Green & Pleasant Land Megagame / Connections UK 2018
Jim Wallman created and ran Green & Pleasant Land for the 2018 Connections UK Professional Wargame Conference, a megagame “examining British national resilience in the face of mounting crisis and a hostile adversary employing the tools of hybrid warfare”.
Posted by Rex Brynen on paxsims.wordpress.com 07/09/2018
Together with about a hundred others, I opted for the megagame, facilitating the game as Control for the Red Cell—a team of nefarious simulated Russians trying to destabilize the UK against the backdrop of a crisis in the Baltics and NATO mobilization. Led by the nefarious Phil Pournelle (doing his best Vladimir Putin imitation), the Red Team used social media to aggravate political tensions, secretly funded alt-right demonstrations, and engaged in sporadic arson attacks—hoping to overwhelm the overstretched British police. There was also quite a lot of hacking, including an extraction of interesting financial information from the Trump Organization, and sabotage of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) used for maritime navigation.
The vast majority of players assumed the roles of various British government departments and officials, trying to deal with a plethora of incidents. Most incidents were simply random events that had nothing to do with Russia, but even those that were connected were rarely linked back to Moscow.
