Kia ora Koutou, ko Jarrod Carmichael toku ingoa. Hello everyone, my name is Jarrod Carmichael, and I am the designer of Red Dust Rebellion, the latest title in GMT Games’ COIN franchise. You might also know me as the voice, and occasionally the face, of the 3 Minute Board Games review channel on YouTube. I am also the designer of the upcoming Shadow Moon Syndicates from Arkus Games.

Red Dust Rebellion is my first published game, and it has been a long and fascinating experience. Thank you for this opportunity to share it.

What Is the COIN Series?

“COIN” stands for COunter INsurgency, and the COIN game series is about irregular and asymmetric wars. To put that in layman’s terms, those are wars in which one side is a conventional organized military and at least one of their opposing forces are not. Conflicts that have appeared in the COIN series include the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Julius Caesar’s invasion of Gaul, and the Vietnam War.

The COIN game series tries to model these conflicts by treating irregular and regular forces in quite different ways. Firstly, irregular forces need to be found before they can be targeted for attack, but once found they are generally not a match for the regular military in a stand-up fight.

COIN games also focus on the political aspect of war more than many other wargames, with the deciding factor in games being whether civilian populations support or oppose the government, rather than capturing points on the map. The political aspect also plays out in the different factions as well, and there can be multiple regular and irregular factions in the game who will work together most of the time, while only one of them can win the game.

The COIN series has done an amazing job of recreating and modeling these historic conflicts, so why did they let me make an entirely fictional game about a conflict that hasn’t taken place?

Why Mars?

I was setting up and playing a game of A Distant Plain — a game about Afghanistan and the third game in the COIN series — and on the television was Ron Howard’s “Mars”, a dramatization of Martian colonization combined with documentary information and interviews with scientists and engineers about the reality of colonizing Mars.

Ron Howards’ Mars

And as those two things were happening, I started thinking about how Mars is always a hot bed of rebellion in science fiction. Whether in Total Recall, Babylon 5, Red Faction, or any other number of sources, Mars is always the place where stories about independence movements are told.

I thought, “This would make for a cool COIN game. I’ll make it to play with my friends” — and that is literally what I did. I designed the world and the different factions first. The Martian Provisional Government was the main government force, and I wanted them to be quite a normal COIN government faction, the main rebels started off as “Free Mars” and were a normal insurgent faction; they didn’t become “Red Dust” until much later on. Then we made the slightly weird factions: the Corporations who are trying to terraform mars, and the Reclaimers who want humans to adapt to Mars, not the other way around.

I threw all this together in a few weeks, made a ton of cards, and designed the first iteration of the game on my whiteboard before drawing it more permanently on a big piece of white paper. Working prototypes really don’t need to be pretty; they need to be functional.

First map version

After a few tests, I thought the game was working quite well, and I thought about sharing it as a print-and-play for people online — but I thought I’d better ask the designer of the original COIN games, Volko Ruhnke, for permission first.

How the Game Became Real

In 2017, which is before I started the “3 Minute Board Games” channel, I emailed Volko asking for permission to share my game once it was finished, and I shared with him some pictures and an overall treatment of the game.

To my total surprise, it turned out that Volko and some other folk at GMT Games had been talking about branching the series out into fictional conflicts, but no one had yet come up with a good idea or put in the effort to make a game — and here I walk in with a working prototype and a built-up and developed world and setting.

Volko suggested I not publish it as a print-and-play and instead consider developing it to be published with GMT officially. He warned me then that it would be years before the project would see the light of day because of all the other games in the line ahead of it, but I was so excited and keen, I didn’t care. I got to work polishing the game and even got a friend to make a fancy board for me to do my testing on.

Prototype map

I was given the direction to make the game normal for COIN, mostly because they worried the setting was going to be enough to confront without the rules being over the top as well.

I worked away on this quietly for two years or so…

The Great Shake-Up

Around late 2020, we had a meeting about the course of the game, and the decision was made to take the shackles off the design and lean into what made war on Mars different from war on Earth — and this was when Red Dust Rebellion started to become the game it is now.

It’s also when I started working more closely with my developer Adam Blinkisop and with Jason Carr, who manages the COIN series for GMT.

First, I completely redesigned the board. Mars has roughly the same surface area as all the landmass on Earth, which means the spaces between settlements on Mars are massive, so I wanted to represent that on the map. I found a map someone had done of how Mars would look when terraformed and found three regions on there to zoom in on. These three regions would become our zoomed-in areas of conflict, with the rest of Mars being represented by an abstract wilderness.

Our three focus regions

I added in the Aldrin cycler, which is a system of ships doing a figure-8 orbit around Mars and Earth and using the gravity to keep going with minimal fuel required. This system became how we moved resources from Earth to Mars.

Refugees and housing were always something I wanted to show in any conflict on Mars because it shows how vulnerable humans are on a planet without oxygen. To do this, we created a conflict system that would cause damage and create refugees if battles took place in populated regions. Adam did a lot of work getting this system to work as well as it does now.

I also completely revised how the Reclaimers faction works, making them into a card-driven faction that breaks just about every conventional rule in the COIN series. I think the bulk of Adam’s testing work was trying to get my vision of how these weirdos should work into reality.

We also introduced satellites and a lot more special rules about Earth Government, a fifth faction whose control swaps between the Martian Provisional Government and the Corporations based on how well the conflict is going.

Almost all of the development work at this point was happening on Tabletop Simulator, and it was a real collaborative process. Many of Adam and Jason’s ideas are in the final design. Later, Joe Dewhurst was brought on, mostly to design the solo systems, as that’s outside my wheelhouse, and he too had a few additions to the core game.

Through this process, we went from being a normal COIN game to something quite unique — and although Red Dust Rebellion is the latest in a long series of games, it is very much its own thing.

Tabletop Simulator

The Art of Red Dust Rebellion

I wanted the game to look great, while looking a little different from others in the franchise. Thankfully, Jason and the GMT crew were 100% behind this, and we got ourselves an amazing artist: Marcos Villarroel Lara.

I got to have a lot of creative control and wrote every single card’s creative brief, for example:

Quote:

Card 9 – Red Wednesday Riots — The Red Wednesday Riots were the single bloodiest night of public unrest during the whole rebellion. Street battles between protestors and security forces became deadly. The foreground of this card should show a protestor on the ground, defenseless, as a security officer’s boot comes down on their head. In the background, similar acts of violence and chaos should appear. (indoors/subterranean)

Sketch

I would then get back a sketch on which I could provide feedback before getting the final art later. I rarely had to give much feedback as Marcos seemed to take my words and get them right the first time. It was a truly remarkable experience to work with an artist like this and see your vision of a world come to life.

Final art

The Long Wait

Red Dust Rebellion was approved to go ahead on the GMT P500 in 2020, and it’s finally going to come out in 2024. Covid definitely got in our way, but a huge part of these delays was an effort by me and the team at GMT Games to get the game right, to get it polished and perfected as much as we could. The game had strong bones and core concepts from day one, but it took a huge collaborative process involving passionate and skilled people at all stages in the game’s development to make it what it is today.

As the designer, I held the overall vision for the design and the world in my head at all times, but it took a literal army of testers, developers, artists, and others to make that vision a reality. All I can hope is that people enjoy the game half as much as I enjoyed designing it.

Final game on the table