All Bridges Burning, and How GMT’s COIN Series Captured My Heart

Ahhh, the summer of 2019...I remember it so fondly. Handshakes, hugs, going out to restaurants, and weekly board game meet-ups were all the norm. More relevant to this article, it's also when I bought my first COIN game: Cuba Libre (Volume II), designed by Jeff Grossman and Volko Ruhnke and published by GMT Games.

In anticipation of playing Cuba Libre, I set it up, ran the playbook, and learned the rules. I even watched The Cuba Libre Story documentary series on Netflix because I was so excited to be fully immersed in its history and theme. I was eager to play it, but could not seem to get it to the table. Months flew by, and I continued to try to play Cuba Libre, but it just never worked out, so I'd continue to think, "One day….one day."

Meanwhile, I had plans to join Lincoln and Nikki on GameNight! to play Gandhi: The Decolonization of British India, 1917–1947 (Volume IX), designed by Bruce Mansfield...but then those plans got pushed to the back burner because of the global pandemic. Once again, I thought, "One day….one day."

A little over a year after I bought Cuba Libre, I FINALLY got to play it! Even better, I played it twice in back-to-back weeks with the same group of friends — but I played staring at my laptop on Tabletop Simulator. It was not how I envisioned my first COIN game going down, but nonetheless, it was a blast, especially having the opportunity to play it again with the same group. We all understood everything much better the second time and didn't need to refer to the rulebook nearly as often.

My first game of Cuba Libre!

At this point, some of you may be wondering what a COIN game actually is. GMT describes the COIN series as follows:

Quote:

This series features Volko Ruhnke's game system presenting guerrilla warfare, asymmetric warfare, and COunterINsurgencies around the world — in both historical and contemporary conflicts.

COIN games feature multiple (traditionally four) asymmetric factions competing against each other in something of an area-control struggle, but each with their own motivations corresponding to their unique victory conditions. The gameplay is centered around an event deck of cards and an innovative eligibility system to determine turn order each round. It's often encouraged for some factions to form alliances with others, so there's lots of interesting negotiation opportunities as well as tense, chess-like moments as you subtly try to achieve your victory condition at the right time, hopefully without anyone noticing, while also watching out for other players doing the same.

I eventually bought more COIN games — even before actually playing Cuba Libre — thanks to recommendations from Rob Oren and his fan base, one of them being Colonial Twilight (Volume VII), designed by Brian Train, which I spontaneously played with my friend Drew one random Saturday night when the two of us were looking to sneak one more game in for the day. I don't think it's typical to hear "spontaneously played" followed by any COIN game. That made it all the more memorable a night.

Colonial Twilight is the first two-player game in the COIN series, and historically it covers the French-Algerian War from 1954-62. Neither of us had played it or fully read the rules, but since we both had some COIN experience at this point and a whole lot of COINthusiasm, we were able to just set it up, skim through the rules and playbook, and start playing it in less than an hour.

I had already seen the The Battle of Algiers movie, which someone on BGG or Reddit had recommended, so I was loosely familiar with the history — which helped with diving into the game without reading the historical background details in the rulebook and playbook.

My spontaneous game of Colonial Twilight

The gameplay for Colonial Twilight felt very tense, like Ruhnke's award-winning, two-player card-driven wargame Labyrinth: The War on Terror, but it also felt undeniably like a COIN game with its map, mechanisms, and event cards. I was impressed with how the eligibility system was revamped for two players in Colonial Twilight, so I was naturally curious when I read about GMT's latest COIN release: All Bridges Burning: Red Revolt and White Guard in Finland, 1917-18 (Volume X), the first three-player COIN game. I reached out to Gene at GMT, and they graciously hooked me up with a copy so that I could check it out.

