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Over/Under as a Cold War Game

And other related thoughts about this game

Some comparisons to other games

First of all, I don't exactly know what people mean by wargaming. I've never done traditional wargaming. I've heard the term used to refer to various non-war training exercises, which are about roleplaying through crisis scenarios without actually playing a fictional character other than yourself. I've heard the term used to refer to some games that are somewhat less war focused and somewhat more diplomacy focused, including:

While these games all contain some war, what they have in common are that they are about managing limited information, misinformation, deception, trust, and alliances. Combat in these games exists mostly to give stakes to the social conflict at the core of the game. These are also games that tend to be full of surprises, which results in great stories that arise spontaneously and without any prior planning. They tend to be chaotic and high stress, which I personally enjoy. While most people probably did not, many people did play Over/Under in a very similar way to how you might play those games.

Over/Under was often specifically compared to the cold war (albeit with very different political ideologies). There was no good reason to fight during the second half of the game, and war would likely have been ruinous, but suspicion and mistrust repeatedly brought both sides to the brink of war. So I think you could maybe consider it a wargame in the way that the Cold War was a war (i.e. not really, but it's the best word we have).

A wargaming attitude vs an RP attitude

Unlike O/U, all three of those games are not RP heavy games. Diplomacy is entirely a board game, with any RP being for flavour. The megagame I played encouraged light RP but discouraged playing a full fledged character, saying in the past it had been disruptive. While people tend to RP in letters, the very limited information flow of Cataphracts means RP is not a major focus of the game. O/U, however, had a lot of RPing, which took the organizers by surprise.

I think what was surprising is not that people RPed, but that the RPing lead the gameplay. I did RP a fair bit in over/under (and I will eventually write a blog post about that), but I took a more wargame-adjacent attitude to it. I approached it as a game to be won, though I made up my own win conditions. I spent most of the game pursuing goals, using the explicit and implicit rules of the game to do so. My character, Alcyone, was created to be suitable for achieving those goals rather than the other way around.

For example, when I became president, I set for myself the following goals:

These are not not RP goals - they probably would have been different if I was playing another faction - but they were not character-driven goals. I wanted to investigate the death of Sanyang because the people who voted for me wanted me to do that. Alcyone did not have a strong in game motivation to suspect the official story. This investigation then lead to a lot of RP and me thinking about how my character would deal with the fallout and what seemed most appropriate in the world we had built. It also involved a lot of meta thinking about game mechanics as well as the larger social and political situation.

I actually didn't think as much in terms of the goals the GM gave us. For instance, investigating Thatch was not necessarily the right move to make if my primary goal was to get that T-shirt. Nor was greater transparency. But those were still motivated more by player goals - of having a satisfying ending, of improving the game for the people who voted for me - rather than character goals.

Denizens

I often heard people express the opinion that denizens do not interact with "the wargame", and that as a result, the correct way for denizens to approach the game is as non-adversarial RP. I do not think this is true of Over/Under. This game was one of the most incredible politics simulators I have ever encountered, and approaching it even as a denizen, as a challenge to be solved through semi-adversarial, semi-cooperative play, was one of the best experiences I have had in a game of that type. It also became clear once I became president that denizens had had an enormous impact on the political landscape of the game. The nature of my experience as a boss was not that different from as a denizen - being a boss was just a lot more intense and a lot busier.

It wasn't necessary to engage with the game in this way - a contrasting approach to this way of approaching the game is described here. But it was definitely a very important option that Over/Under provided, one which I have not really found in any other game.

IC, OOC and a Secret Third Thing

People often talked about in-character versus out of character in the game, with the assumption that if you are out of character, you are not playing the game, which I don't actually think is true at all.

I would instead propose 3 levels (at a minimum) of approaching the game.

You as a person. You want to have fun, maybe produce some good stories you can remember later, avoid content that is objectionable to you, and avoid preventing other people from having fun. At this level, in an ideal world, all players are on the same page and are working towards the same objective, though with a 1000 person game, that gets more challenging.

You as a player. You have game goals, either set by the GM or by yourself, and you pursue those game goals. You use out of character knowledge of the mechanics to do so, within the bounds of the rules of the game. In a social, adversarial game, social interactions are effectively part of these mechanics.

You as a character. You try and do the things your character would do, based on what they know and their personality. If you have goals, they may be more oriented around a character arc, or around exploring how certain aspects of your character interact with the larger game setting, depending on your style of play.

The fact that most discussions of OC/IC separation did not consider approaching the game as a player was I think responsible for a lot of the tension around OOC/IC separation. When people indicated ((out of character like this)), it was often unclear which out of character they were referring to.

When everyone is playing the same game, say a more LARP oriented game, it makes sense to enforce that you are either entirely out of character or entirely in character, but that is not how this game was advertised and I don't think was a reaosnable expectation to have of all players. Within the Union, my expectation was that you are talking as yourself in #union-airlock, which was reserved for among other things OOC safety checkins; you are approaching #union-hall primarily as a player, who needed to have knowledge both of the in-game bylaws, the out of game rules, and the difference between the two; you are approaching #teamster-dispatch entirely in character. In fact I tagged my coffee shop as "RP" because I originally assumed RP would happen primarily in designated spaces. I don't think these expectations were universal, though, and it wasn't until after the game I was able to articulate this clearly.

