The Other Side of the Hill – Thoughts from Volko Ruhnke

More content on the game:

• The Other Side of the Hill Kickstarter Campaign
• Game Overview
• Teach & Play Material

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The Other Side of the Hill (El Otro Lado de la Colina) is boardgame about the rise and fall of German generals in World War Two. It is a product of the flowering Spanish wargaming scene, produced by the NAC Wargames branch of the established publisher MasQueOca and designed by Carlos Márquez.

Carlos is a personal friend. NAC lent me an advance copy of Colina and also produces a Spanish edition of my design Almoravid. This article will not be a review in the sense of what I do or don’t like about the game. Rather, I want to share what Colina led me to reflect about human organization for war, about history in games—and whether we should make games like this at all.

The Game

The game’s title comes from a book by British historian B.H. Liddell Hart, who interviewed captured German generals to get at the enemy command’s experience. In Colina, up to four players fight out the European war not as the usual Axis versus Allies but as cliques of generals, jockeying for position as they run the German war machine together.

As just a glance at the gameboard or all those decks of cards will suggest, there is a great deal going on here. So let us peel this Axis onion one layer at a time. …

The Outer Layer – Fighting the War

The players’ first and most obvious task is to expand German conquests and then hold the Allied counteroffensives at bay. Up to four players act in different roles of authority, called “Sections”. A commander-in-chief (OKW) issues political and military directives that, for example, set diplomacy or launch offensives. A personnel director decides which competing generals get appointed where. A production chief divides the Reich’s resources among economic priorities, pursues weapons development, builds forces, and runs strategic warfare. And a head of operations maneuvers the armies and air fleets that fight the battles.

The scale is suitably strategic, with army cubes deployed to country-sized regions and disks within a region showing operational successes and failures pushing the front out from Germany and back in again. With custom dice and cards giving life to the game-run Allies, individual theater, army group, and leading generals’ talents influencing battles, U boats and the bombing of Germany, the arms technology race, enemy encroachment threatening the collapse of Germany, and the constant call for troop replacements, there is plenty for the team of German players to worry about.

The Middle Layer – Jockeying for Position

But, if you care about winning the game, none of that is your true purpose. Each player represents an unnamed clique of German generals. You win mainly by gaining more prestige for your clique over the others. The game awards you prestige points for doing well in your functional role—such as successful offensives as OKW or operations chief or advancing weapons development if you are the director of production. You also earn prestige for your generals serving in command assignments and especially when they lead victorious military campaigns.

During the first half of Germany’s war, this is a happy race. Plum appointments hang low on the tree, as the Wehrmacht stomps this or that weak little adversary. Just get your generals appointed to lead somewhere and reap the prestige of blitzkrieg triumphs.

But naturally the Allies grow stronger and stronger each year, and the wear and tear on your military machine grinds it down. By 1943 or so, it begins to get serious for you: Allied offensives become near constant; your satellite armies evaporate; and the West bombs Germany into rubble. Even then, you mustn’t ignore consumer production, as you will want to buoy the Volk’s fanatism for the regime.

There may still be laurels to grasp for your favored generals, but a major element of play becomes avoiding responsibility for the looming disasters at home and in the field. When your coterie is blamed for defeats, your prestige drops. If your picked field commander retreats too much, he is questioned and possibly dismissed—making room for your opponent’s generals to earn prestige for serving in his stead. As everyone starts looking to the end game for the Reich, the jolly teamwork of the early days fades into memory and the knives come out.

The Inner Layer – Advancing Ideology

And your perch on the Wehrmacht’s high command is even more precarious than that. You see, this late-war game of “Survivor” is not just about raw prestige. It is also about political ideas, about what sort of Germany will emerge from the war.

Early-war, your high command assignments are musical chairs—you might control the top as OKW one year, then production or personnel in the next. But mid-war, the Führer reorganizes the high command, taking direct control himself. Whichever player is sitting in Oberkommando chair at the moment is OKW for life. The other players then each draw a Hidden Agenda card (kept secret, of course).