All Bridges Burning is a COIN game for 1-3 players designed by VPJ Arponen that's focused on the Finnish Civil War of 1917-1918. The game allows players to recreate the military and political affairs leading up to and during this historical conflict, and it features gorgeous artwork from Chechu Nieto. Nieto has contributed art for several other games in the series, including Andean Abyss (Volume I), Cuba Libre (Volume II), A Distant Plain (Volume III), Fire in the Lake (Volume IV), Falling Sky: The Gallic Revolt Against Caesar (Volume VI), Colonial Twilight (Volume VII) and Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (Volume VIII), but the pastel textured box cover and beautiful, snowy-looking map in All Bridges Burning especially stand out to me.

Off the bat, I knew nothing about the Finnish Civil War, but GMT, as always, goes above and beyond to include a wealth of historical background details that set the tone and help create an enriching, deep gaming experience. In addition, design notes are sprinkled throughout the rulebook to further demonstrate how the game mechanisms are tightly interwoven with the theme/history. They also go the extra step to include detailed historic notes for every single event card, so there's no shortage of learning opportunities. It's fantastic!

In All Bridges Burning, three asymmetric factions — the Reds (red), Senate (white) and Moderates (blue) — compete to define the shape of Finland after the collapse of Russian Tsarist rule. The Reds represent the Finnish working class and their military support, the Red Guard militias, who are seeking to stage a successful revolt to establish socialist rule in the country. On the other side, the Senate White Guard, acquiring political support from the bourgeoisie and nobility, is trying to suppress the leftist revolt and establish bourgeoisie rule in the country. While the Reds and Senate duke it out, you also have the non-violent Moderates in the mix working to secure the political survival of parliamentary democracy and trying to keep national sentiment even keel enough for post-conflict settlement.

All Bridges Burning is played on a map of central and southern Finland which is divided into two types of spaces: towns and provinces. Each space has a population value (0-2) and features Control and Support/Opposition boxes as per usual in COIN games. The Reds or the Senate control a space if their wooden pieces there exceed the combined total of other factions' pieces. In addition, there are five levels of Support/Opposition, ranging from Active Support x2 to Active Opposition x2 that can shift during gameplay and affect victory conditions in addition to commands and special activities.

The factions are represented by (hexbox) cells of their corresponding color, and the Moderates and the Reds have discs representing networks and administrations, respectively. The cells are considered either active if star-side up or inactive when star-side down. In previous COIN games, it's usually bad when your cells are active because they're more susceptible to being attacked, but in All Bridges Burning active cells play a crucial role in gameplay in a different way. Depending on which faction you are, you usually want to have as many active cells as you can dispersed on the map.

You'll also have cubes representing non-player external powers — German troops (gray cubes) friendly to the Senate, and Russian troops (brown cubes) friendly to the Reds, seeking to further their geopolitical aims in Finland while providing some additional military muscle to their respective sides.

Core to all COIN games is the event deck. The event deck in All Bridges Burning is divided into two halves — 1917 event cards on the top half and 1918 event cards in the bottom half — and the entire deck is seeded with four propaganda cards to form a 40-card deck. The deck is prepared such that the first ten cards have a propaganda card seeded in the bottom five cards, stacked on top of another ten cards with another propaganda card shuffled into the bottom five cards, and so on.

When the event deck is good to go, you reveal the top card as the current event and reveal a second card on top of the deck as the upcoming event so that everyone knows which event is up next...with a slight caveat. After four rounds, when you're shifting the fifth event card to be the current event, there's a chance a propaganda card might be revealed. When that happens, you immediately pause "normal" gameplay and resolve a propaganda round, for which you're hopefully prepared.

The event deck not only brings some extra historical flavor and context to the table, but also adds an element of excitement to the game and gives players some enticing options when it comes to making decisions from turn to turn. I'll note that after you set up the event deck, there will be six unrevealed cards leftover (three each from 1917 and 1918) that won't be in the game, so if you ever get to a point that you're familiar with all of the events, this will add some mystery since you won't know which ones are out of play.

