Simulating Crisis: When Games Mirror Current Events

Exploring the current India-Pakistan tensions through the mechanics of Mr. President

In the real world, India and Pakistan had a sequence of violent confrontations. There’s still a lot we don’t know about those events: the casualties and air kills, the course of the mediation and the degree of U.S. involvement in bringing about the current ceasefire, etc. In Mr. President, part of the fun for players is in imagining the narrative of such rapid and dramatic events when they occur in the game.

The most obvious model for the real-world conflict this month is Crisis card #90, “Violence in Kashmir Escalates.” It’s a sharp event, and not a Cascading Event, that adds tension to the map and also boosts the India/Pakistan Conflict Track by one box:

Conflict Tracks are how Mr. President models the closeness of serious armed conflict between plausible adversaries in 2000-2020, and who will start with a military advantage. There are ten of them, and India appears on two (India/Pakistan and India/China). The Status column is a 1-5 scale; if the marker moves to 5, war breaks out. For two of the tracks - China/Japan and Russia/NATO, if this happens, the game is over. For the rest, the war system is used, with an immediate War Progress check and then more such checks as long as the war is going on. The Relative Strength column is a bonus that one side or the other gets added to its base strength when the war begins.

Going back to the Kashmir Crisis card, we can see that the card immediately escalates this conflict track by one box, and adds tension to both India and China (with India engaged, China has two reasons to escalate its own actions - India’s distraction, and the danger posed to Pakistan, with whom China has been building a strategic and economic partnership during this period). It’s unlikely this card by itself will start a war, unless mediation fails. Note that the player has the option to bow out of mediation by declining to spend two Action Points - but even if they do, and cooler heads prevail, they’ll still reap some political benefits).

So this card all by itself has a few different narrative possibilities - and the card doesn’t specifically describe the violence. The player can use their imagination to fill in those specifics, as well as what happened in the ensuing clash. And whether or not the Conflict track was pushed to 5 would influence the story quite a bit! But what if the player had previously drawn this card as well?

Now the Kashmir violence could be imagined as a purely military retaliation, or a spark ignited from the heightened tensions generated by this border skirmish. The Regional Crisis increase seems like an afterthought, but a Regional Major Crisis could add more fuel to this fire, in the form of additional, or leveled-up, Terror Groups, refugee crises, or Stability penalties.

And what about all those tensions markers that are getting added by these cards? Well, if you don’t tamp that down, India is much more likely to get a high result on their Unilateral Action table - which will occur during their Ally Group activation.

See that 13+ result? And the fact that this d10 roll gets +1 to its final result per Tension value on India? Now it’s easy to see how what seems like a calm Conflict track, sitting at 2, can rocket up to 5 - and war - when the key events and actions happen in a fateful order. But if the order is changed, the scene changes, and so does the story in the player’s head.

James Dunnigan referred to historical tabletop wargames as “paper time machines.” But Mr. President is also a story-making machine. Each playthrough will prompt the player to envision new ways the movement of the pieces, the results of the table rolls, and the draw of the cards might have manifested as real life events. We hope you’ll have many hours of fun writing the story of your own presidency in digital Mr. President!