Let's Play Cuba Libre

Mmm... organized crime.

 - Homer Simpson, Last Exit to Springfield, the Simpsons, season 4

I remember seeing a copy of Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 at our friendly local gaming store and thinking to myself that anyone who makes a board game out of the Algerian war has got to be mad. Of course, I now know more about GMT Games and can testify that they are, indeed, quite mad. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of an entire series of counterinsurgency games, and since the publishers themselves suggest starting with Cuba Libre, that's what we're going to do.

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The first impression I got was sheer delight at how small the game board was! We're used to games taking up the entire table, so it was a delight to have some actual elbow room. Despite its tiny size, the board is very functional, and the cards and wooden pieces are excellent.

We're playing as four factions fighting over Cuba: the government, Fidel's rebels, the Revolutionary Directorate of 13 March, and the US Mafia. While the government is trying to hold on to power and suppress the rebels, the rebels are trying to control enough territories to overthrow the government, while the mob is trying to keep its casinos open and make money. While all factions have different win conditions, I was very interested in the asymmetrical nature of the Mafia faction, so that was who I played as.

Cuba Libre is a card-driven game, but in a very clever way: players don't hold cards in their hands, but a card is revealed from the deck, and then the top card of the deck is turned face up. So there's always one card in play, and you can see what the next card will be as well.

The icons at the top of the cards determine the order in which the factions act that turn. In that order, they can decide to pass, play the event, or conduct operations on the map. Once two factions have played, play moves on to the next card, and the factions that took an action last turn have to sit the next one out. In some cards, like Herbert Matthews above, you pick one out of two possible event outcomes.

It's a very clever system, which forces you to think quite hard about your decisions every turn. Furthermore, victory points are scored whenever a Propaganda card comes up; they're distributed throughout the deck, one per quarter.

We started as we went on: I was trying to open casinos and amass wealth, the Directorio massed in the central highlands and Fidel's gang founded bases in the east. Santiago de Cuba attracted huge amounts of police, military and guerrillas throughout, and somehow none of them got much done. The most miserable people on the island must have been the unfortunates who lived in Las Villas, which was constantly being shaken down for resources by the Directory's guerrillas.

When the game ends is determined by when the last Propaganda card comes out. If the deck is prepared properly, it should be in the final quarter of cards: one of cards 40-52. In our case it was card number 49. So with the third Propaganda card showing up surprisingly early, the last campaign turned into a bit of a slog. However, in the end, the Directory won a surprisingly tight game.

We all enjoyed the game and found it quite simple to pick up and play on a weekend day. The asymmetry between the factions and the card-driven system are excellent. I've put in a P500 order for Pendragon, the COIN game set in Roman Britain. Before it shows up, I'm pretty sure we'll bust out Cuba Libre again.

Mission tactics at sea

For future reference, I want to record this outstanding example of mission tactics / Aufragstaktik / whatever you want to call it. I've been thinking about World War II and specifically naval warfare in it, so I'm re-reading Correlli Barnett's excellent Engage the Enemy More Closely. There's a lot to disagree with in Barnett's account, and David Edgerton has done so, at length. I still think that much of Barnett's criticism of British grand strategy in the war is fundamentally correct, and I think I'll want to return to that later.

For now, though, here's a quote from Barnett's narrative of the Second Battle of Sirte in 1942, where a Royal Navy cruiser squadron under Admiral Philip Vian drove off a considerably superior Italian force.

"His own flagship Cleopatra had been hit in the bridge early in the action, killing fifteen and temporarily knocking out her radio. But, wrote Vian in his memoirs, "The damage sustained was of no importance. The leaders of the divisions of the striking force were well aware of my intentions, and communication, for the time, was unnecessary.""

That's command for you.

The decline of Christianity in Finland

I was looking for a cute graph of the fall in church membership in Finland, to go with this tweet, and decided I had to make it myself. That led into a little bit of reading and organizing my thoughts, and I've collated the results here.

It was fully illegal to not be Christian in the Kingdom of Sweden. From 1634 onward, your choices were either to be Lutheran or leave the country. Some practical exceptions were made for Orthodox Karelians living in the eastern provinces, and I don't know to what extent individual people were persecuted, but basically the law said you belonged to the state church and that was that. They later allowed some other Christian denominations, mainly for foreigners: Swedish subjects weren't allowed to convert.

What got me reading was that I was curious as to what the status of Jews in Sweden was, and I learned that they were entirely prohibited from moving to most of the kingdom, including the Finnish provinces. In 1802 Sweden banned the immigration of Jews altogether, and although the law was soon repealed in Sweden, the Finnish provinces were lost to Russia in the war of 1808-09 and the law not only stayed on the books here, but was enforced until independence. I never knew that the Grand Duchy of Finland was so ferociously antisemitic. Jewish citizens only gained full civil rights in 1917.

So the religious situation in Finland at independence was basically that the law forced the entire population to be Lutheran. There was a small Orthodox minority, along with tiny Jewish and mostly Tatar Muslim communities, as well as some other, vanishingly small Christian churches. So officially, something like 98-99% of the population was Lutheran.