More generally, I think the person/player separation is often overlooked when we talk about RPGs. In fact, this boundary is essential even in games that aren't RPGs. It allows you to be a gracious loser and a gracious winner, to set boundaries and respect people's boundaries, to play within the spirit of the game and without cheating. It makes it possible to have games about lying and deception without affecting your real life relationships, and to have games about taking risks you would not take in real life. This separation is a part of all competitive games, and arguably many cooperative games, including board games, video games, sports games, tag on the playground, etc. It also is subject to bleed as well - losing a game can feel bad even with no RP at all!

Challenges in Combining Play Styles

In some ways the two fed into each other quite nicely. RP oriented players made the political wargame a lot more vibrant and complex and added a layer of realism which usually isn't possible. And, while I wasn't as RP-focused, I found myself doing more RP than I expected. The real-world conflict simmering in the background gave more weight to the RP. It also gave me a greater appreciation of low-conflict RP than I usually would have. I found myself seeking out moments of peace and quiet, or of absurdity or comedy.

The big issue is that the two styles of play have very different player boundaries that come with them, and it was very difficult to communicate these boundaries in this type of game.

On the wargame side, it was unclear whether conflict - either declaring war, using assassinations, or just lying a lot - was going to make the game not fun for the more RP-oriented. This became a bigger concern as the game progressed and people who maybe did not intend to play in an RP oriented way became more invested in their characters. With no good way to indicate OOC your comfort level with aggressive player actions, you found yourself unable to know how far you could take things. You'd also start to feel like your opponents are pulling their punches.

Also, the rules of the game set certain factions in conflict with other factions as well as internally, which was not always immediately obvious to players, including players who wanted to play in a low-conflict style. This especially came up in the Union/Bratva conflict as well as with players within the Union who wanted to avoid politics. However, if you were playing from a political wargame perspective, these conflicts were the game. This is something I tried and failed to have some conversations about, and which I think I would want to see addressed more in a hypothetical future O/U 2.

On the RP side, an incredibly wide range of content was introduced that people may not have realized they were signing up for, though the mods who were added mid-game did an excellent job here at managing this. Furthermore, there were several distinct RP communities with very different expectations. As a side note, I hope eventually to write something about the ones that have been less well represented in blog posts so far, since I feel like a lot of what has been written about O/U implies that there was one canonical experience, whereas even within people who were more RP focused people were playing vastly different games.

Dying in Games

Most games with rules for death use those rules a lot. But what if death is present but almost non-existent? I've previously tried exploring this concept with OSR-adjacent solo games (solo because I'm not sure I can get anyone else to put up with my bullshit), based on the concept that the real world is a high-lethality system but you still don't die very much.

There were maybe 6-10 assassinations in the game. 6 murders out of 1000 people is catastrophically high by real world standards, but minuscule for a game with mechanics about killing people. And the possibility of of dying had a huge effect on how people played the game. At the beginning some people were afraid to speak openly against bosses out of fear of being assassinated, though this was soon dispelled. A fear of assassination surrounded every major element of Union politics, especially after the Union president died under mysterious circumstances, and resulted in an elaborate assassin-proof election procedure. The death of every boss in the game affected the entire course of the game.

Because it was a long game as well, you started to not want to die. About 2/3 of the way through the game I thought I might be making decisions that would put myself in danger, and I decided to go forward anyway, but the thought of dying made me sad in a way that it hadn't in other games. It also gave my decisions a weight and significance that is rarely achievable in a game. When I and a conspiracy I was a part of said we were all willing to die for each other, that was a touching emotional moment that was only possible because death felt more real than usual. Death was significantly less abstract in this game than in most games that contain violence.

I had an idea once (probably stealing a bit from jay's Wanderhome) for a game with exactly one mechanic: there is a gun in the game, and at any point someone can use the gun to kill one character and immediately end the game. Even if nobody ever used the gun, it would change the entire dynamic of the conversation.

That was basically what we got with this game. One reason why I think it's reasonable to call the game a wargame, especially the politics side of things, is that the possibility of war affected and informed everything else that happened. If there had been no mechanics for war, the political game would have been completely different, maybe even nonexistent. Even if the war mechanics had not been used once in the game, it would have been on some level a wargame, because that gun would have been sitting on that table and we'd have been staring at it the entire time. Likewise the rules for assassination.

A Final Note On What Playing The Political Wargame Was Like

Overall I hope to one day do a separate post on this. But I can only describe my experience with the political wargame in the Union as exhilarating. It was like riding on the back of a dragon or some enormous monster, something beyond control or understanding, too big to see in its entirety. The situation only spinning more and more out of control as I rose higher and higher, constantly teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Just constantly rolling the dice and them coming up in my favour often enough. Putting complete and utter faith in my new friends despite knowing most likely at least one was betraying me. A lucky hunch, a moment of wild and unreasonable trust in an old enemy, these all mattered more than any reasoned conclusion or careful planning could. I don't know if I will ever play a game like it again.

Written November 22 2025