Workers' Girder! Getcher Workers Girder!

[seventh bullet]

But comrade Louis; we must be careful not to give our imperialist, reactionary bourgeois enemies an opportunity to cast our society as technologically backward. If you were down with the young pioneers you'd know that our space-age industries had given the (young) workers the portable technology that makes redundant the memorising of our glorious slogans.

Fraternal respect...comrade Broggers

Comrade, I fear you are displaying a deviant technocratic ignorance and severe lack of confidence in what can be achieved as a whole under Socialism.

Two VERY IMPORTANT points to remember.

1) Our economic and technological backwardness was well-known and frankly admitted, but was steadily overcome in leaps and bounds after breaking the chains of social imperialism and the traitors to Socialism as well as the western capitalist imperialists, and embarking on the correct path to Communism.

2) It is a mistake to place importance on technology only (from whom and for whom?) rather than humanity which creates it. The ingenuity and creativity of the masses is unleashed by the Party and mobilised through the principles of self-reliance. A mentally-fettered people trapped by the economic, technological and political dependence on others cannot unlock and realise their fullest productive potential.

 

[el-ahrairah]

i saw this and thought of you

 

[BigTom]

Trot Wars update... I forgot to take a photo of the game in action today so you'll have to make do with a pic of the bagged components.

Have now played this with 5 and 6 players and am pretty much done with the alpha testing (mechanics) - after today I'm confident that of the variations I need to try, one combination of them will work well, beta testing (balancing) almost doesn't need doing as far as I can see. I need to play this with 10-12 players but I'm feeling good that it'll work with that number and assuming it does I'm hoping that I'll be blind playtesting in May and be ready for release for Christmas

It's actually a good game - it's not a serious tactical hard thinking type game, it's a party game. I'm aiming for it to be ideal for 6-10 people and playable for 4-13. 13 because that's how the number of cards works out best - the card set is worked out on groups of 27 - so 26 split/stick cards means 13 players and a blank card, and then 3 groups of 27 cards in the base set. It's easy to get cards printed in blocks of 54. I need some help with this right now because the card set is done and I'm going to do some quick designs of the cards for the next bit of playtesting. One of the other things I need is player tokens (as it helps players to keep track of which group they are in). I want to theme the player tokens on the great and the good of Trotskyist heros so I need 13:

1 - Trotsky
2 - Lenin
3 - Marx
4 - Engels
5 -
6-
7-
8-
9-
10-
11-
12-
13- Posadas

I don't really know which people are considered sound in Trotskyism, and which aren't (Stalin aside ) so people like Rosa Luxembourg, Anarchist or Trot or what? Kropotkin is obviously anarchist so out, etc.. basically, can you all suggest thinkers etc to fill in the missing player IDs please.

There'll be other things to help me with as well but I need to get stuff finalised. I really think this will be good enough to get some printed and released as paid for, supporting a cause we decide on (please can we keep focused on the stuff that needs to get sorted now and not get sidetracked on who this might benefit (lol, as if)). There's loads of scope for expansions (based on a 27 card set I already have: Anarchists & Liberals, Police & Conspiraloons, Insterctionalists, Media & Celebrity) and a game along the lines of Fluxx/Munchkin/Grass. I'm going to explain the game in the next post, not the exact rules because they will still change but the basis of the game. We'll need to rewrite this into high-trotskyite.

 

[DotCommunist]

order of lenin for this man ^^

 

[BigTom]

Trot Wars! Experience the thrills and spills of far left organising from the comfort of your own sofa!

So basically, you setup united fronts, you can setup your own or join other peoples. Then in a timed round everyone plays down events, speakers and attempts to hijack other peoples' campaigns to steal their paper sales. Events (paper sales, public meetings, demonstrations, strike and the king card - general strike) get you paper sales. Speakers get you members.

Joining other people's united front lets you join your group together, or just collaborate on the one united front and then go your separate ways. At the end of each round where two or more players are in a united front or group, there is an ideology check where people decide whether to split or stick and if there's a split you split members (the mechanism for this has a variation to try, at the moment it's a weighted dice roll).

The game ends when all the unaligned people are in a group.

There are 3 winning conditions:
1 - collective - All unaligned people are in a group containing all the players. Congratulations, you have created the one true vanguard party and have lead the proletariat into the glorious revolution. In the rules of the game this is actually really, really, really easy to do if you all decide to do it. But of course that's not in the spirit of the game is it

2 - Individual victory (a) - paper sales - whoever has sold the most papers wins this
3 - individual victory (b) - members - whichever group has the most number of members wins. A group with more than one player, the player with the most paper sales in that group wins (maybe, this might just be that all players in that group win).

It took about 1.5hrs to play tonight with 5 people, of which 1 had never played before and 3 had played previous incarnations of the game. I think that with 5/6 players who know the game you could be looking at 45m-1hr, with 12 it'd be more like 1.5hr play time (once everyone knows the game, first games always take longer).


Oh - I forgot to say in my previous post, this would also be released print and play under a creative commons licence of course. The other components are generic - player tokens, some kind of meeple counter (the square blocks in the pic), money, a timer, some 6 sided dice (2 minimum), and cards. Cards are relatively easy to print on demand or to make yourself, and the other things can generally be scavenged from other games - the meeple tokens you need 10 per player at the moment so this could be something like matchsticks... which actually aren't bad as a makeshift person counter in visual terms

 

[DotCommunist]

kautsky's out cos he had beef with colonel sanders.

callinicos and Meiville lol

 

[BigTom]

kautsky's out cos he had beef with colonel sanders.

callinicos and Meiville lol

I reckon it'd be better to go with historical figures rather than ones associated with current groups.