This only begins to change in 1923, when the first ever law on the freedom of religion is passed. Now, for the first time, it's possible to found new religious organizations and freely join or leave them, and even not belong to one at all. Full freedom of religion this ain't: the Lutheran and Orthodox state churches maintain their privileged positions, Christian churches get special tax exemptions, and the process for registering new religious denominations only recognizes religions that are Christian or broadly similar to Christianity. This is how the law still works: the Finnish wicca community, for instance, have been denied religious status because, among other reasons, they lack a holy book. This is a totally absurd criterion for a religion, but it's still the law.

The law came into force in 1924, so that was the first year Finnish citizens were allowed to leave the church. Since then, if I recall correctly, overall church membership has only gone down: there has never been a year in Finnish history since when the church had more members than in the previous year. Membership now stands at something like 68% and is continuing to fall.

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So what happened? Why is church membership collapsing?

A new religious freedom law was passed in 2003, which made leaving the church easier. Earlier, for instance when I quit the church, you had to actually go to a church office in person, fill out a form and talk to a priest, and if they couldn't talk you out of it, a month later your papers were transferred to the civil registry. The 2003 law made it possible to quit the church through a simple letter, which could be sent electronically. That same year, the Tampere "free-thinkers" atheist organization opened a website, eroakirkosta.fi, where you could input your personal details and they would take care of the process. As of this writing, they were coming up on 800 000 people having used the service, which you have to admit is a little bit impressive in a country of five million. But if you look at the overall graph, it's not like the trend started in 2003.

While the membership decline has been fairly steady, it's been given tremendous momentary boosts by both the church itself, of which more later, but also various public scandals involving religion. Several of those have involved Finnish Christian conservative politician Päivi Räsänen, a disgusting bigot who hates everyone different from her, and has consequently but presumably inadvertently done more to eradicate Christianity from Finland than anyone, up to and including the national hero who murdered a bishop with an axe. Whenever she shows her face on TV, there's a spike at eroakirkosta.fi. Lutherans sometimes complain about this, but the effect is real.

In my opinion, the fundamental reason behind the collapse of church membership is that the vast majority of people leaving the church were never Christians to begin with. We have no real information on how many people were actually Christian back when it was illegal not to be, because they didn't do a lot of polling back then, but also because the poll question would literally have been "do you confess to treason against God and your King".

What we do know is that in several surveys done by the church in the 21st century, the Finnish population divides into three approximately similarly sized groups. One is Christian and believes more or less what the church teaches; one believes in some kind of higher power or whatever, but not in the sense taught by the church; and one believes in nothing at all. So you could say that while some 70% of the population belongs to a Christian denomination, only about 30% say they're Christians. Suddenly the graph becomes a lot easier to understand, I think.

This also seems to be the mechanism behind the various Christian conservative-inspired brouhahas causing people to quit the church: if you don't actually believe in what the church teaches, and you see these odious bigots declaiming their hatred without any real pushback from the church, I think it's easy to see that this can lead quite a few people to ask themselves why, exactly, are they paying money to stay affiliated with this kind of activity.

As a point of interest, we have no compelling reasons to think that number of Christians was ever much higher. It may have been, but it may not have been; we have no direct way of knowing, but we can make some guesses. Until at least the 19th century, everyone in Finland had to pass an examination on the catechism to be confirmed into the church. It was never a particularly difficult examination, but in large parts of the country, people legitimately suffered with it and many were almost certainly being confirmed without passing it. This doesn't exactly make you think the average person was deeply devout.

Similarly, Finnish folk religion persisted well into the 20th century, and was only really wiped out by the elementary school system. While it incorporated lots of Christian language and ideas, it was still fundamentally a pagan belief system which the church tried to eradicate for centuries - in vain. Despite considerable efforts, the church also failed to impose Christian systems of gender and sexuality on the broader population; homophobia and strict bourgeois gender roles only became anything like universal in the 20th century through public education and conscription.

So we have no real reasons to believe Christianity was ever particularly popular or widespread in what later became Finland, in terms of things people actually believed in, whatever their nominal (compulsory) allegiance was. Again, I feel like this makes the decline in membership seem like a return to normality.

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Finally, there is a core reason for the collapse in church membership that it's considered taboo to really talk about. It's that what the church teaches is complete nonsense. The Bible is, in parts, an interesting collection of books with some historical value. As an actual guide to organizing your life or thinking about, well, anything germane to living in the 21st century, for the vast majority of us, it is useless. The Finnish Lutheran church officially expounds doctrines like the Trinity, which is pseusophilosophical garbage, and the resurrection, which is a very silly fairy tale. The question isn't really why people are leaving an organization that professes to believe in this blather, but rather why anyone would join it in the first place once they're no longer being forced to by state violence.

Education in what is now Finland was a church monopoly until the 1860s, and the modern school system was founded in the 1920s. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the quality of secular education improves, membership in organized superstition declines. Or in other words, when the church loses access to the coercive power of the state, and critical thinking skills become more widespread, church membership begins to collapse. Obviously it is a more complex social phenomenon or series of phenomena than just this, but if we're going to pretend that broadening access to high-quality education doesn't matter at all, well, that's a pretty big choice to make.

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So what will happen in the future? Who knows. A fellow theology freshman told me in 2012 that maybe god will send a new reformation to Finland. Who am I to argue?

