While Gandhi may offer some lessons for today, other historical games were built for the express purpose of engaging with the past to address collective trauma.

Still, it’s a “wargame at heart”-though one, Peck wrote in a another piece, that “offers a glimpse of how nonviolence might triumph.” It presents a largely nonviolent independence movement, and the players must constantly weigh the benefits of violence versus peaceful protest. The four major factions in the game are the British Raj, the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Revolutionaries (a collection of groups that support a violent uprising). The board game Gandhi, which came out in 2020, depicts India in 1947, the year British rule ended. Of course, not all such strategy games were created with an eye for the future. Rather, the simulation’s value lay in its narrative and its insight into the reason events played out in the order they did and why players made certain decisions along the way. The game showed that supporting Japan in such a conflict would risk war between the United States and China, but declaring a winner wasn’t exactly the point. The simulation, which ran last July, followed the role of Washington in a Sino-Japanese conflict, which changed based on the vote of public participants through Zoom. Likewise, a wargame simulation run by the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, “ A Deadly Game: East China Sea Crisis 2030,” was designed to aid statecraft. Some historical games were built for the express purpose of engaging with the past to address collective trauma. The paper wargame-meets-Dungeons & Dragons then made its way as a teaching tool to public policy graduate schools and military staff colleges across the United States. Rather, it was used by the Pentagon to help write the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the journalist Michael Peck explains. If it sounds complicated, there’s a reason for that-the game wasn’t designed for the public. The Blue team (the United States, the European Union, and NATO) faces off against the Red team (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) by creating a defense policy that takes into account, among other things, military means and defense budgets. Hedgemony-spelled with a “d” because it forces its players to “adopt hedging strategies that trade off between different priorities,” according to one of the game’s designers-is a board game rooted in the nitty-gritty of great-power politics. If Sex With Stalin is all style and no substance, then Hedgemony is quite the opposite. Instead, it features uninspired monologues by Stalin and ultimately, Christiansen wrote, is “so edgy it lacks any point.” But Sex With Stalin itself, whose gameplay is likened to a PowerPoint presentation, fails to tap into its transgressive potential.

Of course, the idea of the figurehead of a repressive regime that criminalized homosexuality being central to a game with sex in its title is ripe for satire. The most enticing, at least at first glance, may be Sex With Stalin, but as the author Nate Christiansen wrote last November, the video game is disappointingly dull despite its basis in the “truly depraved” idea of time-traveling to seduce the Soviet ruler. defense strategists, a late 2020 release named Sex With Stalin, and many a game in between. Over the past few years, we’ve covered a board game used to train future U.S. Many (web)pages of Foreign Policy have been devoted to these new games, which range from cheeky and wonkish to meditative and mournful-some even seeking to address historical trauma. But games that may appeal to the current and future foreign-policy set expand far beyond Risk and Axis & Allies. It’s no surprise, then, that they served as inspiration for the classic military board games of the 20th century, which have made a resurgence during the pandemic, with new users finding escapism in the strategic tabletop games of the past. In their crudest form, world politics-and especially great-power affairs-may seem like a game.

Diplomacy no stupid game