Author Archives: johnprados

CIA Bamboozles Congress–Again

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March 5, 2014– You read it here first! I’ve commented repeatedly in this space on the enormous gaps in, and frailty of, congressional “oversight” of U.S. intelligence. The point has been made repeatedly in my coverage of the National Security Agency scandal but it also appears in pieces I’ve posted about the CIA. Now we’re back in the soup again. The McClatchy News Service first reported, and today’s New York Times confirms, that the CIA, far from acquiescing in the legal right of Congress to oversee the agency, has been spying on Congress.

A month ago a fairly extensive analysis appeared here (“Should We Depend on Intelligence Oversight,” February 1, 2014) on the byplay between the agency and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program and its black sites. That column discussed how the agency was sitting on the Senate report, refusing to send it back for public release, because CIA careers and rice bowls are on the line. The new Times report indicates the spooks went further than that–CIA officials hacked the computers which it, itself, insisted that Senate committee staffers use in examining the documents it provided to investigators. This attempt to find out how the Senate discovered internal CIA documents which contradict the agency’s official position (that the conclusions of the Senate inquiry are wrong) is a violation of criminal law.

Sources have confirmed that the agency’s Inspector General has conducted an investigation into this spying. The latest information is that the IG has referred suspects in the case to the Justice Department.

All of which is the very antithesis of the principle of oversight. Here we have the watchers spying on those whose charge is to monitor them. This new excess joins an already lengthy list of irregularities that I documented in my book The Family Jewels . “Chilling” barely covers the implications here.

On March 4 Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) wrote a letter to President Obama regarding the torture report’s release, alluding to the impropriety, and requesting that CIA be stripped of the authority to rule on declassification of the document. This is a follow-up to a letter back in January to which Obama never replied.

So guess what? We’ve been here before. The whole notion that an executive branch agency has the authority to regulate what information can be released by Congress is a product of the “Year of Intelligence,” the time of The Family Jewels. More specifically that custom arose from the dealings between the CIA, President Gerald Ford, and the House Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by New York Representative Otis G. Pike, who recently passed away (see “We Miss His Integrity Already,” January 22, 2014). It is a fiction.

So all can understand just what happened here let me relate that story. Pike’s committee had a broader writ than the Senate torture investigation. It was empowered to look into every aspect of U.S. intelligence. The CIA loathed the whole thing. On the other side of Capitol Hill a similar committee under Idaho Senator Frank Church was doing the same thing. Just as with the recent torture investigation the CIA laid down ground rules for what the inquisitors could see. It even drafted the texts of secrecy agreements congressional staff were supposed to sign before being granted access. Their actions were closely monitored by the White House. President Ford designated his counselor, John O. Marsh, to ride herd over the whole thing, backed by none other than Dick Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president (his boss at the time was Donald Rumsfeld).

At Langley, CIA headquarters, there was early confidence that the agency could keep the lid on the investigations. But these gradually developed their own leads (the Church inquiry into assassinations, for example) and went in directions the agency feared. At a hearing on September 10, 1975, the Pike committee let out four words of a National Security Agency cable that was top secret. The Ford administration seized the opportunity to demand that the committee return all classified documents in its possession and refused to provide any further information. It did not matter that Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, had given the same information to reporters already.

This maneuver led to a major crisis between the Congress and President Ford. Then, as now, the administration had its spies on Capitol Hill, in this case the Republican members of Pike’s committee. But the White House was aghast to discover that even their congressional allies agreed that the committee had the right to any information it required to fulfill its duty. At the White House Jack Marsh crafted an “action plan for the defense of the agency.” As a CIA lawyer observed on September 22, “The Action Plan is much broader than simply the confrontation . . . . It deals with the future in terms of Executive and congressional oversight.” The Pike committee insisted upon its prerogative to release any information it considered necessary. It began considering Contempt of Congress citations for officials. It subpoenaed documents.

