Die Woche des Väterchen Machno: Das Spiel

Ein Spielentwurf von Justin Pickard:

"How about a hex/card-based (alternate) history strategy game? Let’s call it Free Territory …

The players are the immediate subordinates of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, competing to amass resources and meet certain conditions (mostly involving their own self-preservation) while preserving the autonomy of the ‘Free Territory’ (represented by a certain configuration of hex tiles) in the face of attacks by various enemies - Bolsheviks, Germans, Austrians, counter-revolutionary White Russians, and various Ukrainian nationalist movements.

Historial Player Characters: Lev Zadov, Viktor Belash, Simon Karetnik, Fedir Shchus, Peter Arshinov, Volin (or, alternatively, a bunch of fictional characters – circumventing controversy and opening up the endgame as something where anything could happen)

Three stages of play: (1) set-up (semi-random determination of the size and borders of the ‘Free Territory’, plus the location of player power-bases); (2) the middle (bulk of the game, comprising of alternate phases of politiking, historical events, and random events); and (3) the end (determining which of the players escape the fall of the ‘Free Territory’, and with what).

If the game was to stick to history-as-it-happened, the game would run from January 1919 to November 1920. I’d rather have the game finish at a random end date, as the ‘Free Territory’ falls to one of its enemies. The end would be between – say – December 1919 and December 1923. If rounds were monthly, that’d give us a game of between 12 and 24 rounds. Does that sound manageable? Would monthly intervals give enough room for manouvre? Depends on how long a round is. "

Im Originalkontext auf Nostalgia for the future.