 

[DotCommunist]

Then I shall just whittle my own China Meiville bust from mahogany for the craic

 

[BigTom]

card protector sleeves have arrived so I can make the (hopefully final) prototype of the game... so I need more theorists, c'mon people.. otherwise I'm just going to chuck in theorists I know without regard as to whether Trots would hold them up as worthy.

1 - Trotsky
2 - Lenin
3 - Marx
4 - Engels
5 - Ernst Mandel
6- Tony Cliff
7-
8-
9-
10-
11-
12-
13- Posadas

 

[rekil]

Tony Cliff. Leave out Callinicos on purpose because it might annoy him.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Tony Cliff. Leave out Callinicos on purpose because it might annoy him.

If you include Cliff then you've got to have Healy and Grant.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[rekil]

If you include Cliff then you've got to have Healy and Grant.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

Hard choices.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Ernest Mandel should prob be in there

 

[BigTom]

I'd want historical rather than contemporary tbf, so was never considering Callinicos, Lindsey Germain etc. Cliff though, he's nicely dead. Who is Grant? Healey I recognise - wasn't he the WRP paedo or sexual abuser?

I've added Mandel and Cliff, thank you.

 

[SpineyNorman]

I'd want historical rather than contemporary tbf, so was never considering Callinicos, Lindsey Germain etc. Cliff though, he's nicely dead. Who is Grant? Healey I recognise - wasn't he the WRP paedo or sexual abuser?

I've added Mandel and Cliff, thank you.

Grant was Militant's answer to cliff.

maybe alan woods and duncan hallas

 

[rekil]

Need some forrins to emphasise the intergalactic appeal of trottery. CLR James? Trots like Chavez don't they.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Need some forrins to emphasise the intergalactic appeal of trottery. CLR James? Trots like Chavez don't they.

Pablo?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[Louis MacNeice]

I'd want historical rather than contemporary tbf, so was never considering Callinicos, Lindsey Germain etc. Cliff though, he's nicely dead. Who is Grant? Healey I recognise - wasn't he the WRP paedo or sexual abuser?

I've added Mandel and Cliff, thank you.

Healey, Grant and Cliff all members of the RCP and the founding fathers of the WRP, Militant and the SWP respectively; the holy trinity of British Trotskyism?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[BigTom]

ok cheers - would Healey, Grand and Cliff be recognisable to Trots in the US/Canada/Europe?

What about Castro/Guevara?

Also, there's no women yet.

 

[DotCommunist]

Need some forrins to emphasise the intergalactic appeal of trottery. CLR James? Trots like Chavez don't they.

I thought chavez had form for suppressing the CWI. frogwoman think you mentioned something about this once.

 

[frogwoman]

He put some CWI activists in jail once

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Grant, Cliff, Healy, the three main figures of British Trotskyism between the war and the 80s or 90s. All dead, all recognisable to Trots worldwide, but as Healy was a wrong 'un it's in rather poor taste to include him.

Most famous/significant leaders of world Trotskyism in that period (dead people only):

Grant (Militant, CWI, IMT)
Cliff, (Brit SWP, IST)
Healy, (WRP, ICFI)
Cannon (US SWP, ISFI, ICFI)
Shachtman (US SWP, ISFI, US WP)
Moreno (Argentine PST, LIT)
Lambert (French OCI, OCRFI)
Barta (French LO)
Posadas, (!!!)
Pablo (USFI)
Mandel (USFI)

 

[butchersapron]

**ignore**

 

[BigTom]

Cheers Nigel Irritable , that's fantastic, thank you. (edited request out as I don't need it)

What about pre-war / Trotsky contemporaries? Would any of the other Bolsheviks fit here, like Bukharin, or are they all disavowed by Trots?

 

[BigTom]

Ok, so Nigel's given me enough names anyway... they are all men. I suppose that's not too surprising, it's a bit disappointing. In a way it kind of fits with being a satire of trotskyism, but it'd be nice if there was a few women on the list. I'm vaguelly planning to add more characters in the expansion packs, so the intersectionalist pack would need to be very diverse, but it's not thematically important with this, except that in terms of it being a game, and people choosing which character is going to represent them I think that I need to have a reasonable number of women, it'd be too much to ask for it to be half of the list, but any would be good, because there'll be plenty of women wanting to play this. (Character has no play function, it's just to help people keep track of which group they are in - I could do it with coloured meeple pieces or pawns of some kind, but this feels like a good idea for the game)

1 - Trotsky
2 - Lenin
3 - Marx
4 - Engels
5 - Ernst Mandel
6- Tony Cliff
7- Max Schachtman
8- edit: Raya Dunayevskaya
9- Nahuel Morena
10- Pierre Lambert
11- David Korna (Barta)
12- Michel Pablo
13- Posadas

 

[SpineyNorman]

Kashama Sawant is a trot, a yank and also a woc so she's internationalism and intersectional both at the same time.

 

[BigTom]

Definitely one for the intersectionalist expansion pack, if not for the base set.

 

[phildwyer]

Also, there's no women yet.

Raya Dunayevskaya.

 

[BigTom]

perfect, thanks Phil.

 

[nogojones]

Rosa Luxumberg, Clara Zetkin