By Baptiste Alloui-Cros & Thomas Danger
Characteristics
Number of Players: 7
Time: ~ 2 hours
Themes: Military Procurement, Bureaucratic Politics, Innovation in Defense
Type: Rigid Game
Description
Guns N’ Money is a game about cooperation and competition within the military establishment regarding weapon acquisition. 7 players representing key actors of miilitary procurement (MoD, Industries, Army/Navy/Airforce) try to tackle an upcoming flow of crises through clever decision-making and resource management. Will you lead the Federation toward having a grand modernised army? Or will you let self-serving interest create chaos? It is up to you to decide!
Content and Gameplay
- Over 55 capability cards
- 30 crises ranging from conventional warfare to counter-insurgency and natural disasters
- 36 risk cards hindering in various ways the procurement process
- Customed objective cards simulating various national contexts for a more realistic playthrough
- Up to 200+ tokens representing various military systems and political actions affecting the procurement process
Guns N’Money is a highly flexible game, adaptable to a large variety of national contexts. The bulk of the game lies in the negociations and interactions between players. It highlights the human flaws and the difficulty to reach smooth cooperation between actors in the procurement process. As such, the game shines at underlining which factors and specific contexts improve or deteriorate this cooperation.
First presented at the King’s Wargaming Network in London in May 2022, it was well received and thus further played at the DSET (Defense Simulation Education & Training) conference in Bristol and in Berlin for the German Armed Forces. The game was also mentionned alongside other SSG games in an article by The Guardian about the rise of wargaming. It was more recently used by the Canadian Forces College to teach senior military staff about procurement dynamics.
Previous clients and gametesters, civil servants and people working in the Defense Industry, have stated that the game was simulating “with a scary accuracy” the dynamics of military procurement and that the in-game negotiations had “an impressively realistic feel”.
Contact
Strand Simulations Group 