Ford sought legal advice, in house, from the Department of Justice, and CIA did its own analysis. White House lawyers did not give him much comfort. In a September 23 memorandum the president was told that Congress might not have the power to declassify information, “but it has the power to publish the document in its possession.” The Attorney General advised that the president could withhold information–and Henry Kissinger demanded it–but as a political matter that represented the highest risk option.

The same day Pike Committee lawyers told their principals, “the CIA is a creature of Congress, created by statute of Congress . . . . In other words, notwithstanding that the agency is a member of the Executive Branch it is created by Congress. If the subpoena is defied it raises the spectre of Frankenstein. That is, an agency created by Congress, funded by Congress is set loose in the world without any ability of its creator to control its acts, let alone examine them.” Pike stood his ground.

A sort of negotiation ensued. Some of the subpoenas were flawed, being addressed improperly (to the National Security Council for State Department information, for example), but the Pike committee was properly constituted, had the power to do this, and could legitimately regard any less than full response as failure to comply. Finally the sides cobbled together an arrangement under which the CIA would “lend” its documents, and before releasing anything to the public, the Pike committee would “consult” with the president on whether there was any national security objection to their release. President Ford adopted the device of asserting executive privilege each time one of these issues came up.

There is much more. The crisis went on into January 1976. Pike sought a contempt citation against Kissinger. Ford suppressed the Pike Report itself. Significantly, the legal advice then was that the president might succeed with a national security claim but that this dispute between Executive and Congress might very well be held a “political question” by the courts, so Ford’s chances were no better than 50-50. The president instead took the course of lobbying the House to vote against releasing Pike’s report, and in that he succeeded.

It is significant that in the draft recommendations which Otis Pike sent to his committee members on December 19, 1975, he included the provision that “Each such committee [dealing in national security] should be authorized to recommend that specific classified facts and documents be made public . . . after . . . giving careful consideration to the judgment of the executive branch,” with the final determination to be made by senior House leaders. This did not survive into the final set of recommendations, which instead provided that “classification of information be the subject of the enactment of specific legislation.” Forty years later, Americans still lack that protection against malfeasance and abuse.

(Note: I shall tomorrow post the Pike draft recommendations as a Hot Document on this site.)

Bottom line? President Ford relied upon the power of executive privilege to keep the documents secret, not on national security per se. The Pike Report was spiked as a political act, not a matter of security classification. The Church Committee did, in fact, release its Assassinations Report over Ford’s objections. And Section 4 of Senate Resolution 400, passed in 1976 to create the Senate Intelligence Committee, explicitly provides for the committee to declassify information, under a procedure similar to what appears in Pike’s draft recommendation.

The latitude Congress has given the Executive Branch in the release of national security information is a courtesy, not a matter of law. There is apparently some inkling of this within the Obama administration right now. The journalist Jason Leopold filed suit against the Department of Justice last September to compel the declassification of the 300-page executive summary of the Senate torture report. This past January the Department moved for a summary dismissal of the suit on the grounds that the Senate report is a “congressional record” and not an agency document.

The Central Intelligence Agency no longer deserves to be accorded courtesy in the matter of the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report. The Senate should simply release its investigative study. Forthwith.

 

 

Tone-Deaf CIA Lawyer

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March 1, 2014– Midway through his gossipy, score-settling memoir, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acting general counsel John A. Rizzo drops the line that his boss of the mid-90s, director of central intelligence John Deutch, used to make remarkably tone-deaf public comments. It’s a charge you might very well want to apply to Rizzo himself. I wrote about the CIA lawyer at some length in my book The Family Jewels.