Most commentators, even from the church, reckon that the membership decline will continue. If you think that the previously cited figure of 30-ish percent of the population being Christians will stay that way, then maybe church membership will drop to around that number.

A church with a membership around 30% will be quite a different organization from the state religious bureaucracy it is today. At that point, the church will probably no longer be able to discharge its remaining public functions, like burial services, and considerable state subsidies to a minority religion will hardly be a sustainable solution. As with schools, at some point in the not so distant future, the public sector will have to reclaim the rest of the public services the church has monopolized.

Even now, with a declining membership and massive pension burdens, the church is in a somewhat perilous financial position. They also have great swathes of real estate that may prove somewhat difficult to unload; who do you sell a cathedral to in Finland? The state already directly subsidizes the church to the tune of over a hundred million euros a year, not without controversy. There are those who think that the church is headed for financial collapse; I remember a panel at the faculty of theology where one provocative participant told the attending students that none of us would ever retire from the church, because it will have gone bankrupt by then. He may not be wrong.

The church may also collapse because there will no longer be any demand for it. So-called mainline protestantism has been in a global decline for quite a while, and the same seems to be happening in Finland. Roughly speaking, as more and more people are leaving organizes religion, the influence of the extremist bigots in churches is increasing. Maybe the most spectacular instance of this is the way white USian Protestants are rallying around, of all people, Dolan fucking Trump. The more influence these fanatics gain over their denominations, the more repulsive they will appear to the general population.

The strategy of the Finnish Lutheran church has been to sit on the fence as long as possible. They triggered one of the bigger waves in membership loss by their uncompromising opposition to women in the priesthood in the 1980s, and went on to resolve the issue in such a stupid way that clerical misogyny is rampant to this day. They're now doing a similar thing with same-sex marriage, which is accepted by the state and not the church, and the church's homophobic bigotry is one of the main reasons members are quitting. At the same time, the opposite side of the culture war professes to believe that the church has sold out to cultural Marxism or whatever they're calling it now, and bigots are also leaving the church.

It's easy, and not entirely wrong, to say that the church is choosing the worst possible alternative by equivocating. The truth may be that there's simply no position they can take without potentially catastrophic consequences. If the church came out in favor of gay marriage, against racism and inequality and so on, they would not only alienate quite a large portion of their members, but according to what we know about their opinions, most of their staff. Similarly, for the church to come down even more firmly on the right of the culture war would be a complete disaster for them in terms of not only popular support but potentially even their official position as a state church. So it's not at all clear that they can actually do any better.

The final dilemma for the church may be that there just isn't any real demand for a national mainline Lutheran denomination. When both the liberal and fundamentalist believers are minorities in a large church, they can coexist. It's the middle between them that's falling out of the church, and if this keeps up, it'll be just the extremes left. Who, at that point, is the former state church for?

Anyway this is all premised on current trends continuing, so if something new and unexpected happens, all bets are off.

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So this is the kind of thing that happens when I'm working and in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave where it's impossible to do anything except lie down in front of a powerful fan. I hope you've enjoyed these random thoughts on the Finnish state church and their membership problems.

Let's Play Freedom: Underground Railroad

Obviously we don't have a lot of opportunities for board gaming during the pandemic, but I did get a chance to play Freedom: Underground Railroad last month.

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Freedom: Underground Railroad is a co-op game for 1-4 players, set before and during the US civil war. The objective is to abolish slavery, both by gathering support for abolitionism and smuggling freed slaves north to Canada. 

Like so many board games these days, the setup feels really complicated, but when you actually start playing, it isn't, so you just gotta have faith in the process. The system of buying and using tokens to perform actions, along with the various player roles and so on, initially feels difficult but isn't too fiddly once you actually get going. The components are reasonably well-made; there's quite a few cards, tokens and doodads, and a couple of special dice for random slave catcher movement.

Basically the game is like a co-op puzzle: you move slaves north, collecting money on the way and trying to avoid slave catchers. The mechanics are nothing fancy, but they work. Where the game really shines is theme. There's a rotating series of cards featuring people and events of the time, which are pretty good; here's an example:

But the biggest thing is that you really get into the theme of the thing! You beat the game by buying a set amount of support tokens and freeing a certain amount of slaves; you lose if too many slaves get caught or you can't do this in the allotted turns. It's not really a problem if some slaves are caught, and when we started we figured it would be okay if we lost some; once we started getting into the game, it was not! So I'd say it was a surprisingly intensive experience. But it was also fun, and hey, we won!

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So this was a very brief sojourn into Freedom: Underground Railroad, and I obviously can't comment on how it stands up to repeated playthroughs. But I really enjoyed playing it, and I think it could even have some potential as an educational game: the theme, as I said, is spot on. The only downside I can really think of is that the game is a bit on the expensive side for what you actually get in the box. Overall I definitely recommend it.

The US is a failing state

 So Joe Biden was sworn in as President, and the previous guy flew off to Florida in a sulk. All well and good, and frankly, very relieving. But the US has serious problems that aren't going away nearly as easily.