Everyone knows who the boss is and what the boss wants: OKW will score bonus points for forestalling the collapse of Germany and keeping the population’s National Socialist fanaticism high. But the Hidden Agendas reflect four shadowy interest groups within the German high command and among all those generals. These four groups secretly harbor ideological objectives distinct from those of OKW:

• The Old Guard—imagine traditional aristocratic Prussians here—is enthusiastic about winning the war and seeks especially to hold the Bolshevik East at bay.
• The modern Professionals—Manstein and Guderian are their archetypes—would be glad to win the war but not by suicide in the attempt. They would prefer somehow to preserve the German Army for whatever the post-war world might hold.
• The fanatical Sympathizers—we can call them Nazis—are equally devoted to victory in the West as East and especially want to block the faithless Professionals and Dissidents from taking over the Wehrmacht.
• Finally the Dissidents—whom Rommel eventually joined—are for the downfall of the Führer.

That downfall might occur via a “Black Orchestra” plot, for which each player will control an unknown set of pro- or anti-coup personalities (via yet another little deck of cards). But the Dissidents do not particularly mind whether the Nazi collapse is by assassination and coup or by Allied armor divisions. The Dissidents Agenda player will score a hefty bonus if Germany collapses militarily or, in the scenarios that stop short of 1945, for flagging popular support of the regime.

Among four players, with one OKW and four Hidden Agenda cards, there will always be an agenda missing. So players can never be sure that there is any full-on hidden traitor. Did the head of operations do the best that that player could to hold off that last enemy assault in France? Or was that a feigned error by a secret Old Guard, who care more about the Eastern Front than the West? Staying hidden matters, as OKW can tag a player as “Traitor”—costing that player points if indeed the Dissident but costing OKW points if not.

Here is another rub: each general identifies with one of these four Interest Groups (and generals who get questioned for poor performance can come over to the Dissidents). The more that generals of a given group occupy command positions, the more that group’s influence within the armed forces rises. But your Hidden Agenda does not necessarily match your stable of generals! It’s up to you to see to the appointment and advancement of generals sharing your ideology—whether they belong to your clique or not.

You can guess at the subtle personnel maneuvers that might result among players. How clearly do you help another player’s general because he is aligned with your interest group? If you do, is it a favor to be returned or an ideological ploy? And have you just revealed your true objectives?

Recall that each player still controls a different sector of the high command, with different authorities. Then throw in that OKW may be able to override another player’s decisions.

With all these competing priorities and perverse incentives, you can never really be sure why a player did what they did in the war. Just as in life …

Playing Politics: “Coopetition”

In reality, all human organizations and thus all mass human affairs such as war feature such internally competing priorities. Groups of people comprise smaller groups within them and ultimately individuals, all of whom pursue overlapping but distinct interests. Sociologists and historians have long seen the need to consider bureaucratic politics in order to understand the behavior of any community or institution. That includes a nation’s army—a military machine of people, not just of equipment.

There are always inefficient frictions that affect the performance of armed forces. In World War Two, think of Montgomery versus Patton or McArthur versus Admiral King.

Yet WWII games typically simplify away these internal politics. Even multiplayer ETO games stick to depicting each nation’s military as a unitary rational actor. At most, there might be a nod to factionalism here or there, in event cards or rules such as “interservice rivalry” hindering use of all of a player’s forces in unison (a bit more on which later).

The aim of the game is to allow players to simulate the effect of the struggle for power within the German High Command on the development of the Second World War.
– From the Design Notes for The Other Side of the Hill

Colina resides within a class of games that get at real-world factionalism by giving players some mix of explicitly competing and overlapping interests in their victory conditions. Players at least ostensibly pursue a common goal throughout—such as defeating a military enemy—while also competing for position and reward them variously within that larger effort.

Here are some sub-categories of such “cooperation-competition” games. …

The Power of Purview – Player roles alone can come to the fore and create friction in tactics and strategy, even when players shared interests entirely—when all win or lose together, and there are no distinct victory conditions or victory points. In the original Pandemic boardgame (2008), players fight diseases as a team, win or lose together. But each player has a unique special ability, and a charm of gameplay is the disagreement that tends to emerge from these occupational roles about how to get the overall task done.

Any traditional 2-sided monster wargame in which players form teams to divide up command responsibilities is likely to see such friction. Decades ago, I experienced this effect in a 3-on-3 team game of Operation Typhoon (1978) in which the tunnel-vision of each player running their own sector of front opened a fatal gap in my side’s front line.

