but what does this mean for the natives who were being subordinated by the player’s armies? What is the liberal state’s relationship with imperialism? There was no mechanic for subaltern agency, and I found myself needing to provide a health warning to incoming playtesters about the disturbing ramifications of their actions.
Likewise, if a player chose not to engage in an imperial conquest of the world, how would their game-plan work out if they decided to operate under a protectionist style of play (mostly exporting goods for profit and resisting foreign imports) or through a liberal free-trade approach? What about full-blown autarky? Could economic transactions be positive-sum (ie. to the benefit of both parties as David Ricardo’s theory of ‘comparative advantage’ suggests) or would they be zero-sum and to the benefit of the dominant power (creating ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ relationships like Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world systems’ theory entails)? How could I create win conditions in a game about international relations? What does it mean to be a hegemonic state? On that question, I examined Tony Norfield’s “Economics of Imperialism: Index of Power” (2018) as a way of designing three central goals the players could work towards.
These are all vital and difficult issues I needed to address throughout the design process. The result is a game which examines the way in which empires are created and I would hope that conscientious players question the outcomes of their in-game actions and place them in the context of historical colonial and economic practices. Moreover, these questions can be extrapolated to an even broader level. What are the political arguments which exist in other board games? Are players implicit in their assertions? To what extent are designers responsible for the political arguments of their games, or are they driven by what is ‘fun’ for the players?
While this blog might leave you with more questions that it does answers, I hope that it has been an insightful introduction to the fascinating area that is board game design and its interaction with critical subjects such as politics and economics. I believe it is more important than ever that we think about the social ramifications of the entertainment we engage in and tabletop games are no different. What board games have you been playing during lockdown? What sorts of narratives are the games which you play on a Saturday night trying to tell? Most importantly, what is left unsaid?
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