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I wrote about the Forever War a couple of years ago, but it's not like anything has changed. American troops have spent 30 years in the Middle East and achieved absolutely nothing. They're still occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, there's still a civil war in Syria even though nobody cares about it any more, and so on. What I want to highlight here is the total ineptitude of the Forever War. The USians have spent three decades fighting and have learned nothing.

Take Syria, for instance. When the country collapsed into civil war, the US couldn't decide whether or not to actually intervene. The Obama administration drew several "red lines" and then dithered over them, while the next guy was more than happy to order airstrikes that accomplished nothing. The point is not to debate what the Americans should or shouldn't have done in Syria. It's that two consecutive administrations were unable to formulate or execute any kind of coherent national policy, or use military force to achieve national political goals. This is how a failing state acts.

US policy toward Iran is similarly senseless. Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, seemingly for no reason except that Obama signed it and therefore it must be bad -- only to then turn around and insist, in a ridiculous and failed diplomatic maneuver, that even though the US withdrew from the treaty, they're still a "participant" in it. Trump then had Qasem Soleimani murdered, again seemingly for no particular reason. At the time, it looked like the US was trying to provoke Iran into a war, but when the Iranians retaliated by striking US bases in Iraq, Trump lied that they hadn't and nothing came of it. You tell me: is this a superpower executing a strategy of regional dominance, or an empire as decrepit as the idiot con man who pretended to lead it?

This January marks the 30-year anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Over those three decades, the US has taken a sledgehammer to the Middle East and achieved nothing at all, except killing untold thousands of people and destabilizing the entire region. And they're not done yet: US forces are still stuck in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and no-one even expects the new administration to do anything different. There's no exit strategy and there never was. In Vietnam, they had to leave when the other guys kicked them out, but US military supremacy is now so overwhelming that this is very unlikely, but they won't leave of their own accord. Nobody can define an end state, let alone a victory condition, for the Forever War, and because it's constantly spun as somehow a patriotic defensive effort protecting American liberties, it can't be stopped.

In other words, the supposedly greatest country in the world can't figure out how to stop spending literally trillions of dollars murdering innocent people in the Middle East.

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Speaking of people dying, as I write this in early January, the death rate to the coronavirus pandemic in the US is a little over 1 000 per million (Statista). At that rate, over five thousand Finns would have died. The actual number was under six hundred when I wrote this. So despite spending over twice as much per person on health care, the US system is delivering an outcome that's ten times worse. They also can't get people vaccinated: the US government set a target of 20 million vaccinations by the end of 2020; they managed two million.

Now, it's easy to say that this is because of the idiot who's been in charge, and obviously he's to blame. You don't want a vacuous populist with stupid hair in charge of your country during a pandemic; just ask the Brits. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause.

The Forever War has turbocharged American racism. Most obviously through the massive islamophobia constantly incited in its name, but also in indirect ways. The ongoing police brutality in the US, for example, and the militarization of US policing, long predate the "war on terror" but are being accelerated by it. Veterans are strongly overrepresented in US police departments, and according to at least one study, are more likely to shoot people than non-veterans. Law enforcement agencies across the US gained massive, intrusive new powers of surveillance in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the flood of military equipment to police departments only increased. A more militarized police force with more veterans is then more likely to brutalize and murder minorities, which leads to protests, which justifies more policing.

As with the Forever War, there's no end in sight for the rampant police violence in the US either. One party openly cheers for it, with the unwavering support of the police unions, but the other one can't figure it out either. I'd like to say it's unbelievable that Biden's response to the police riots against the Black Lives Matter movements is to increase police funding, but it isn't. His position didn't change when off-duty cops stormed the Capitol and on-duty cops let them.

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Trump himself, as a politician, is obviously a product of the Forever War. His racism, crude even by American standards, is boosted and justified by the rampant islamophobia of the "war on terror", and is key to his popularity among his overwhelmingly white, mostly well-off supporters.

But I think there's another way in which the Forever War ties into Trumpism. The supposedly constant threat of terrorism lets white Americans pretend that they're being victimized. White people living in the middle of rural nowhere, USA, can profess to be terrified that any moment now, an ISIS technical will pull up on their main street and shoot out the only traffic light in the name of the Caliphate. This doesn't just excuse white USians' racism, but it lets them play-act being oppressed, and there's nothing Trump supporters love more than pretending they're being oppressed. It's why Trump's repellent and ridiculous mix of bombast and self-pitying whining appeals to them: they want to both revel in their privilege and pretend it doesn't exist. The "war on terror" provides a way to get there. And, of course, once you've convinced yourself that ISIS is coming, you'll find it a lot easier to believe that buses full of Antifa are on their way to your hometown, as so many USian conservatives at one point claimed to believe.

This impossible idea, by the way, of simultaneously being the privileged and invaluable backbone of society, and a persecuted minority, has historically been the position of Christian churches. Which makes it entirely unsurprising that white Christians overwhelmingly support Trump.

Even though the most deranged conspiracists were bitterly disappointed when Biden was sworn in, the conservative persecution complex is carrying on as if nothing had happened. Moments after voting to overthrow the results of a democratic election, various Republican politicians were on the usual platforms whining about how mean the Democrats were being. Fox News and their ilk have spent the past year telling their viewers Joe Biden is a communist who is going to take their guns, ban cars and beef and whatever, just like they told everyone Obama was going to do. When none of that happened, it didn't put so much as a dent in the hysterical screeching, nor will it now.