Colina offers an option for such a fully cooperative mode. I have not tried that (why give up all the flavor and realism of competing cliques?). But I suspect that it too would bring out some friction in favoritism toward one’s own generals or one’s current function within the high command.

Wary Partners – Some games construct their victory conditions to enable teams of players to win or lose together but anoint one player within a team as the bigger winner or bigger loser. Four-player Wellington (2005) does this for the Spanish-British partners versus French Nord and Sud; Liberty or Death (2016) does so for British and Indians versus Patriots and French. “First, don’t lose the war! Then, out-fight or out negotiate your ally.”

You can play Colina this way: a semi-cooperative mode leaves out the Hidden Agenda cards—so no anti-Nazi Dissidents here. All players lose if Germany collapses. If not, you score prestige to find which player is the biggest winner.

Bad Marriages – Other COIN Series games similarly propose historical partnerships between factions: Fire in the Lake (2014) with its NVA and VC versus ARVN and US, for example. But these games ignore which team might win the war and rather rank all factions entirely individually by their victory conditions and allow only one partner to win it all. Players may be colleagues, compatriots, allies, but the cooperation is ostensible only. As only one of you will win, you cannot engineer a shared victory.

The race for Prestige Points in Colina’s full competitive mode works this way: you fight the war only to jockey for dominance over your partners, whether Germany wins or loses.

Secret Traitors – A further design twist is to merge cooperative roles with competition underneath by keeping hidden who among the players is actually not on the team at all. The boardgame Battlestar Galactica (2008) popularized this mode of play, in which players first compete against a game-driven enemy all together. Then at some point, certain players are secretly assigned the role of saboteur, to help the game system defeat the other players. The resulting suspicions among players can generate intense team dysfunction—quite reflective of the real world’s perhaps unavoidable but often counterproductive hunts for “the traitors who walk among us”.

Colina’s Hidden Agenda cards work precisely so. As the Dissidents try slyly to sabotage any coordinated war effort, the Professionals and Old Guard too will tilt toward army survival or defense in the East, respectively. We can recognize such effects in the historical Wehrmacht’s behavior, not only in the participation of officers in plots against Hitler but more subtly in the varying treatment of Western versus Soviet PoWs, outreach for separate peace with the West, and greater propensity in the last weeks of German units on the Western Front to surrender. 

What Have We Done?

Here, in Colina’s Agenda cards, we smack squarely into the question of ethics and what we are about as players. Dissidents players can be comfortably pleased when they win: they did their part to bring down evil, from within Hitler’s Reich. But what of the rest of us around the table? If the history in the game has any meaning to us, what has our triumph just enacted?

Particularly tricky in this regard is that the game’s otherwise delicious Hidden Agenda victory bonuses will cast one player essentially in the role of Hitler himself.

Agenda cards represent a player’s nature, his unchanging essence … . Section cards represent a player’s possible functions, which will vary throughout the game.
– Design Notes, The Other Side of the Hill

The Design Notes explain that players simultaneously represent their clique of generals, their Section of high command responsibility, and their Interest Group as represented by their Agenda card draw. But the Notes make clear that the latter identity is paramount. That is, if you are playing the Sympathizers, your role’s essence is the support of Naziism. And the Notes affirm that the OKW player is exercising Hitler’s historically firm personal grip on military power from the beginning of the war and moreso after his direct intervention upon the first failure in the East, in the game, the “Reorganization of the High Command” event card that assigns one player the role of OKW for the rest of the game.

The Agendas assign to other players the roles, respectively, of the fanatical generals who pursued militarily the triumph of Nazi fascism in apparent true belief; the traditional German officers who went along enthusiastically out of their blended abhorrence of Bolshevism and Russia; and the new breed of officers who soured on Hitler’s destruction of their precious army but nevertheless went along meekly enough. Only one player might represent those with the moral courage to resist National Socialism actively from their positions power, and that player is the skulking deviant at the table. In one in four competitive 4-player games, no player takes that role—it is merely a ghost dwelling among the suspicious clutch of subservient bureaucrats around the openly fanatical leader.