Back in the Deutch era, when the CIA was caught misleading Congress by failing to reporting that agents in its employ had had a hand in torture and murder–including of American citizens in Guatemala–the CIA boss ordered a review of agency assets for others with blood on their hands. Among others, the Counterterrorist Center’s best spy had been involved in an attack in which Americans had been wounded (the intent had been to kill). CIA hired him later, when remorse led the man to change sides and supply them intel. The agency had never reported the man’s past to the Justice Department–as it is obliged to do–or to the congressional oversight committees. When it got around to doing so after the Guatemala affair this information promptly leaked to the New York Times. Agency officers warned the spy he might be outed and the man disappeared, never to be heard from again. Rizzo seems to want to say, and half-implies, that the spy’s former comrades did away with him. The CIA lawyer then condemns Times reporter Tim Weiner for going ahead with most of this story, and after that trounces him for not mentioning the affair in the book Weiner wrote later about the CIA. (Just parenthetically, Weiner’s CIA history basically stops much earlier than this 1990s episode.)

Fast forward to the drone war of today. John Rizzo was the CIA lawyer at the center of the agency’s “kill list” of people to be taken out by drones. Rizzo essentially bragged about his role to Newsweek reporters for a feature article that magazine published in February 2011. But when nominated for CIA general counsel, at Rizzo’s confirmation hearing he was much less forthcoming to the congressional overseers. And in his memoir Rizzo does not mention his role, or deal with the drone war at all–except to express the antiseptic opinion that he thinks drones are here to stay. Looks just like the offense of which he accuses the journalist.

This is a guy who wore a flaming pink polo shirt on a field visit to a CIA black prison, who finds nothing objectionable about the Justice Department “torture memos”–which he, in fact, solicited–and who shellacks the Bush White House for getting cold feet mid-course. The polo shirt incident led his CIA security man to ask sarcastically why he didn’t just paint a bull’s eye on his back. So who is tone-deaf here?

There is at least one CIA excess which Rizzo does find outrageous. That is agency operations chief Jose Rodriguez’s gambit in November 2005 to destroy videotapes documenting CIA torture at the black prisons. Rizzo recounts that he had never felt as upset and betrayed as he did the morning he found out about it. But Rodriguez’s maneuver was of a piece with countless things that John Rizzo spent a thirty-four year career justifying, and at times contriving.

PANZERKRIEG FOG OF WAR

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February 23, 2014– And now for something completely different. Looking over the new, Six Angles edition of the game Panzerkrieg it came to me that we can use the components to craft a fresh game variant. Masahiro Yamazaki has added “Objective” pieces to the countermix. Fans of the game will know that most of its scenarios postulate one of the players “To Win,” and to do so by means of capturing a number of named objective hexes. Mas has made this more visual with the Objective counters.

But the same pieces can be purposed differently. I’ve compiled a variant that inserts Intelligence Deception. Players designate their Objectives as before– but some of the Objectives can be phony ones! This way the opponent may work to defend cities the player is not really interested in.

The Panzerkrieg variant is a product among those in the “Downloadable” section of this website. Hop over there and check it out!

The Wargame Laboratory

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February 17, 2014– Several years ago, for my book Normandy Crucible  I chose to make use of a boardgame as a kind of historical laboratory. I took an existing game on the Normandy campaign, SPI’s Cobra, done by Brad Hessel many years back, to generate virtual data on the actual campaign. (I’ll say something in a moment about how that went.) The other day, while researching a topic from World War II in the Pacific, I was delighted to encounter another instance of someone who’d done the same thing. This was an honors thesis in history done at Ohio State nearly a decade ago. There’s not enough to call this a trend, but clearly the notion is out there, so I thought I would say something about best practices.

A little more detail on the Normandy Crucible experiment: I set out to explore the contours of the German defense of the hedgerow country following the D-Day invasion in June 1944. I wanted to see if a different combination of German strategic approach and/or defensive tactics might have worked better and, in particular, how these factors impacted on the size of the force the Germans would succeed in withdrawing from Normandy once they began their retreat. To accomplish this I first took the Cobra game and brought it up to date. When it was published in the late 70s we knew very little of the Allied intelligence advantages with ULTRA, the design itself had certain awkward elements, and now we have much better historical data on German replacements and reinforcements. All these things were factored into the game.