In a round of All Bridges Burning, players choose and take actions or pass in eligibility order, spending resources for commands, then eligibility is adjusted and a new event card is drawn. Play continues this way until a propaganda card is revealed, at which point a propaganda round is triggered in which victory conditions are checked, followed by a politics phase, with players gaining resources and support and resetting some things on the board.

All Bridges Burning is divided into two phases, starting with the pre-war build-up and shifting into the actual war. The shift to phase 2 can happen in two ways, either when Reds and Senate cells on the map total 27+ or after the second propaganda card is resolved.

The "Sequence of Play" area is your guide for turn order and action-taking throughout the game. To someone who's never seen or played a COIN game, it might appear to be a daunting, mathematical flow chart of sorts, but it makes a lot of sense when you understand how it works. In fact, it's one of my favorite aspects of the COIN series and the three-player version is incredibly clever and smooth!

Eligibility (turn) order is decided randomly during set-up, but after that it's based on what players choose. The first eligible faction gets the pick of the litter when choosing their move. They can execute a limited command, a command with special activity, trigger the event, or pass. Depending on which option they choose, the next eligible faction will have three choices, then the third eligible faction will have two choices. For example, if the first eligible faction decides to take the event, the next eligible can either execute a command (w/ special activity), a limited command, or pass. The only action that moves your marker to the ineligible box is when you take a command w/special activity. In four-player COIN games, the event cards themselves have faction icons in a certain order which dictates when you'll get to choose an action or pass, but when you take any action, you're ineligible for the next event. In All Bridges Burning, you could potentially take the event back-to-back turns, although I doubt your opponents would just let that happen.

After all players have taken a turn or passed, eligibility is adjusted based on the letters on the actual boxes. This is what determines eligibility order for the next round.

With this eligibility system, challenging choices arise. If you're first up, maybe you pass because you really want dibs on the upcoming event card? But then that leaves the current event open for one of your opponents, which could be harmful to you. Sometimes you have to sacrifice what you wanted to do to protect yourself from something else. Or what if the current event is way too juicy for the next eligible player, so you decide to defensively take the limited command to make sure no one gets to trigger the current event this turn. Or what if you really need to take a full command with a special activity because you know the propaganda card is likely to appear soon, but doing so makes you ineligible for the next turn. There are so many interesting decisions that spawn from this innovative eligibility system. I think it's awesome how the COIN eligibility system was adapted for three players in All Bridges Burning; it feels balanced and flows seamlessly.

Only one player can choose the current event each round. Event cards will have one or two options you can leverage to change the state of the game without needing to spend resources. There is plenty of variety when it comes to the events in All Bridges Burning, and depending on which faction you are playing, certain events could be extremely beneficial to you, while others won't pertain to you at all. There are events that allow players to gain resources and capabilities, or take resources away from opponents, execute commands, update Opposition/Support, add or remove cells from the board, and so on. I find it to always be exciting when a new upcoming event is revealed so that you can weigh your options and plan accordingly, and of course, anticipate when the next propaganda card might be coming.

Event card examples

When you're not jumping on an event card, most of your turns will be spent executing commands. Usually commands cost one resource per space and you use plastic pawns to mark which spaces you're "activating". When taking the standard command, you can optionally execute a special activity as well. Because of this and the fact that you can impact multiple spaces and potentially have a big turn, you will be ineligible on the next turn. Whereas if you take a limited command, you'll be able to perform a command in only one space with no special activity, so you will be eligible on the next turn. Again, this is all super clean and easy to keep track of in the Sequence of Play area of the game board.

Each faction has its own list of commands (actions) that are summarized in a menu-style player aid which is always super helpful in COIN games. The player aids have a summary of all three factions' commands so you can easily follow what your opponents are doing and better understand how each faction works. The Reds and Senate have the same commands and special activities for the most part, with some slight variations on how they play. The Senate also has two additional special activities that the Reds do not. Then the Moderates pretty much have their own politics-focused commands, though they do have Rally command in common to the other factions.

