So your task is protecting or overthrowing the (il)legitimate government of the United States. Now what do you do? Well, as with any wargame, you have to pay close attention to the victory conditions and keep in mind what level you wish to achieve. Figuring out the level of victory is easy; getting there is the difficult part, and it is even a bigger challenge than usual in this wild and woolly affair.

Control of regions is the way to win, so you must keep what you start with and grab what you don't. But that doesn't mean just placing any old units. You have to do it with Infrastructure, the weakest and least mobile units in the game. This is similar to the king's role in chess, only in Crisis 2000 every region you control has a fragile king needing care and protection. In some scenarios, one side (usually the Rebels) start out with far fewer Infrastructures, so that side must take special pains to gain them or it will never really be in the game.

Forming attack groups and raiding parties to knock off enemy Infrastructure and establish your own is the way to go. This sounds easy but your efforts will prove largely futile unless you execute it properly Plan to use combinations of regular armed combats along with data attacks. The overt boys will kill the enemy while the covert folks will cause riots and defections.

The optimum attack force is a Cybernaut, a mix of military units (High Tech, Rapid Deployment, Special Ops), and a sprinkling of Strike Force (police) and Insurgent (rioter) types. All types of enemy units can be attacked by this bunch, and they can't all be eliminated by one lucky enemy armed attack, because Cybernauts are clandestine.

Crisis markers seem unimportant at first, but watch what happens when you have none and your opponent has four or five! You must keep and capture territories to keep the Crisis markers flowing, so keep on attacking. Pay attention to the combat tables before you add crisis markers to an attack: they are more valuable on the lower end than adding to an already overwhelming attack.

You must keep new units flowing to strongly contested regions, so set up some Cybernauts in your secure areas, protect them with some police, and use data attacks to recruit new units there. Attacks should be augmented by the Crisis markers to boost the chances for success. Surveillance markers are the one way to get at Cybernauts in open combat. Recruit new Cybernauts whenever possible and keep moving them around to make it harder for your opponent to swoop down on them.

There are no "Zones of Control" to impede or prevent enemy movement anywhere on the map, so you have no real secure area. Make sure to leave some protection for your controlled areas, but if the other player wants, he can march right in and start blasting away. The best counter to this is your own relentless offensive with armed and data attacks. Keep recruiting, and grab a defecting enemy unit or two whenever possible.

Recruiting Tips

Taking on new Infrastructure is almost always a good idea, but don't overlook powerful, flexible Cybernaut units. They are clandestine and thus hard to knock out physically They are the best units on the board for delivering solid Data attacks all by themselves, and are devastating when used in twos and threes. Lastly, they are very fast moving. Strike Forces are nearly as good, and are especially worthwhile if the opponent has plenty of pesky Cybernauts you need to run down. A group of three Strike Forces make a great hunter/killer team.

High-Tech Arms units are very good at getting the high totals needed to destroy Infrastructure and take out Insurgents, but Rapid Deployment units are nimbler. The situation will tend to dictate the best choices, and you have to pick right to give yourself the best shot at a solid victory

The District of Columbia almost always ends up deciding the outcome because of its high Political Value. If you can hold or capture it, your chances of winning stay high. Send enough force to do the deed, but dorit commit too much, because there are other areas that must be attacked and defended. As always, send a mixed force to capture it and plant an Infrastructure as soon as you have the opportunity. Don't ignore other territories, because you really can win the game without DC. One good strategy is to feint toward DC, forcing your opponent to defend it heavily, and then clean up in the West and South.

Some results are not exactly what they seem. One of the most effective things that can happen to you is to have the opponent neutralize an Infrastructure marker It often comes back at a better location, and leaves the other fellow to ponder the wisdom of going after Infrastructure too eagerly!

These are just the most basic pointers in a game that has a remarkable number of variations built into it because of the free-form use of Crisis markers. Things can happen very fast, especially if you insist on forcing the issue. In one playing of the "Coup 2000" introductory scenario, the military Rebels tried to move from NATO to DC, rolled a counterattack and were wiped out by a motley assortment of urban gangs, police, rioters, and Clinton-Gore Rapid Response Teams.

A similar result occurred when they tried to take California--only there I assume it was the Libertarians who were at the barricades! The game ended with the coup plotters sulking in their beer.

Initial playtesting revealed a tendency for players to use military force rather than "soft measures," because the original rules rewarded it. There was no point in saving any Crisis markers because they were easy to take away and players could always choose Infrastructure units to destroy whenever they wanted to. Innovative games like Crisis 2000 are likely to veer off in some undesirable directions, both from the standpoint of realism and of play value.

Fortunately the game could be played often enough by several different groups that these problems surfaced in a matter of days. (The developer tells me that each game averaged about 90 minutes to 2 hours, and that the four playtest groups ended up playing the game at least 75 times in Just one month of intensive testing!)

The designer quickly responded to our concerns with a couple of easy fixes that completely solved the problems. Now whenever a side doesn't have enough Crisis markers to cover a required loss, the other side gets to choose new markers to cover the difference.

Also, Infrastructures are only eliminated on an "E" result on the Armed Conflict Table, never a "T" result. That means you either have to pound a region into submission (virtually guaranteeing collateral damage that loses you Crisis markers), or resort to less violent Data conflict to "turn" an enemy Infrastructure. It's amazing how two seemingly minor changes like these can refresh an entire game system and add immeasurably to the replay value of most of the scenarios.

The groups had some ideas that the designer didn't buy like more complicated exchange results where both sides lost something. A few you might want to tinker with are increasing the number of "C" (Crash) results at the lower ranges of the Data Conflict Table (particularly 0, 1, and 2), increasing the number of Crisis markers lost from certain C results (i.e., 2C or 3C results would become possible), and allowing the Government to have the first player turn, especially in Scenario #3 "UN Occupation."