To effectuate the laboratory schema, I chose a set of parameters–some strategies, some tactics, some were terrain-based defense emphases. Each of these became a scenario. Then the game was played numerous times with extensive data recorded, ending with the number of German troops who escaped the debacle. The game was played solitaire and with various opponents.  Every scenario was played multiple times. I ended up with a very interesting collection of insights.

In our other example, in 2005 Mark Gribbell at Ohio State used the 1992 editions of the Avalon Hill games Midway and Guadalcanal and modified them to replay the battles of the Philippine Sea (June 1944) and Leyte Gulf (October 1944). Gribbell asked the question of whether the Japanese, had they had better pilots at that time in the Pacific war, could have done better at these decisive naval battles. We don’t know enough about his assumptions or data to judge his actual scenarios, but his conclusions were that the outcomes would still have been Japanese defeats although the Americans would have suffered somewhat higher losses. To judge from the honors thesis, the battles were replayed just a few times.

So, best practices? In my view the first key element is to ensure that the simulation platform actually has the capacity to answer the questions posed. In both of these examples an original boardgame (or games) were modified to accommodate the experiment. There is not sufficient information to describe the actual modifications made in the Pacific war laboratory, but in the Normandy case I am confident the game update provided exactly the platform required.

The second key element is to ensure the questions are the right ones. For Normandy, the ability of German forces to withdraw was directly measurable by the game. Secondary questions, such as the effect of commencing the retreat at different moments in the history, was also observable. In the Pacific war case, losses were a surrogate measure for the impact of pilot quality, but there the connection is less clear. For example, what about the effect of better Japanese aircraft, along with or apart from, pilots? Gribbell himself suggests something of this with a related conclusion he draws–that the American use of the F-6F “Hellcat” aircraft was a key factor in Japanese losses.

Finally, it is very important to ensure that there are enough iterations of the scenario to collect a broad range of data. This takes better account of the effect of different player strategies and tactics, as well as for the element of chance.

In my case one other lesson of this exercise was that some readers and historians are not yet ready to accept the simulation as a valid tool for historical analysis. In the text of Normandy Crucible I made some use of the simulation laboratory results, but I had originally done more. Comments from readers and editors encouraged me to extract most of this material and move it to an appendix, and some items I had to drop altogether. The simulation laboratory has yet to come into its own.

Panzerkrieg Rules Arrive!

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February 8, 2014– Masahiro Yamazaki has just sent his translation of the rules and scenario sheets for Panzerkrieg. I’ll be checking them against the originals for any discrepancies, but if there are any you’ll easily be able to download updated versions later. In the meantime you can play the game in its new edition.

At this point English versions of the charts and tables are still outstanding but they’ll be coming along soon. Those of you with earlier editions can simply use the currently existing versions during this interval.

The new material looks very nice and has already given me an idea for a game variant rule that will put some strategic intelligence flavor into the game.

Enjoy!

The Working Class General

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February 7, 2014– In connection with publication of my new book on the battle of Dien Bien Phu I’m adding a new article to the “Downloadable” list on the website. This piece focuses on one character in that story, the French officer Marcel Bigeard, who led a parachute battalion in Indochina. Of working class origins, he was colorful enough to feature in the movie The Lost Command, played by actor Anthony Quinn and modeled on the character “Pierre Raspeguy” in the Jean Larteguy novels The Centurions and The Praetorians. In the Algerian war Bigeard’s role became controversial in the Battle of Algiers and afterwards, with charges that he had had prisoners tortured, a subject that reverberates in America today as a result of CIA actions during the 9/11 era. Bigeard also fought in World War II, ending his military career as chief of staff of the French army, after which he entered politics and became a deputy in the French National Assembly. Marcel Bigeard is a fascinating character, worth more attention than I could afford to give him in Operation Vulture.