Of course, in the dying days of the Trump regime, a huge number of these people convinced themselves that any election they lose isn't legitimate. Their elected representatives voted to overturn election results, and incited an armed mob to storm the Capitol, trying to stop the election result from being confirmed. Nearly half of all Republicans supported the attack.

A strong faction of Republicans now openly oppose democracy. If they took back the House and Senate in the midterms, judging on their behavior so far, they would vote to throw out a presidential election result that didn't go their way.

It's one thing for a party to elect someone lile Trump, who openly opposes democracy. It's another for some politicians, like the Zodiac, to support him and echo his rhetoric. But when a large part of the supporters of the party start opposing democracy and believing that only they are entitled to rule, it becomes a serious problem.

This mentality is being driven by the brutalizing racism of the Forever War. It's being driven by the constant police brutality and racism. It's being turbocharged by the radicalization engines of the right-wing media, Facebook and Youtube. It isn't going away. If anything, it's going to get worse, because the structural forces driving it aren't going anywhere.

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This year will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Of course, they didn't create problems like American racism and militarism, or the fascist contempt so much of the USian right has for democracy. We can't know what the 21st century would have been like without the War on Terror. But it would be very difficult to argue that that Forever War hasn't made all of these problems so much worse, and so much more difficult to solve.

The US has been in mortal peril before. It survived the Civil War, even though the subsequent efforts to fix some of these deep-rooted inequalities was sabotaged. Now, real structural change seems even harder, and the saboteurs are legion.

No-one knows what will happen. In one of the more spectacularly silly journalistic outpourings in my country, someone compared Joe Biden to FDR. I can't help thinking that's spectacularly wrong. To stay in that context, I'm afraid Biden isn't the great reformer who will actually grapple with the great problems of US society that FDR was. Instead, he's Herbert Hoover: the studious technocrat who won't address the actual issues, and is overwhelmed by them. I suppose in 2024 we'll see if he's succeeded by an FDR - or a Buzz Windrip.

I can't say I'm very optimistic.

Let's Play Here I Stand - by email

I don't know why it took me so long to find out that GMT Games has done an epic board game on the Reformation, but now that I know about it, we're definitely playing Here I Stand. A monstrously complicated card-driven game with a 40-page rulebook and separate setup guide, Here I Stand has mechanics for everything from theological debates and French chateaus to Ottoman piracy and circumnavigating the world, not to mention a table where you roll to find out how Henry of Eight's love life is going, complete with an individual cardboard counter for each wife. At the end of the day, whoever has the most victory points wins.

Our bodies are not ready; they will not be ready; nonetheless we are doing this.

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After a succesful attempt at the Game of Thrones board game, we got most of the gang back together for a game of Here I Stand. We're uniquely qualified to play this. I'll be first in player order as the Ottomans; I've majored in Arabic and Islamic Studies in the past, and most importantly, I've read Mikael Hakim several times. Also, here's a picture of me at the Reformation Wall in Geneva.

View this post on Instagram

Vacation, day 3. The trip continues; until I get back online, enjoy this selfie I took with Oliver Cromwell at Geneva's absolutely ludicrous Reformation Wall.

A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on May 26, 2017 at 12:46am PDT

Perhaps even more impressively, we've arranged to have players with theology degrees represent both the Vatican and the Protestants, so I fully expect those theological debate mechanics to get a thorough working out. With three less theological but very competent board gamers representing France, England and the Hapsburgs, we are ready to Here I Stand.


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Our first attempt took eight grinding hours, during which we managed to play a grand total of three (3) turns.

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on Feb 22, 2020 at 1:49pm PST

For posterity, let it be recorded that the first card played in the first action phase was Shipbuilding, as the event. This actually turned out quite well for me, since Barbary Pirates came out fairly early, and the Hapsburgs invaded Algiers and I had to go through quite some trouble to drive their fleet back! Meanwhile, the other bastards played both Revolt in Egypt and War in Persia, so my armies disappeared off to fight these foreign wars very quickly; while I did knock out Hungary-Bohemia, I spent most of the game firmly on the back foot as I had very few cards or troops.

Meanwhile, the Reformation got off to a slowish start and the Diet of Worms ended in stalemate. Things looked bad for France when England declared war and invaded, with Hapsburg troops massing on the Spanish border, but the English army was outflanked and defeated, and the Hapsburgs not only made peace with the French but actually allied with them. The French built some chateaus and drove into Italy, which left them with the most victory points when we hit our time constraint during the third turn.

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Based on our initial attempt, I only really have three criticisms of Here I Stand. One is that the board can get very cluttered at times; to the extent that it can genuinely get confusing trying to figure out what is where, especially looking down the length of the board. The other is that the rules really can be absolutely bewildering at times, especially when trying to look something up in mid-game - which, quite frankly, is something that's going to be happening a lot. It's been said that none of the individual rules in Here I Stand are particularly complicated, and I sort of accept that. But the problem is the sheer volume of rules, which makes it really difficult to get a handle on all of them. So to put it mildly, a generous amount of time needs to be allocated to poring over the rulebook in-game.