The Dissidents … are all Generals executed or incarcerated for their opposition to the Nazi Regime. … [Old Guard and Professionals] would deny Hitler and Naziism after the war, despite benefiting from the regime … and lacking the moral fiber to act against it. The Sympathizers Group represents Generals identified with Naziism … . Most generals directly responsible for war crimes are included in this group. It is important to stress the “directly responsible” part. If all Generals who condoned or looked away from war crimes were assigned to the Sympathizers Group, precious few would fall out of this category.
– Design Notes, The Other Side of the Hill

As the Design Notes point out, historically, there were few admirable heroes anyway among all those General cards that you will promote and nurture to win the game.

And in cooperative mode, no one fights Naziism. Indeed, if Hitler is assassinated, all players lose. That is, the game’s victory conditions call on the players to keep Hitler alive and in power and keep Hitler’s rule over as much of Europe as possible going as long as they can.

Topic versus Treatment

This is a hobby game. Naturally, one’s taste in fun should influence what we choose to play. No game is for everyone. But, as games help make the broader culture that we all share, we can usefully ask, should a game like this, which invites players to enjoy running the Nazi war machine together, best be made at all? Some of us might answer with a straight “no”, that the topic itself is harmful. I have encountered such sentiment regarding other games. But that blanket reaction strikes me as an intellectual dead end.

The reasoning that some topics are simply unsuitable for boardgaming seems built on the idea that games are trivial, that because they invite players to have fun they are just for fun. Therefore, games inherently trivialize their subject, and some historical subjects must never be trivialized.

If boardgames are inherently trivial, silly, we almost needn’t care what they are about. But we do care because we know that games are more than trivial or silly. They immerse us. They can be potent media for conveying messages and ideas, understanding or misunderstanding. In the United States, there are subindustries and defense and of education that continue to invest in the power of games for research, training, and education.

If games do have something to say, we should treat them critically as we do other media. Please don’t tell me that it’s bad to read about or write about something. That sentiment edges toward censorship and book bans—a notion rearing its head in my country today. Do tell me instead whether what I am reading or what I have to say is good or bad or right or wrong in your view.

It is not what a game—or a book or film or play—is about, what it chooses to examine, that we ought to judge, at least not alone. We must instead consider ethically how the game pursues its examination, how it delivers its topic, and to what purpose.

Liddell Hart—the historian who interviewed the German generals and wrote about them in The Other Side of the Hill—took criticism for lionizing Rommel. But we cannot reasonably condemn him for undertaking his research in the first place into how the German high command operated or for writing his book at all.

Our evaluation of Colina must hang not on the game’s topic but on its treatment.

Of Valorization and Whitewashing

One important objection to ponder: does the design or presentation of a game serve to valorize evildoers? Does Colina’s presentation of the German high command glorify its exploits, glamorize its participants, or at least render them more sympathetic to us when we play as them?

This question, while more meaningful than “should there be games about this?”, is rather tougher to resolve. Valor, glory, glamor, and sympathy are all ultimately in the eye (or heart) of the beholder.

Typical and ever-popular ETO wargames almost always include a German or Axis player. If the simulation is at the strategic level, then that player represents Hitler. Perhaps Colina is no better or worse in that regard.

A concern might be the literal portraits of these German generals, our involvement in their careers and the effects of their personalities on our play, as they personally lead for us the conquest of territory or hold our Soviet and Western enemies at bay. Could that experience subtly bring us uncomfortably closer to them than would their silent portrayal in a typical WWII hex-and-counter?

For what it’s worth, my feeling when playing Colina was the opposite of glory. Especially from 1943, I instead took away the impression of the German high command as a pack of bickering losers, vainly trying to string out and hold together a losing cause, with more eyes on scores against one another than on the outside world crushing in on theirs.

A separate objection about any boardgame that treats tragic episodes of history is that it may whitewash its subject. Boardgames always simplify history and are typically not trying to make their player uncomfortable about the setting or their roles. Colina is a game about Nazi Germany at war. Are the ugliest bits washed out? Where are the Gestapo, political prisoners, the war crimes, the Holocaust?

Of course, most ETO wargames tend to have little to none of that either. Colina briefly but at least explicitly portrays forced labor for war production and the elevation of the Waffen SS. And they are not just there: the players must choose whether to reach for atrocities as military tools, with some blowback: “Unrest” that can contribute to the downfall of the regime. So we get more provocation than most wargames give us to think about what we are up to here.