Overheard on Amtrak: A Gaming Story

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February 4, 2014– If you’re a boardgamer who looks askance at the first-person-shooter variety of videogames, here’s some grist for your mill. Of course lots of folks love videogames, and the first-person-shooter variety is a strong category in that field, so if that’s your passion please excuse this. My take is that of a longtime boardgame designer who was there when computer games first got started, solicited our help, then left us in the dust.

Anyway the story is this: a few years ago I was on my way to take care of chores in New York. I prefer Amtrak for these periodic business trips. The train is more comfortable, you can walk around, and it leaves you in the heart of The City, ready to go wherever you need to. So I’m on a Northeast Regional bound for a city I love, where I lived a long time. I read a book as the train barreled along. Sitting there I became conscious of the conversation from the twin-seat ahead of me. Two men were engaged in avid debate. I heard the words “axe” and “sword.” That got my attention pretty well.

Some nefarious plot? I worried briefly but it quickly became clear the two men were game designers, and their purpose was to figure out what weapons to put into the first-person-shooter they were crafting. The conversation was quite interesting. Heft of the axe and sword, length and edge-type of the latter, single- or double-bit for the axe, type of metal, weight–all were things they considered. What struck me in particular was their focus on the visual impact of the various weapons configurations. They were clearly concentrating on a game design issue.

The purloined conversation got me to thinking. Plenty of gamers have asked me over the years why I did not move into computer games. Actually a few of my designs–Third Reich and Kanev are two–have appeared in computerized versions, though the games (and even the computer platforms which ran them) no longer exist. But I never made the crossover myself. At first I thought I would, but that I needed to wait–the early platforms were very restricted in terms of core memory. For a long time the memory requirements for representing a mapboard effectively consumed the machine’s capacity leaving little for the game itself. As a designer my preference has always been to innovate systems that mimic large-scale processes in the real world, requiring pretty sophisticated code. But I anticipated that CPU memory capacities would someday reach the level required for both board and design, plus, of course, pieces. In any case, focusing my design efforts on image (as my Amtrak friends were doing) rather than content, as in the modeling of processes, was not something I wanted to do.

That evolution of computers happened–but so did something else. The early electronic games were very much like the boardgames. But as computers improved, the action game, granddaddy of the first-person-shooter, eclipsed the old-style game. The charm of putting the person into the game–as character (in role-playing), as ball player, as shooter, as action figure–was irresistible. The personal element made computer games the behemoth they are today. Even large-scale games today, as in the massive online game, are permutations of single person action. My two friends on Amtrak were onto something.

But I did–and still do–prefer to model processes, not individual action, whether cumulative or not. I’ve been pleased that old-style electronic games have survived, even as a niche in the computerized milieu, and also that computers have come around far enough to develop game-assist programs (like VASSAL) that improve the practicality of boardgames. And developing trends may be moving in the direction of  a more central role for boardgame-like computer games. Sales of first-person-shooter designs peaked in 2011 and have diminished since. Though these games still account for nearly a fourth of all electronic game sales, their dollar volume has decreased by more than a third. This suggests there is space developing for electronic wargames of the traditional kind, now in an environment when the platforms are fully capable of handling a sophisticated boardgame. Some of my old designer colleagues–Eric Lee Smith is an example–have chosen to go straight to electronics with new game companies. And games are being formatted to work on I-pads and I-phones. We may be witnessing the dawn of a new age. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

Obama : Syria/NSA = Eisenhower : Dien Bien Phu

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January 29, 2014– This is about history, or more precisely what  presidents learn, or think they learn, from history to apply to their current headaches. Many of you will be familiar with the kinds of word associations that college entrance exams delight in confronting us with. Here I want to make an analogy between President Barack Obama’s present approach and one attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to argue that it is indeed possible to learn wrong things from history.