To give you a little more insight on the commands, all factions have a Rally command which allows you to put more cells (dudes) on the map and build up your forces. The Reds and Senate have an Activism command which mainly allows them to either reduce Polarization (which is helpful for victory conditions) or activate/deactivate enemy and friendly cells, which will help execute other commands, prevent your opponents from executing certain commands, in addition to helping gain support during the propaganda rounds. During an Activism command, the Reds can also potentially Agitate to create more opposition in spaces they control with an Administration disc, which is helpful for their victory conditions.

The Reds and Senate have a Terror command which helps remove enemies in addition to increasing Polarization. You'll place terror markers of your faction's corresponding color on the space and this makes the Rally command more expensive for your opponents, but applies to the Reds and Senate only. The Moderates just don't have time to be bothered with the Reds and Senate's petty terror antics.

The Reds and Senate have Attack and March commands, but these cannot be used until the game hits phase 2, so there's a lot of build up in phase 1, then as soon as phase 2 hits, gloves are dropped and it's on. These two commands are pretty common in COIN games from what I've seen, and they function exactly as they sound. March lets you move cells into an adjacent space and Attack lets the Reds and Senate battle each other to remove enemies. When it comes to the Attack command, there's a whole procedure to follow to determine the attack strength and it will feel a bit tedious initially, but after you go through it a couple times and follow the handy player aid, it isn't very complicated at all — just lots of different modifiers to consider. I'll also note that German and Russian troops in the battle location will fight, too, and impact the attack strength.

When it comes to the Moderates, in addition to the Rally command, they have a Message command that allows them to move and hide their cells while optionally carrying either News or the Personality token. The News tokens represent important pieces of information and are placed on the board in phase 2 by German landings and when attacks send defenders to prison. The Moderates really want to grab news and take it to their personality to benefit their cause via the Personality special activity, which helps the Moderates resolve political issues and in turn, help meet their victory conditions.

The Moderates also have a Negotiate command which lets them deactivate enemies and optionally shift polarization and a Politics command which helps them advance political issues, which is tracked on the Political Display and not only impacts the Moderates' victory conditions, but also the cost of Agitation which is one of the main ways the Reds and Senate shift Support/Opposition. It definitely lends itself to some fun negotiations since the Senate and Reds players will want the Moderates player to choose their respective cubes when adding cubes to the Political Display.

Regardless of which faction you are, never underestimate the power of passing in a COIN game. Passing lets you gain a resource, which is helpful and sometimes absolutely necessary so that you can fund future commands, but more importantly (in most cases) it will give you an eligibility advantage for the next turn which can be powerful and critical at times based on an upcoming event or other happenings on the board.

Once you get into the 1918 event cards, the Germans begin taking actions when an event card has a "German Action Phase" banner. There's a straight-forward flowchart you use to determine what action the German troops will take; they'll either land on random Landing Sites on the board, attack, march, or do nothing. However, if the Senate player takes the Coordinate special activity, they get to place the Coordinate marker on the German eligibility cylinder and decide all the details for the German action phase.

I mentioned Polarization above a few times, and I feel it's important to hone in on the Polarization track since it's something unique to All Bridges Burning. The Polarization level represents the level of national unity between the factions, and all factions can manipulate the Polarization level when executing various commands and events throughout the game. This is something all players have a vested interest in considering since Polarization impacts events, commands, and special activities, in addition to each faction's victory conditions.

As with all COIN games, each faction in All Bridges Burning has its own unique victory conditions tied thematically to their historical motivations. The Reds need to build up enough opposition to the bourgeois rule, keep Polarization on the lower side, and make sure they're not over-leveraging the support of Russian troops. The Senate need to gain enough town populations back under Senate Control and similar to the Reds, they need to keep Polarization on the lower side in addition to keeping their German vassalage level down. Meanwhile, the Moderates need to gain an abundance of resources and accumulate political will by organizing into networks and resolving political issues, while also keeping Polarization at a moderate level.

