Red Dust Rebellion

Some evenings end with COIN because the trains have been vetoed. Red Dust Rebellion is not the gentle substitute: it is a dense, demanding design, up with Pendragon for sheer cognitive load, and it wants a clear head and proper time.

Its core is an odd four-faction arrangement in which no side is remotely equivalent to another. The economic faction is symbiotically linked to the government, in a manner recognisably descended from A Distant Plain; opposite them sit FARC-like rebels and local reactionaries. Then there is the wholly asymmetric fourth faction, built to enter the arrangement and upset it like Fremen finally deposited on the right planet.

That distribution of aims makes interaction more than a matter of two camps exchanging blows. Corporations and government require one another while retaining separate demands; their opponents must do more than fight, finding openings in that relationship while surviving a faction operating on entirely different terms. The interesting decision is when to serve the temporary common interest, and when to let your allies receive the invoice.

On paper, this arrangement has every reason to fail. At the table it meshes almost miraculously, and the lack of a historical template seems to have allowed an unusually clean balance of powers. The corporate faction remains the hardest to get moving and demands genuine mastery; this is not a game that kindly permits a rules refresher at every sitting.

This is probably the best COIN I have played so far, and certainly the hardest: a demanding, deeply rewarding experience that deserves to stay on the table rather than return to the shelf for another bout of rule recovery.