The episode from the Eisenhower years occurred in 1954. It was a Far Eastern crisis, one in Vietnam. In the last year of the French war there, our ally’s Expeditionary Corps trapped itself into a hopeless battle against a Vietnamese revolutionary army. Paris, aghast at the specter of defeat, appealed to President Eisenhower to save them. “Ike,” as he was familiarly known, was sorely tempted to intervene with air strikes in support of the French. If those did not work, he recognized that he would have to commit American ground troops.

Ultimately President Eisenhower did not intervene at Dien Bien Phu. I mention the crisis because of the similarity between actions Mr. Obama has taken recently to one explanation for Ike’s course in 1954. The conventional wisdom on Dien Bien Phu is that Ike worked with a “hidden hand” deliberately to avoid intervention by insisting that Congress approve the proposed action, safe in the knowledge that it would not do so. I happen to think that explanation is false. As I argue at length in my new e-book, Operation Vulture: America’s Dien Bien Phu, the president worked to further the intervention project far more assiduously than can be accounted for by an explanation which posits that he opposed this course. We shall see how that historical debate fares, but for our purposes in today’s posting it is the supposed historical lesson of the consensus–the desirability of “hidden hand” action–which frames the point.

Last summer and fall an extended debate raged in the United States over whether the U.S. should intervene militarily in Syria to support a popular uprising against the ruler of that land. Much as Mr. Eisenhower, at Dien Bien Phu, had been trapped by policies he had set and promises made to France; President Obama had been caught in his threats to retaliate against the Syrian government if it were found to be using chemical or biological weapons against its people. When evidence emerged the Syrian regime had done exactly that, Mr. Obama was on the hook. His response? Obama insisted that Congress approve the proposed intervention.

Much the same thing happened with regard to the Snowden revelations and the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal. That issue also emerged last summer. Mr. Obama’s first response was to solicit a national debate on the legal, constitutional, and privacy issues involved in the NSA’s eavesdropping. Privately he ordered intelligence agency chiefs to offer options that might make the dragnet more palatable, and appoint a blue ribbon commission to review the practice. Another review was carried out by an independent agency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (see “Funny Name, Serious Business,” January 23, 2014).

We now know that President Obama approved of this domestic spying all along. As reported by journalist David Remnick in The New Yorker of January 27, Mr. Obama felt no ambivalence about this: “I actually feel confident that the way the NSA operates does not threaten the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans and that the laws that are in place are sound, and, because we’ve got three branches of government involved . . . it actually works pretty well.” Despite Obama’s feelings, last month his blue ribbon commission reported out a study starkly critical of the domestic spying and a federal judge ruled it probably unconstitutional. Three weeks ago the oversight board emerged with an even darker view (see “Independent Agency Study Trashes NSA Claims,” January 24, 2014). Obama’s response? On January 17 he gave a speech accepting the criticisms of the NSA spying, and proposing a number of reforms that he says should be enacted by Congress.

Last night President Obama presented his 2014 State of the Union address. Among its more important features was Mr. Obama’s lambasting of Congress for its inability to act on anything. The president promised to move forward on social issues by means of executive action if Congress will not cooperate. Of course the political gridlock on Capitol Hill has been evident for a long time, since before Mor. Obama took office, and Republican obstructionism became even more strident with him in the White House. Obama’s speech makes perfectly clear his awareness of this factor–and his willingness to proceed unilaterally. Why, then, on two critical issues–Syria intervention and NSA reform–insist that Congress move the ball forward?

One explanation, cynical but not unlikely, is that the president did not want anything to be done on these matters. This certainly concords with Mr. Obama’s expressed view on the NSA spying, and it is a good fit with his need to escape entrapment on his own laying down of “red lines” with the Syrians. Obama has been playing with Dwight Eisenhower’s “hidden hand” deck.

