Venezuela: Brian Train's Caudillo

The ongoing events in Venezuela reminded me of what was probably a matrix game  from long ago. My inquiry concerning this old game, led me to Brian Train's Caudillo.

Brian is a long time game designer whose articles and game topics trend towards civil strife, counterinsurgency and revolution.

Caudillo is a semi-fictional card game designed to simulate power struggles among various factions in post-Chavez Venezuela.  In this game, the composition of starting factions are random by nature as in the set up phase each player picks seven Group Cards.

Group Cards have different attributes such as business, criminal, government, media, military social and political. A player can start molding his or her faction's identity during the set up phase as the player has to discard three of the seven cards dealt.

Partial or full control of a group gives a player resources each turn. During the game a player can gradually change the nature of his faction by allocating more resources to group cards in play to gain full or partial control or withdraw support from a group (removing ID marker) and allocating that faction's efforts elsewhere.

On the next page I'll show some Group Cards along with my take on the control of these groups in today's Venezuela.

Matrix Games (game format, not the company): Part I

Game designer Brian Train was good enough to send me an e-mail containing references and ideas for further research on matrix games. 

Update: Here's my first post on Brian's Caudillo.

With his permission, I'm copying his e-mail below as I wanted to share the links and info:

Brian's e-mail follows:

"I don't remember this exact game, but I am aware there were probably quite a few made just like it that were used for high school or college classrooms.

In  university I remember a very entertaining week when my fourth-year class played several turns of the Inter-Nation Simulation, originally designed in the early 1960s by Harold Guetzkow.

The INS came in a basic version with made-up countries, but it could easily be adapted for any real-world situation you wanted. In our case it was an Asian crisis, IIRC.

More on Guetzkow here, I think you should have a look at Rex Brynen's blog generally as he does a lot of this kind of thing for his work as a political science professor at McGill University.

Some of the INS material is in the Internet Archive.

Here is part of a book with references to similar games:

Another big name in this field of early simulation is Clark Abt.

He designed a lot of simulation exercises in the 60s, from city planning to global war, and wrote a book called Serious Games that listed a number of such things.

You can see some of it on Google Books.

I'm sorry I don't have an exact answer for you, I hope you'll find it.

But I must concur with RockyMountainNavy's note that a matrix game is what you need to do for this kind of exercise you are planning. 

It's perfect for this kind of application. 

These things are not hard to arrange or play if you don't have to convince the players first of all that games are a way to explore problems... this holds their professional acceptance back, still!

But I think you don't have that problem.

There is a lot of free information, guidance and material on matrix games and how to play them.

Start here, at Rex Brynen's blog:

And this guide is gold:

I hope you will look up matrix games and use that format.

Your players will not be struggling with rules and discrete mechanics as they would with an old team simulation game you would have to adopt, still less with the rules of my Caudillo game (which is not a difficult game, and is free, but still needs a bit of work to prepare a physical copy).

Thanks,

Brian