This really exacerbates the third and biggest problem: it can be a long time between player turns. When the Protestant player slaps down A Mighty Fortress and starts making his six reformation attempts in Germany, requiring us to dig out the rulebook and figure out exactly how many dice he's rolling and who wins ties where, and you're a player with no direct stake in any of this - how do you not tune out? It can also be mildly frustrating when players are getting very different amounts of cards; I spent something like half of turn three just hanging around, watching the Hapsburgs demolish my position in Hungary, since I started with three cards and he had seven or eight.

The sheer complexity of the rules can make it very difficult to get invested in the game, and the amount of downtime between turns can make it very difficult to stay invested. Despite this, I found Here I Stand to be an absolutely fascinating experience; I can easily understand how someone else might find it to be anything but.

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Having said this, I feel that Here I Stand is an absolutely extraordinary game, and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to play it. Our original plan was to dedicate a summer weekend to playing it properly, but then, of course, the coronavirus happened. We've quarantined ourselves and cancelled all our gaming activities for the spring; in practical terms, you could say we're stuck here in our apartment and there's not a lot we can do about it.

So instead of a weekend of Here I Stand, we're going to be responsible citizens and play out this reformation the old-fashioned way: by email. With the help of my partner, I will be maintaining the physical board in our living room, and everyone will be e-mailing in their moves. Here it is, by the way:

Both the rulebook and scenario book are available for download on the GMT Games website. We'll be playing the long campaign, obviously. I'll be doing regular updates on this blag and my social medias as well; because there will be a full written record of every move, I can post a play-by-play account here. I'm going to shoot for one post per turn, but we'll see how it goes.

Finally, I thought I'd say a couple of words about each faction and their starting position in the game, so that if anyone wants to follow along they'll have some idea where everyone's starting from. Every faction also has a home card (the Papacy has two), which is never discarded and always returns to that player's hand.


The Ottomans

Fresh from the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottomans are ruled by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and start the game at war with the minor power Hungary-Bohemia. Historically, this was when the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna but eventually had to withdraw. The Ottomans are the only power that can build corsairs and gain victory points through piracy.

The Ottoman home card is Janissaries. Named after the slave soldier corps that came to dominate the Ottoman military, the card can be played for five command points, or used to generate troops or affect a combat.

The Hapsburgs

The mightiest power in Europe, Emperor Charles V rules modern-day Spain, the Netherlands, southern Italy, Austria and Germany. They're still embroiled in the Italian Wars with France, which started in the previous century, and so start the game at war with France. As ruler of Germany, the Emperor also gets involved in the religious struggle, and with a conquistador already underway, they also have a headstart to the New World. There's no areas of the game where the Hapsburgs aren't involved.

The Hapsburg home card is Holy Roman Emperor. The card represents Charles V charging around his widely dispersed empire, and can be used to move him about and conduct operations, making sure the Emperor is always in the thick of it.

England

English policy on the eve of the Reformation is concerned with exactly one thing: producing a lawful heir for Henry VIII. There's a pregnancy table for his wives and everything. Also, as the game goes on, the English Reformation starts, and everything generally gets more complicated. The English are secure on their island, but have to reach out in order to win.

The English home card is Six Wives of Henry VIII, which can be used to declare war on England's traditional enemies (i.e. everyone) or pursue Henry's quest for a male heir.

France

The French start the game under the rule of Francis I, a great patron of the French Renaissance. The French are trying to conquer Italy, but can also gain victory points by building chateaus and, of course, colonizing the New World.

The French home card is Patron of the Arts, which is good for either 5 command points or building a chateau.

The Papacy

The Medici pope Leo X is going to have his papacy blighted by that dude from Germany. The Vatican holds very little territory and is at war with the French over North Italy, and needs to divide their attention between preserving their holdings and fighting the German heresy. They can gain victory points by building St. Peter's Basilica, which is what exacerbated the heresy in the first place, and have the theologically delightful action Burn Books for 2 CP.

Uniquely, the Papacy has two home cards: Papal Bull and Leipzig Debate.

These let the Pope excommunicate Christian rulers and call theological debates to try to quash the rising Protestant heresy.

The Protestants

Speaking of heresy, here's the last of the six factions in impulse order. Until the Schmalkaldic League event happens, the Protestants play very differently from the other factions: with no military or controlled territory, they focus on converting spaces on the map to Protestantism.

The Protestant home card is Here I Stand, which lets them insert Martin Luther into debates or find cards in the discard pile so they can get their various conversion events into play.

The battle between the Protestants and the Catholics is tracked on the Religious Struggle Card:

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So, the game has been set up, the e-mail thread has been started: for the next who knows how many months, we are Here I Stand. You can read what happened on the first turn here!

Finnish army anti-tank guns in the Winter War

The unsuccesful Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-40, known in Finnish as the Winter War, is one of the more famous conflicts in military history. An especially iconic image of the war that encapsulates the popular notion of the desperate Finnish underdog is Finnish soldiers trying to stop enemy armor with improvised anti-tank weapons. After all, by all accounts the Molotov cocktail got its name in Finland during the war, and stuffing cloth down the neck of a bottle of flammable alcohol was one of the most effective anti-tank measures available to Finnish infantry units; the other methods, like jamming a log into an enemy tank's running gear, were if anything more suicidal.

