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There are words and phrases that I just hate. Often this is because they are contrived, misused or just overused. In many cases, I understand that my hatred is quite irrational but that doesn’t make it burn any less fierce.

Do you know what else I hate? I hate when people “list their language pet peeves.” Either I’m going to hate hearing words used that I too hate, and I am therefore going to suffer for hearing those words from my fellow haters*. Or… if they are words I don’t hate? Well, I’m going to get perturbed that people actually complain about the fairly-innocuous word-X when word-Y is so much more infuriating.

So I’m not even going to give you one example. OK, one.

Because I hate the name of this game. I hated it when I first read it and I hated it even more when I heard someone pronouncing it in a video. Hedgemony. Man, that’s repulsive. But that’s the name of this game and I am going to have to try to look past it so as to see the merits of said game through a hazy, red fog of rage.

Now, even though it is but a week or two later, I am not sure exactly how I got myself entangled in this topic. It is from the same websurf that turned up this post and got me buying a new game covering the Peloponnesian War. And despite the link between** the name, Hedgemony, and the jockeying among the Greek City States for dominance, my original search wasn’t about ancient Greece. No, I was actually following a discussion about professional wargaming and its intersection with hobbyists. Wherever I started, I ended up on the RAND Corporation’s blog and taking in its discussions about professional wargaming.

RAND developed Hedgemony: A Game of Strategic Choices in the fall of 2020. Reading between the lines, it was an effort to enhance the professional wargaming exercise by incorporating some of the best practices from commercial games. By way of contrast to the boardgaming world, when the military or a contractor like RAND conducts a wargame, is a personnel-intensive endeavor. Such a structure for a “professional wargame” goes back as far as Prussia’s Kriegsspiel. These are group exercises which, to augment the actions of the “players,” use umpires to interpret the commands of those players, filtering them through the systems and communications of what is being modeled. For one example, from 1820s-era play, the “commanders” would issue orders for troop movement but the umpire would decide how subordinates would actually carry those orders out and move the forces represented on the map – perhaps executing something different than the commanding officer’s intent.

Professional wargaming also tends to be a one-sided event. The goals necessarily suit the purposes of the hosting organization. The point, when the U.S. Army organizes a wargame, isn’t to challenge and entertain the Russian player – it is to optimize the strategic and operational thinking of U.S. Army officers; the ones playing the U.S. Army side. Therefore, a typical modern exercise might have a blue team (actual commanders or planners of the host organization), a red team (other professionals role-playing the enemy), and white team (the referees). The last group will often have the ability to “make up the rules as they go along” so as to best model reality and to allow for “outside of the box” thinking from the members of the blue or red teams.

At RAND, their wargaming teams often involved people who were also hobbyist wargamers – probably of my own generation. Specifically mentioned is gaming experience with Avalon Hill and SPI’s products, something suggests being of a certain age. Tapping this accumulated background, RAND launched an exercise where the top*** (relevant) wargames of the day were surveyed to see what they could add to a more traditional RAND exercise. A multi-team, rapid-prototyping game-development process produced some competing ideas which were then refined into a hybrid boardgame/refereed game experience. It is important to point out that the goal was not to create a board game, it was to better RAND’s existing wargaming capabilities.

Nonetheless, the result is a product available for purchase by the public. In many ways it resembles the games we would buy for our own entertainment but in other ways it doesn’t at all. Even if I thought this game was for me, I almost certainly would not buy it. It sells for $250!

Fortunately, a player guide and a rulebook are both available for download and both of these make clear who might be interested in this game and who wouldn’t. As stated in the player’s guide, “Hedgemony is not really a game qua game; it is a flexible pedagogical tool.”

Crikey!

I, myself, have a background in defense contracting. Military systems contractors specifically and defense workers in general love to use inscrutable language packed with insider lingo and acronyms. You might even have detected that I’m falling back on some of that vocabulary (e.g. “multi-team, rapid-prototyping exercise”) as my mind returns to that old world. But part of me strenuously objects when forced to stumble through such overly-impenetrable prose. After choking on the above sentence, I was further dismayed by the heavy use of buzzwords and acronyms on the pages that followed. (In true military/defense industrial complex style, the game also has a Abbreviations and Glossary manual which, itself, approaches about half the size of the Player’s Guide.)

What does that offending sentence mean in plain English? Well, Hedgemony is not intended to be a game, played for fun. It was created as a training and educational exercise for current professionals or, maybe, grad students in the field. More specifically, it is designed to be played with a specific lesson in mind – the game session hand-structured around the teaching of that lesson. I’ll give them credit where it is due. If I had $250 burning a hole in my pocket, the fair warning is right there telling me that I might not like this game. The purpose, if I were to guess, of offering the game as a commercial product is to make it available for graduate school -level instructors as a classroom aid.

At this point, I am still reading the guides and the rules. There are some interesting aspects to it although my initial feel is that the best of the game is left out of the game box. Which is to say, what will make a really good Hedgemony session depends on what the players (especially those on the red and white teams) bring to the table in terms of both strategies and a connection between game mechanisms and “ripped from the headlines” events. That said, there are a few hearty gaming souls who have bought this game and intend to give the old non-college try.

Board Game Geek ranks the game at 8.0 based on exactly two scores (both 8s). There is but one comment thread and in it there is one**** member who indicates that they’ve bought the game and are hoping to play soon. Another BGG user, on his blog, created a two part “review” of the game. His write-up is also based on unboxing and analyzing the rules and not as a result of an actual game. Since he was already, a year ago, way ahead of where I am now, I’ll just wrap up my own writing and link here to his summary.

Pre-play review of Hedgemony, part 1

Pre-play review of Hedgemony, part 2

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

*I know I said I wouldn’t list words but this one just came out. Plus, it’s not that I really hate “haters.” It is an overused term, however.

**RAND describes the origin of the word as a combination of Hegemony and “hedge,” as in hedge fund. I take from their marketing pitch that one of the trends in government think tanks is to apply to international policy and diplomacy the techniques that top hedge fund managers use to seek alpha. I further glean that this game has been created, in part, to encourage just that way of thinking.

***The Hedgemony lists the inspirations for the game. Notable to me, based on my personal experience, are A Distant Plain, Triumph & Tragedy, and Twilight Struggle. Looking at the longer list, there is an emphasis on strategic planning and investment rather than tactics and combat.

****This is not to imply there is only one non-professional owner of this game out there. The website tallies 13 owners of the game with 14 more having placed it on their wishlist. Obviously, this undercounts even those users of BGG who own the game, much less the hobby universe as a whole.