Social Democracy: Popular Front

Three games into the Social Democracy franchise, I think we’re now past the point where reviews need to assess the quality of the latest installment – unsurprisingly, it really really is, if you like strategy, history, or things that are good, you should play it – and into the realm where it’s most interesting to talk about how it differs from the others, and what that winds up saying about the particular era it focuses on, and our own.

But first a paragraph of throat-clearing, for those who somehow have managed to miss what’s probably the biggest thing to come out of IF in at least the last half-decade: the Social Democracy games are storylet-based simulations of interwar European politics, where you play not a nation but a particular left-of-center party as you attempt to deliver economic growth and freedom by any means necessary. What distinguishes the games from the traditional Grand Strategy approach is the focus on party politics: you’re almost always attempting to manage a coalition, keeping fractious interest groups on-side and doing just enough to pander to public prejudice to eke out enough power to implement the reforms that will, hopefully, create lasting material change. Gameplay-wise, the storylets are delivered via cards – you can draw from different decks representing internal party affairs, or, if you’re in the government, the particular ministries you control, with each card representing an opportunity to shift policy, or an event or dilemma to which you must react. Since you can typically only have a hand of three cards at a time, this winds up being an elegant system to manage the games’ staggering-when-you-thing-about-it complexity, and put you more in the shoes of a contemporaneous leader, subject to the whims of fate and forced to grapple with transient opportunities, than a deathless spirit-of-the-nation able to advance your strategy regardless of what might be happening.

The other commonality is that there’s always a wolf at the door. In the first game, you played as the German SPD, desperately trying to maintain a truce with Russian-aligned leftists as Nazis and their paramilitaries attempt to overthrown the Weimar republic. In the second, you can play a variety of Russian parties during the interregnum between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, though by default you’re the Mensheviks, waiting to be outmaneuvered by the more hardline Bolsheviks. In this third game, you guide the French Popular Front, a coalition of left-leaning parties that takes power in the late 1930s, so we’re back to the Nazis again – but this time it’s not street violence and idiot conservatives handing them the chancellorship you need to worry about, but tanks. So many tanks.

One thing to admit up front is that while I went into the other two games with a dim sense of the time periods and their politics, this is not an era of French history with which I’d previously had any familiarity. So while I was excited to learn, I was also worried that my ignorance would leave me just hitting my two default buttons (1) vulgar Keynesianism, 2) no enemies to the left unless they’re authoritarians) without any understanding of where I was getting myself into trouble. Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, since I think Popular Front is the easiest of the trio to get up to speed with. See, the game starts just as a wave of popular unrest carries your coalition into power, and unlike previous games, where regular elections producing splintered results made forming a government an agonizing, repeated part of gameplay, here you come in with a strong majority and no elections scheduled until after the Nazis invade (I at least knew that much off the top of my head). You’re also handed a program of agreed-upon policies for the Front to pursue, which acts as a relatively simple framework pushing you towards short-term goals you should be pursuing.

You’re also much less dependent on the luck of the draw this time out. You have enough juice to snap up half a dozen important ministries from the get-go – the rest go to your coalition partners – and cabinet members show up as always-available cards in addition to the trio in your hand, meaning that if you’ve got the finance ministry, you can use an action to tweak tax rates or mess with tariffs (or devalue the currency) any time you want. You also get more than one action per turn if your coalition is strong enough, though they start to decrease if your partners get fractious or the Senate gets restive at the pace of progress (though I was a little surprised their disapproval had as much impact as it seemed to, since almost my first course of action every time I’ve played is to remove their veto and kneecap their prerogatives – I’m no idiot, I know what to do to Senates).

As a result, Popular Front can play more like a traditional strategy game, where you can play out a proactive strategy and take action on your own terms, and marshal almost the whole powers of the state rather than a single formation within it. It makes for an empowering change of pace, but there are of course reminders that you’re still subject to the whims of history, most notably the events that play out at the end of many turns: in the early stages many are entirely domestic, highlighting the agency of players outside your control, like union leaders or other parties, but as time goes on they increasingly have to do with foreign relations. The Spanish Civil War kicks off early, and you have some ability to influence it via arms sales; similarly, German rearmament and adventurism create a constant, escalating drumbeat to which diplomacy can only offer so much of a response.

Thus, the central dilemma of the game reveals itself to be the question of when to pivot from domestic considerations to a military buildup. In my first game, I didn’t have the War Ministry included in my portfolio by default, and I figured that was OK – I spent three years leading France out of the Depression via judicious public-works programs and pro-labor reforms, giving women the vote, encouraging immigration, and accomplishing various other liberal priorities along the way, all while keeping the budget more or less balanced, inflation under control, and the government unified. As German saber-rattling about the Sudetenland increased, I figured it was time to reshuffle the cabinet and run a crash-investment program to get the military up to snuff. But I was horrified to see what my complacent coalition partner had been up to when I took over the War Ministry, as a few dozen armored divisions and an anemic air force didn’t seem likely to give the Wehrmacht much of a pause. Nine months of maxed-out deficit spending, alas, wasn’t nearly enough to get things back on track, and I had cause to regret erring so far on the butter side of the guns-or-butter debate (while still appreciating how awesome it was to have all that butter) as the tanks rolled into Paris.

My second time out, I made the opposite mistake, rushing defense production too early which meant the economic recovery never really took and some of my allies got a bit cranky (especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant the pro-Soviet tankies didn’t like my antifascist propaganda any more). Still, I was able to keep the plates spinning long enough to get an impressive army pulled together, and with some judicious save-scumming to explore the set of strategies control of the military allows you to adopt, this time it was French troops entering Berlin in 1940.

All of which is to say that while Popular Front may be a bit easier and more conventional than other games in the series, it very much works gangbusters as a story-creation engine, and it once again helped me see history in a more direct, participatory way. And not just history – this is a small thing, but as I played the card that allowed me to organize a mass rally and picked as the theme, as always, “against fascism, at home and abroad!”, I found myself comparing this attempt to educate the party’s voters about their interests, and form a public around these ideas, to our current, cramped debates about how best to sacrifice vulnerable minorities to public opinion for maximum electoral benefit. Perhaps more so than any other game in the series, Popular Front reminds us that politics is not just the pursuit of economic growth and a 50%+1 electoral margin: there are larger things at stake, then as well as now.