Why was the Finnish army so ill-prepared for the Soviet armored threat? The core reason is what I talked about in my thesis: Finnish officers wrongly believed that armored forces couldn't operate in Finnish terrain. But even after this belief was dispelled, the army still failed to acquire anything like sufficient quantities of anti-tank weapons. I explain why in my latest peer-reviewed article, which is also my first publication in English, in Tekniikan Waiheita, available online here.

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Also, just to celebrate this article, here's a Warlord Games 28mm model of the 37 PstK 36 that the Finnish army failed to procure in proper numbers.

I took the advice of the Warlord Finnish paint set, and painted the uniforms in Medium Sea Grey, with Chocolate Brown accessories. You may notice I've taken an ahistorical liberty by giving the gunner a Statuesque Miniatures head, complete with a later Finnish armored brigade beret. We still wore second world war-esque greys when I was (very briefly) in the military, and I thought they looked very smart with the black beret! These days it's all camo all the time. The gun is in Luftwaffe Camo Green, which is somewhat darker than it should be, but I like it.

Since I mostly intend to use this model in Warhammer 40,000, as a Rachkoi-pattern lascannon, I've also omitted the third crewmember. Where are they, you may ask?

Fraternizing with the enemy at a Blood Bowl game!

Let's Play Twilight Struggle

I was reading something on fivethirtyeight.com last year, and came across a link to their article on designing the best board game in the world, which turned out to be Twilight Struggle. Since we were making a trip to Stockholm in January, I took the opportunity to visit the Science Fiction Bokhandeln, where board games are consistently cheaper than in Finland, and pick up a copy.

Twilight Struggle is a card-driven board game that covers the global Cold War. The board is a map of the world, divided into countries where you place influence, mount coups and generally vie for control and thereby victory points with the opposing superpower. Whoever reaches 20 victory points first wins - unless DEFCON drops to one, in which case the game ends in global nuclear war.

Everything is done by playing cards. Here's an example:

The red star in the upper left corner tells you that this is a Soviet event. If the Soviet player plays it, they can either have the event happen, or play it for Ops, which are used to spread influence, mount coups and that sort of thing. The number inside the star is 2, meaning Liberation Theology is good for 2 Ops. If the US player finds this card in their hand, they can only play it for Ops - but if they do, the event occurs as well. Therefore, one of the key skills in the game isn't just figuring out when to play your events, but how to time your opponent's events optimally for yourself.

The other kind of cards are scoring cards, which, when played, score their region in victory points. Below, an early victory in the Mid War from a judiciously played Africa Scoring.

Much as in other card-driven games, like War of the Ring, for instance, the cards direct gameplay. One way is structural: some scoring cards, for instance, only show up in the mid-war, and while the Soviet side is considered to have an early advantage, the late war cards tilt toward the US. In a recent game, I found myself with a hand of powerful enough Europe-focused cards, like Suez Crisis, Socialist Governments, and Europe Scoring, that a blitz on Europe seemed like a worthwhile shot. This is as far as I got:

One key thing new players should know is that in the Early War period, the only scoring cards in play are Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This tends to focus play; while I was mounting my assault on Europe, this is what Southeast Asia ended up looking like:

You can believe I did poorly when my opponent drew Southeast Asia scoring! However, Africa and the Middle East went my way, somewhat evening the odds. Finally, late in the Mid War, while my opponent's attention was focused on Latin America, I used Willy Brandt to break his control of West Germany, and snuck in enough influence to grab it, leading to a victory through controlling Europe.

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All in all, Twilight Struggle is a tremendous game. Not only is it great fun, but it also does a brilliant job of evoking the Cold War mentality of a superpower game of geopolitical brinksmanship, where all other countries and actors in the world are just pawns and battlegrounds for you to utilize to get the upper hand in a zero-sum battle against your opponent - all while staring down an imminent nuclear holocaust. That all the events are actual Cold War people or episodes gives the game great thematic strength, but it's not tied to the historical constraints of the Cold War, but can unfold very differently indeed. As a history teacher, I very much appreciate the little historical vignettes about each card provided in the rulebook; they add a very real educational dimension to the game.

If you want a better handle on how the game works, head over to Twilight Strategy; I especially recommend one of the annotated games.

So, simply put, Twilight Struggle is great fun, and does a wonderful job of capturing the Cold War mentality. While I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best board game in the world - that's a much bigger conversation - I will say that if you're at all into board games, it's definitely worth experiencing.

The Forever War

The Forever War is a great novel by Joe Haldeman, but it's also what several national security professionals have come to call either the US war in Afghanistan, or the "war on terror" in general. And for good reason: the US went to war with the Taleban on October 7 2001, almost seventeen years ago as I write this. Depending on which casualty estimates you want, tens to hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. President Trump has escalated the war, increasing air strikes and sending in more troops. With no clear strategy, there's no end in sight.

The other forever war is in the Middle East proper, and it's been going on a lot longer than the War on Terror. Now that US foreign secretary, oligarch Rex Tillerson seemed to commit US forces indefinitely to Syria, it seems like it would be a good idea to look back on how long the US has been fighting in the Middle East.

