Order & Opportunity is a 1 to 4 player game with a dedicated solo system about the making of the post-Cold War world order covering the first decades of the 21st century. In the game, the United States, Russia, China, and the European Union compete over control of the agenda and ultimately over victory points in the dimensions of economic, political, cultural, and security power projection. Order & Opportunity combines card-driven, asymmetric gameplay to produce a topical and thematic historical game on a global scale. The game offers a distinctive and captivating play experience at every one of its player counts. Order & Opportunity begins in the early 2000s and covers the next twenty years of global, multidimensional power competition. In that setting, the game aims at creating a thematic experience of the period as players are faced with historical and familiar crises, challenges, and opportunities as they emerge from gameplay.
The first decades of the 21st century have seen events with long-lasting consequences. In the year 2000 in Russia, Vladimir Putin became president, and the question was: would he be the young reformist that many in 2000 still had hopes for, or would he choose hard imperialism of a personalist authoritarian ruler and strongman seeking to restore Russia to its former glory? In Order & Opportunity, you decide. Over the same period, China’s “peaceful rise” will gradually turn the communist party controlled hybrid state into a global economic superpower, but again, to what ends will China use that power? You decide.
During the same period in the West, despite the global war on terror and increasingly visible signs of climate change, global capitalism seems to know no limits as the United States and its European allies continue to enjoy never before seen material prosperity and something of a “unipolar moment” of world domination.
In the West, economic globalization combined with rapid automation and offshoring of work begins to create a gulf between those who benefit and flourish and those “left behind” by these developments. Simultaneously, a number of unilateral military adventures eat into the credibility of the Western model of freedom and democracy. Did the end of the great ideological rivalry of the Cold War create an ideological vacuum characterized more by economic and other opportunism than values and convictions? In such an environment, can alliances last, or do they decline in conflicts of interest? Who will be the force of order? Who will be the force of opportunism? Order & Opportunity allows the players to explore such possibilities.
Order & Opportunity is a game about global and domestic fragmentation and confrontation but also about alliances, amidst ever deepening interconnections between the global powers. Through the development of reaction abilities, players’ moves become interconnected with one another as actions by one player may be met by reactions from other players. Alliances are tried and tested as the powers now compete over economic and other opportunities in what might increasingly begin to look like a zero-sum game.
Alongside economic competition, gray zone conflicts proliferate in a world of unequal traditional military power, new information technologies, and resurgent authoritarianism, giving rise to a war of ideas between democratic and authoritarian visions of a world order, both home and abroad. Domestically, the excesses of economic globalization and technological change cause polarization that may weaken powers from within. Globally, terror threats seem ever present and preoccupy people and their leaders. Tensions may destabilize entire regions, but flashes of color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and other civil society based movements seem to show that, ultimately, people want make up their own lives.
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