First Contact: 2035 – a view from the Indo-Pacific
First Contact: 2035 is about to kick off. Credit: Rob Grayston
Rob Grayston is a game designer and emergency planning officer in Nottinghamshire. He’s a fan of all kinds of gaming, from grinding all-day boardgames, through flippantly delightful card games, to rules lite indie RPGs. As his partner says, “he’s 50% doomsday-prepper and 50% doomsday-writer.” You can contact him on Twitter.
States intentionally targeting communities to get them hooked on addictive narcotics, as part of a wider diplomatic goal… “allies” launching hostile covert operations against nations they publicly work with… military-political brinkmanship in a failed state rife with warlord militias, shady megacorporations, UN peacekeepers, and more societal instability than you can shake a stick at?
Sounds like a megagame to me!
I was fortunate enough to be a control player (A.K.A facilitator) for First Contact: 2035, a spiritual successor to the much-loved Watch the Skies. I was allocated the Indo-Pacific region where I would be helping players with the murky world of narrative plot and freeform play, alongside the steady hand of Daniel Bürkle running the map, with occasional support from Matt Clapham and Barbara Croker.
A megagame can be a daunting and confusing environment at the best of times; five things are happening all at once, they all need your attention, and if you don’t respond to even one of them it could snowball into a larger catastrophe. Different players are passing on information which may be inaccurate or even an outright lie, and sometimes your closest allies decided they would love to attack each other whilst insisting you have to pick a side – and all of this was happening in a hall on a Saturday in Camden with 200+ players behind every conversation, scheme, and action!
I’m going to present a brief snapshot of some of the events that happened in the Indo-Pacific – it’s not possible to capture everything 100% accurately, but I hope the stories I present below give a flavour of what was happening in one corner of the world.
Calm before the storm as the organisers make last minute checks. Credit: Rob Grayston
With potential hotspots like Taiwan and North Korea on the Indo-Pacific map, alongside the exciting potential of standard player shenanigans, I was looking forward to the cut-and-thrust of teams trying to secure their objectives – and the players did not disappoint, especially some of the new players who had not tried megagaming before.
It was heartening early on to see India making friends and influencing its neighbours in Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, where it had a friendly agreement with the Chinese on spheres of influence. One of the Indian players, a first-time megagamer who was more familiar with boardgames, let me know they weren’t sure what was going on and asked if I could help – and I loved that they did that, as it made my job easier and hopefully meant I helped them have a better day! It was brilliant to see them getting more involved and confident about the game as the day went on, and I hope to see them at future games.
Another brand-new megagamer, from the Australian team, performed some very reasonable and non-evil actions for the first few turns, after which they asked about their options on some disputed islands between Australia and Indonesia. What were the locals like? How much influence did the Indonesians have? Could the islands be flooded with recreational drugs which would cause community strife and narcotic dependency, only for Australian medical aid to swoop in, look like heroes, and win the islanders’ support?
In the real world, such an action would be an unspeakable act of cynical exploitation! In a megagame, you call that “Turn 3.”
Other new megagamers helped start one of the most tense threads of the day for me, let alone the players on the Indo-Pacific table, and the UN – the events in North Korea.
North Korea getting busy. Credit: Rob Grayston
With the death of the Supreme Leader and reports of mounting instability, a US and South Korean joint humanitarian and peacekeeping mission crossed the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) into North Korea. I asked whether they had consulted the UN about this. Or perhaps nearby China?
The US INDAPACOM military commander and South Korean military commander both looked at me with the sudden realisation of people who have got on a train going in the wrong direction, only to find out the train is a rollercoaster, and the direction of travel is a free-fall drop.
This initial boldness would produce a day of tension, brinkmanship, and skulduggery. This was all done with a cast of countries, megacorporations, scientists, foreign-sponsored democracy protestors, other nations’ “pet warlords”, and the UN.
In the aftermath of the unilateral violation of the DMZ by South Korean and US forces, it was clear that the North Korean forces had splintered into factions of the army loyal only to their generals. There were light casualties to the invaders, from disgruntled deserters and frightened North Koreans – but order seemed to hold, even as the Chinese lodged strong complaints at this brazen course of action.
In order to secure the nation swiftly and effectively in a pro-unification stance, South Korea bribed a general to be their chosen representative to advocate a unified Korea, and as a possible presidential candidate for imminent democratic elections. South Korea promised to support his campaign, and spent vast sums on pro-democracy and pro-unification political parties, as would be expected of a liberal democracy who stood for liberal values, progress- only kidding, they used some spy satellite action cards and a butt-ton of covert ops teams to go and assassinate all the rival generals in North Korea who weren’t their candidate.