Scope and Purpose

The boardgame reviewer Dan Thurot, in considering the whitewashing of colonialism and the slave trade in mainstream boardgames, explains in an essay on “Scope and Relevance” far more effectively than I can why we must evaluate a game’s treatment of history within that game’s scope and scale—the designer’s choices what to parcel of human affairs the game is to capture and what is outside that boundary. The broader (more “strategic”) the scope, the less detailed the scale. These design choices should set our expectations of what facts and dynamics are in, what is out, and therefore the degree to which a charge of “whitewashing” may be valid.

Scope relates tightly to purpose. Like all books and all films, all games focus on something. That focus—scope—helps deliver the purpose of that work. Once we address how a game’s scope might set our expectations of coverage and detail, we must also consider whether the purpose that yielded that scope is valid, is commendable or abhorrent. We should not, to make up an example, laud a biopic that focuses on some historical villain’s perspective without context simply on the basis of the filmmaker’s chosen scope for the project.

Why can’t I play the Allies? It may be that Colina’s scope—play of the German side only, the absence of an Allied player—raises the question “why make this game?” more vividly or urgently. For a multiplayer or two-player game, we can argue that we want to have human opponents on the other side from the players playing the War’s “Good Guys”. Bots are all well and good if you can’t find human opponents. But nothing beats a brain-on-brain contest for simulation or fun. Playing the “good” side against a game system is fine, but relegating the upstanding and valorous side to a bot so that you and your friends can play the evildoers is misguided, backwards design.

But do we really imagine that, when we run the Nazi war machine in Rise and Decline of the Third Reich (1974) or Totaler Krieg! (1999) or Unconditional Surrender! (2014) against our friends playing the Allies, that we are merely providing a human foil for their sake and are therefore immune to concerns over valorization or sympathy?

I am not at all sure that the reliance on game-driven rather than player Allies, as in Colina, works to obscure the historical meaning of our player roles. I suspect instead that Colina’s Germans-only scope acts, if anything, to bring the nature of our roles into greater focus, especially when those roles’ varying range of Nazi sympathies emerge as a point of the competition.

Is detail fetish? But why in Colina go into to such exorbitant detail about all these Wehrmacht generals? The comprehensiveness and detail of the generals portrayed in the game remind me fondly of the inclusion of WWII US submarines in the solitaire game Silent War (2005): every US boat that served in the war gets its own named piece to patrol the Pacific. Are Colina’s 48 generals, each defined with five or more distinct characteristics, an indulgence in fetish? I mean “fetish” here in the sense of obsessive devotion well beyond the inherent value of the object, to the point of adoration.

In my case, I play commercial games in large part because I want to learn history from this powerful medium. To assess the degree of detail in a historical game design, I would instead ask two other questions.

How worthwhile is it to learn this particular history? Here, highly: Both the external and internal workings of the German war machine were clearly consequential to the world. As well, understanding how such a regime works remains sadly relevant to modern times, as we worry over the implications of far-right gains within various democracies.

How much do we benefit from this detail to understand it? Surely substantially: Individual German general officers’ capacities and political posture affected the course of the war, with Rommel and his eventual dissidence only the most famous of several such cases. And a game that features the interactions of all these characteristics of all these personages gives us a model of that historical complexity that we can operate, test out, and thereby take into our intuitive understanding.

Much research has gone into the [assignment of Generals] to Interest Groups because the game is designed as a simulation, a learning experience.
– Design Notes, The Other Side of the Hill

To hop to a historically adjacent comparison, would not a look at the Pacific Theater of Operations, with competing IJN and IJA players—whether against game-run Allies or against an Allied player team of, say, MacArthur and Nimitz—be fascinating and illuminating? Empire of the Sun, for example, uses event cards and restrictions on unit activation to simulate such interservice rivalry. But how much more life and innovation we could give this critical historical dynamic if we enabled individual human beings to enact it! Should Imperial Japan’s historical war crimes deter us from making or playing such a game?

Personally, I would be encouraged by the direction of the hobby if The Other Side of the Hill were to spawn other such detailed examinations of internal politics in war, be it about Imperial Japan’s army and navy or some other military bureaucracy. That development would signal our readiness in the hobby to delve deeper into the nature of not only wartime organization but also human affairs generally. Enjoy the games.
– Volko