Timing is everything in COIN games. Each time a propaganda card is revealed and resolved, the first step is checking to see whether any faction meets its victory conditions, and if so, the game ends. If not, the game will definitely end after the fourth and final propaganda card is resolved. In either case, if a single faction has met its victory conditions, it wins. In a tie, the faction that reached the highest victory margin wins the game. There's even a chance that Russia and/or Germany will come out as the winners, so be careful! The fact that you have to set yourself up to be winning at the time a propaganda card reveals keeps every player engaged with what their opponents are up to. You'll often have to work together to hold someone back, and it creates a three-way tug-of-war at some moments in All Bridges Burning. You have to strategize smartly, keep your plans to yourself, and think a few steps ahead of your opponents.

If you're planning to play All Bridges Burning solo or with two players, you'll be happy to know the game includes slick non-player decks that are way more streamlined than the older, intimidating flowchart non-player system. I fumbled my way through a solo game after playing multiplayer only once and got crushed. Even with the added efficiency of having the non-player decks, it's still a complex game and you'll probably make mistakes like I did until you get familiar with the game and how each faction works. I will admit, I took the shortcut and bypassed the non-player examples of play in the Playbook, and that probably would've primed me better. Regardless, I would definitely revisit All Bridges Burning anytime if I'm looking for a heavy, thematic solo experience packed with tough decisions and plenty of complexity to stimulate my mind — but realistically, I'll probably mostly play with three players because I thoroughly enjoy the player interaction.

Me getting whooped in my solo game as the Senate

I've played only a couple of games of All Bridges Burning, a couple of games of Cuba Libre, a game of Colonial Twilight, and a half game of Liberty or Death and I am by no means anywhere near an expert when it comes to understanding COIN games — but from what I have experienced so far, I think they're awesome!

I won't sugarcoat it; they definitely all require a decent amount of time and energy, as well as several plays to fully grasp, especially if you're new to the series/system. But I find the experience of learning and playing these games so fulfilling and fun, that the time and energy investment is 100% worth it. Of course, due to their complexity, they are a bit challenging to get to the table, especially during pandemic times, but All Bridges Burning is pretty accessible with its smaller scale map and the fact that you need to learn only three factions instead of four.

I think that gamers, especially heavy gamers who love or are curious about asymmetrical gameplay should give one of these games a whirl. Most of my friends who love COIN games don't come from a wargame background; they're eurogame game fans like me — and if you're into Root but haven't explored the COIN series yet, I suspect you'll dig it, especially if you enjoy historical board games. After all, Root was inspired by the COIN series.

In 2020, I dipped my toes into 18xx and the COIN series for the first time. Having played multiple games in each, I appreciate how much easier it is to get into other games in their respective series after you've played one. After I finally played Cuba Libre, for example, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to jump into Colonial Twilight.

From a design perspective, I'm fascinated by how the eligibility system, the event cards, and the asymmetric factions all work together, blended with mechanisms that are tied so well to the historical themes. I also love that all the COIN games share familiar elements, but no two games are the same. There's always some variety and twists on mechanisms, and of course each game has a completely different setting.

The COIN series is continuously evolving in terms of gameplay, but also in terms of themes, historical or otherwise. I'm stoked to check out the upcoming releases which I'm sure will continue to bring fresh edge to the series: People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1983-1986 (volume XI and the second three-player COIN game), China's War: 1937-1941 (volume XII) from COIN guru Brian Train, and the highly anticipated, Red Dust Rebellion (volume XIII) which is the first futuristic-themed game in the series.

I mentioned how Joel Toppen's Comanchería came onto my radar and got me into historical board games in my Zenobia Award post from November 2020. Well, it is also the reason I initially discovered the COIN series. I told my friend Hector about Comanchería when I was learning it, and he asked me whether it was a COIN game. I had no clue what a "COIN" game was at the time, but I'm glad my curiosity led me to this series and I'm looking forward to exploring it further!

My most recent Tabletop Simulator game of All Bridges Burning, where I won as the Moderates