If Barack Obama drew these lessons from history, they are the wrong ones. Let’s go back to Dien Bien Phu, and Vietnam. The hidden hand approach neglects consequences. After Dien Bien Phu these tactics left Eisenhower with no alternative but to support a South Vietnamese government that progressively embroiled the United States in a war. By not addressing policies the tactics put the U.S. on a track from which there was no escape, except by doing the very thing Ike’s supposed course sought to avoid. At the same time, because the hand is hidden a president builds little constituency for his actions. The effect is thus inherently limited. It is distressing that history can offer the wrong lessons and be invoked in support of dubious courses of action.

Korea 1968 Hot Document

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January 27, 2014– The Electronic Briefing Book that we posted on the National Security Archive website a few days ago (EBB-453), which dealt with North Korea’s seizure of the U.S. spy ship Pueblo in January 1968 attracted a great deal of attention from South Korean media, fascinated that nuclear weapons might have featured in an American response to the crisis. The actual story is not quite what media mavens have seemed to appreciate: Nuclear weapons were mentioned as part of a planning paper prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in May 1968–some months after the crisis–as part of a contingency plan for what to do if hostilities broke out on the Korean peninsula. So that readers can judge for themselves I am posting the paper here as a “hot document.”

What’s a Jigsaw Puzzle? The BEYOND LEIPZIG Mapboard

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December 26, 2013– A fellow game designer commented in one of the online chat rooms on gaming that the mapboard for by Beyond Leipzig looked like a project for a jigsaw puzzle. Seems a bit snarky to me, but his bleat opens up something worth comment, and that is representation on a mapboard. Let me put in my two bits on that.

To start with a general description, Beyond Leipzig features an area map representation of Central Europe from the French border of 1813 to the Oder River. That map includes terrain, for purposes of representing movement and combat; plus delineates certain political boundaries of that era, because this game has a diplomatic aspect and players may dicker over the control of minor states. There are at least eleven different kinds of terrain (clear, highlands, swamps, forests, major and minor rivers, river crossings, cities, fortresses, mountains and passes). The territory of roughly fourteen states (three Major Powers and a host of minor kingdoms, principalities and so on) lies within its scope. Their boundaries have to be specified. Lots of information needs to be on that map.

Several avenues to this are possible. For a long time the standard technique was to take terrain and overlay a grid of hexagons upon it. Another method was to craft a map which divides the space into areas. The third is to produce a network map, dividing the space into “stops” connected by a route-path of movement lines, much like the map of a transit system.

For Beyond Leipzig the choice was an area map. I wanted to get away from the hex grid because that impedes a naturalistic view of the land. But the hex grid does offer one important advantage: it facilitates the representation of terrain. So I made it a goal to make “areas” behave more like “hexes.” Thus, rather than have vanilla, undifferentiated areas on the map, here we get areas which have terrain intrinsic to them, as well as terrain features along the boundaries. This conforms precisely to design practices using hexagons. Areas in Beyond Leipzig terminate at significant boundary features (like rivers or mountains).

Some of the gamer’s impression of a jigsaw can be attributed to another attribute of the area map–areas were drawn so as to inhibit “gamey” actions such as jumping across corners so as to avoid transiting boundary terrain features. No legitimate objection can be made to this approach.

As for a network map approach I rejected that for two reasons. First, a network map would be even more artificial than a hexagon one. Appreciation of land and space becomes so vague that verisimilitude virtually disappears. Second–and equally important– route-path networks are inherently limited by the route connections permitted on the board. In real terrain a force could head in any direction to reach its goal. Within a network, however, directions of movement are restricted. The device of correcting this by connecting all stopping points to all adjacent ones robs the network of its purpose of constricting play. It also produces a more complex visual presentation in which the landscape becomes less visible.

Beyond Leipzig offers a sophisticated terrain analysis in a very simple fashion while opening up all possibilities to the players and affording them the opportunity to see the land as it was, and conduct their campaigns within that framework. This is not a jigsaw puzzle, it is a considered mapboard representation.