The Guerrilla Generation: Cold War Insurgencies in Latin America (Pre-Order)

For many Central Americans who came of age between the 1960s and 1980s, the solution to mass poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion lay in taking up arms against the entrenched structures of authoritarian militarism and oligarchic elites.

– Dirk Kruijt, Guerrillas

Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint, discipline, and control. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of governance, engaging civilians in the process of affecting political change; others build administrative machineries that do nothing more than extract resources. In some context, rebel groups kill their victims selectively; while in others violence appears indiscriminate, even random. Movements sometimes loot and destroy the property of civilian populations, while at other times they protect it from government attacks.

– Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion

The Guerrilla Generation: Cold War Insurgencies in Latin America is the second COIN multipack, containing four separate games exploring a series of thematically related insurgencies. Building on the The British Way, this new multipack allows players to explore variations in insurgent groups organizational structures, strategies, and relationship with civilians, across four insurgencies in Central and South America between 1968 and 1992. During this part of the Cold War era, Latin America experienced an incredible number of different insurgent groups, many inspired by the Cuban Revolution featured in Cuba Libre, ranging from popular backed rural insurgencies, flexible urban guerrillas, externally sponsored raiders, and brutal ideologically rigid groups. This multipack features a game exemplifying each of these types of insurgencies, to offer players the chance to compare different approaches to rebellion highlighted in the quote by scholar Jeremy Weinstein above. The Guerrilla Generation also offers four longer and more complex individual games than those found in The British Way, as well as an entirely different approach to the linked campaign scenario, which combines two games into a simultaneous side-by-side experience.

Highlights:

• Four full games in one box: Explore four different conflicts set during the height of Cold War Latin America between 1968 and 1992. Each game uses a unique ruleset building on the same general mechanical structure, ensuring that they are easy to pick up while still offering a distinctive experience.
• An extension of the COIN multipack approach with a higher level of complexity than the games in The British Way, introducing new changes to the core system.
• Unique mechanisms reflecting the different attributes of each insurgency: exposing atrocities with Radio Venceremos in El Salvador, managing US Aid in Nicaragua, the hunt for Guzmn in Peru, and kidnapping officials to the Peoples Prison in Uruguay.
• Small board footprint with quick-but-deep gameplay: Each game plays in under 2 hours and takes place on a single 17 x 22 board.
• A Resisting Reagan Campaign: A linked campaign scenario allowing up to 4 players to play El Salvador and Nicaragua side-by-side, with new mechanisms to represent the Central American peace and solidarity movements efforts to resist the Reagan Administrations aid to both the Salvadoran government and the Contra insurgency, by influencing Congress and American public opinion.