The largest powers in the Indo-Pacific argue over North Korea. Credit: Rob Grayston
Importantly to this story, Japan’s ultimate goal was to prevent the unification and strengthening of Korea – it was a potential nearby rival after all, even if both nations wanted many of the same things. In pursuit of this (quiet) opposition to a unified Korea, another first time megagamer from Team Japan came over to me with a mischievous glint in their eye.
With the use of covert ops teams, diabolical action cards, and the most cunning of schemes, the Japanese brought down the South Korean satellite network.
Right after the South Koreans had just told me about their plan to assassinate all the generals, tracking their whereabouts with… those same satellites.
Neither team was aware of the other’s schemes and it was delicious.
This is exactly the kind of scenario that works so well in a megagame because it involved players’ actions having a direct impact on the game state and overall narrative – in this case, resulting in not enough North Korean generals being assassinated, China reacting to the mysterious assassinations and paying attention, and the instability of the country only worsening.
Maybe if those generals had died, North Korea would swiftly have been brought into the democratic fold with only limited and specific acts of violence? We will never know.
Japan was, so it seemed, very kind to send some armed forces to act as peacekeepers in North Korea when the US and South Koreans pulled out, in a move that was deemed acceptable by both China and the South Koreans. It would take Japan a while to leave though, even when asked – “supply chain issues,” or so they said…
To add to the situation, a megacorporation, Krieg Concern (an arms manufacturer, who were sanctioned by the UN for dubious activities) moved their HQ to North Korea and paid off some warlord soldiers to be their own private security. This did not help the general atmosphere of the region, and nor did the failed hacking attempt by a scientist’s quantum computer of the Chinese nuclear arsenal codes.
If they weren’t paranoid before, they certainly were after that!
Refugees spilled over into Russia and China from North Korea. UN peacekeepers were shot at. Pro-unification and pro-democracy protestors were attacked by Chinese-funded North Korean army deserters, followed by the Chinese army marching into North Korea, with Japanese armed forces standing aside for their entry – to the joint shock of South Korea and the US.
There were moments of anticipation, and towards the end of the day moments of hope for peace as an election was declared.
The Chinese weren’t having that, and after NATO and Russia had come to blows over Romania in Europe, the People’s Liberation Army (supported by Russia) moved against the joint UN-authorised South Korean, Japanese, and US peacekeeping forces.
It’s no surprise that China was booted out of the Security Council by the Secretary-General, but that didn’t help things when Chinese tanks rolled into Seoul…
You always find stuff in your pockets after a game – hey China, I owed you this on the last turn! Credit: Rob Grayston
After the sad story of North Korea, I will leave you with a glimmer of hope from Indonesia. This team were pivotal in creating strong political ties within the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and generally seemed to conduct their affairs in a diplomatic fashion which only saw minor acts of conflict, like a mercenary deployment against an Australian military base in the Philippines (although to be fair, the Chinese helped).
Having wisely invested their efforts and money into industry and technology (as well as supporting the farmers and communities on the islands disputed with Australia, rather than getting them all hooked on drugs), they acquired “Sunleaf” reactors, which could be harnessed to create clean energy that would revolutionise their society and could help combat global warming. At the end of the game, they were one of the most prosperous and technologically-advanced nations in not just the Indo-Pacific, but in the world.
However, after all those mushroom clouds went up over Russia and the USA, perhaps Indonesia would need some wonder-technologies to address the new challenges of an Earth that had so recently seen a sizeable nuclear exchange!
There’s more I could say, about the back-and-forth thieving of an historic work of art between Japan and South Korea facilitated by a megacorporation, the radiation leak in Thailand, the stalwart efforts by the UN to make people see sense and not escalate delicate situations, or the grinding rise of the pro-Chinese government in Cambodia – but I think you’ve heard enough from me.
(So a load of you should write something about your game thoughts – I’ll happily proofread or give advice, and it doesn’t need to be that long!)
Overall, I had a really enjoyable time, and am grateful to Very Large Huge Games for helping bring back some of my own megagame motivation, as well as generating a lot of excitement within our small corner of gaming hobbies.
I might even sign up as a player for First Contact: 2036! Now I just have to check if that pharma-diplomacy Australian player wants to be on a team with me…
Did you play First Contact: 2035? Do you have a story you want to tell the world? Let us know and we may publish it on our blog!