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A century ago, the Middle East, with the exception of what is now Iran, was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The Empire took the side of the Central Powers in World War I, and collapsed at the end of the war. The Allies had made contradictory promises to the Arab and Jewish subjects of the Empire during the war, and eventuallu decided to take over the Empire's territories in the Middle East as colonial protectorates. Eventually these protectorates gained their independence, leading to the map of the Middle East that we know today.

As British and French influence declined, the Americans stepped in. Saudi Arabia actively cultivated ties with the United States, and during World War II, the Americans came to believe that Saudi oil was of vital strategic importance. There has been a US military presence in Saudi Arabia ever since.

During the Cold War, the Middle East was a battleground for US and Soviet interests, with the Americans supporting Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Shah of Iran, and the Soviets backing Arab socialism in Egypt, Iraq and Syria. Neither side prevailed: Israel was never destroyed but didn't rout its opponents, and the incredibly bloody Iran-Iraq war ended indecisively. No one state or superpower could control the region.

In 1990, with the Cold War coming to a close, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded the tiny neighboring emirate of Kuwait. A US-led alliance kicked him out the next year, with coalition ground forces crossing the Saudi border on February 24. The poorly led and motivated Iraqi conscript forces were swept aside with ease, and Kuwait was restored.

Saddam, however, stayed in power. To stop him from oppressing Iraq's Shi'ite and Kurd minorities, no-fly zones were set up in north and south Iraq, monitored by US, British and French aircraft, the French later withdrawing. These no-fly zones were enforced until the 2003 invasion of Iraq, accompanied by cruise missile strikes in 1993 and 1996, and a sustained four-day bombing campaign in 1998.

So by the time the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, the US military had been operating in Iraq non-stop for twelve years already. As we know, the US-led invasion of 2003 led to the death of Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Iraqi state, ushering in a thoroughly unstable situation where a US-supported regime is faced with a massive insurgency. Militarily, the invasion was a success; the decision to destroy the Iraqi state without any kind of realistic nation-building strategy to replace it was a disaster. American combat troops stayed in the country until 2011, when they declared "mission accomplished" and withdrew, marking 20 years of continuous operations in Iraq. The insurgency simply continued as before.

2011 was also the year of the Arab Spring: regimes were overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, protests crushed with Saudi help in Bahrain, and Libya collapsed into civil war. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad tried to suppress protests with force, triggering the Syrian civil war. A Sunni extremist group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took advantage of the US withdrawal from Iraq to launch a full-scale offensive on the Iraqi government, and also became a participant in the Syrian Civil War. The Americans are intervening in the still-ongoing Syrian Civil War, along with the Russians and the Turks, and returned to Iraq in 2014. Meanwhile, a civil war also broke out in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is carrying out air strikes to support one side. And I haven't even mentioned Israel's continuing occupation of Palestine and its ongoing violence.

So from the 1991 Gulf war to several wars still being fought in 2018, the Middle East is nearing a full thirty years of war.

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To put all this into some kind of context, I see two major developments. First, obviously, the Arab spring exposed the unusustainability of the Cold War order. Arab socialism had atrophied into venal despotism, and with money and military aid no longer pouring in from competing superpowers, the edifices began to collapse.

Secondly, the US destruction of Iraq shattered the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. In the short term, it created the power vacuum in which ISIS was born. In the longer term, the region will be looking for a new power balance. Iran is expanding its influence, but its capabilities are being massively overhyped. Iran is not an expansionist power outside the fever dreams of American islamophobes.

Saudi Arabia, however, is taking a very different approach, which Wikipedia is already calling the Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy conflict. The Saudi intervention in Yemen and the diplomatic offensive on Qatar are the most visible tips of this iceberg, but the Saudis' growing rapprochement with Israel and their bizarre orb ceremonies with Egypt and Trump certainly make it look like Saudi Arabia intends to flex its muscles. This is the essential background to the war drums being beaten against Iran in so many places today.

In the longer run, what we're seeing is the realignment of the Middle East from a superpower battleground to an area under a US quasicolonial hegemony. The extent of the conflicts, and the number of the dead, will depend on how far the US and its allies push their advantage. A war on Iran would be the ultimate exercise in remaking the whole Middle East, which is the only actual rationale of such a war. It's particularly absurd that such a pivotal time in the history of the region is being presided over by Donald Trump, a true idiot in the classical sense: completely ignorant and seemingly unable to hold a foreign policy opinion for as long as a week, but given to random, blustering fits of childish rage. It verges on impossible to decipher whether the US actually has some kind of strategy for the Middle East, let alone what it could be. Simply because he is president, Trump's idiocy and unpredictability make every global crisis more dangerous.

In retrospect, it's difficult to overstate how catastrophically bad the US decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan without a proper exit strategy was. There's a ton of strategic literature by various American thinkers and pundits penned after Vietnam on how the US must never again be drawn into such a quagmire again, but it was all a waste of time, because American combat troops have been in Afghanistan for twice as long as they ever spent in Vietnam, and they show no signs of getting out. Whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, there are no signs that the Americans have any kind of credible strategy for resolving the conflicts they have become involved in, let alone the ones they started.

The only thing that seems certain is that the forever war shows no signs of ending.