The first thing one notices about the third scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation is that the script has been flipped. Unlike both the Uruguay and Peru scenarios, which presented the COIN Series’s customary red insurgents facing off against government blues, here the entire color scheme has been inverted. Now the insurgent cylinders are the blue ones, while the government’s troops and police are red and pink. The effect is jarring. More than once, I found myself staring at the wrong side of the faction aid, trying in vain to make sense of the information before me. What do you mean the red side needs to deploy sweep-and-clear operations? Wait, the pinkos have air superiority? When has that ever been the case?

This is Nicaragua, baby. One short year after the socialist Sandinistas ended the Somoza family’s four-decade reign, inheriting an indebted and war-wracked country, the U.S.-backed Contras are pouring over the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. What follows is the most harrowing of the multipack’s scenarios thus far.

As always, the first few turns in a new COIN scenario are testy. Both sides take longer turns than usual, acquainting themselves with the operations that will be their guiding star over the next few hours. (Or, in the case of Rangazas’s scenarios, the next hour to ninety minutes.) Everything is new. The contours of the geography, with its many tropical hiding places and mountainous hard points. The location of any urban centers and their lifelines through the countryside. Any neighboring countries to act as hiding places for roving insurgent forces.

And, in this case, the sudden realization that the Sandinistas are going to have to find a way to afford all this stuff, while the Contras are perpetually flush.

This isn’t the first time in the COIN Series a faction has wielded unlimited spending potential. That distinction traces all the way back to the bottomless pockets of the Coalition in Brian Train’s A Distant Plain. Even this multipack has already showcased a scenario that dispensed with funding altogether.

But what makes Nicaragua so dizzying is that here it’s the insurgents who can act with impunity, not the government. In the background, the Sandinistas are hurrying to repair the damage from the last bad decade of Somozan rule, including the earthquake that leveled much of Managua only for relief funds to quietly route into el presidente’s personal bank account. Now they’re making good on their promises: literacy campaigns, schools, hospitals. Also no small measure of native repression, in case you’re thinking everything is rosy. So when it comes to the CIA shenanigans in Honduras, the Contras with their limitless materiel, the commandos laying nautical mines in the harbors, the U.S. embargo squeezing the entire economy, there simply isn’t enough cash to go around.

It wouldn’t matter so much if everything weren’t so damned expensive. When the scenario opens, the Sandinistas are desperately undermanned. This makes sense in context. All those bright-red troops and hot-pink police have been hastily retrained from the previous conflict’s insurgent cylinders. This leaves much of the country unprotected, especially around the fringes. The only solution, especially early on, is to spend, spend, spend. Spend to train more police. Spend to garrison them in the countryside. Spend to sweep into insurgent hotbeds. Spend to send in the soldiers with the big guns. Even with the multipack’s briefer campaigns, hovering around only eight cards per propaganda round, it isn’t uncommon for a government player to find themselves skint with a good few turns before the next infusion of income.

The only reprieve comes from the Contras themselves. Once again, Rangazas uses the limited tools of Volko Ruhnke’s COIN System to carve out some impressive evocations of insurgent warfare. Unlike the other insurgents we’ve seen thus far, the Contras are not locals. Or, well, they’re locals, former members of Somoza’s national guard or disillusioned revolutionaries, but they aren’t locals the way the Tupamaros were locals to Montevideo or the Shining Path were locals to Ayacucho. The Contras are roving death squads. Their targets aren’t only military, but also the schools and hospitals and agricultural collectives currently being set up by the Sandinistas. Their targets are economic. And therefore civilian.

Which means the Contras don’t have roots in local communities. They can establish bases in Nicaragua, but these are closer to waystations than actual recruitment centers. All their actual recruitment occurs in neighboring countries, in the safe harbors of Honduras and Costa Rica. They aren’t wholly untouchable across these borders; the Sandinistas can lob artillery strikes into foreign territory, risking erosions to their legitimacy, and depending on the whims of the event deck might mount small incursions. But their foreign-backed status informs everything about how the Contras behave. They deploy in foreign territory, then infiltrate into Nicaragua via mountain passages and jungle paths. Once there, they mount attacks and sabotage infrastructure — the customary insurgent tactics — only to melt back across the border at regular intervals.

This produces a starkly different type of gameplay from the usual COIN fare. The Contras work according to their own circadian rhythm, there and back again, in offensives and dispersions, rather than claiming territory long-term. When a campaign ends, they can maintain a certain number of toeholds in-country, but not so many that they won’t have to yield something hard-fought.

More importantly, this gives the Sandinistas some breathing room. Border security is a priority, and not an impossible one. Urban centers have always been tough nuts to crack, but Managua’s central position makes it uniquely secure among COIN capitals. It isn’t unthinkable, for example, that the Sandinista player might opt to empty it of protection altogether. A risky proposition, but one that might put its manpower to better use in more vulnerable sectors.

Meanwhile, the geography takes on real significance. Given its operational focus, the COIN Series has always taken a satellite perspective of territory, more about regional tendencies than individual strongpoints. Here, one immediately grasps the various inroads the Contras might take toward destabilizing the socialist regime. Harbors on the coast are vulnerable, but are more readily policed. The mountains are good hiding spots for entrenched death squads, but access can be blocked with some well-placed army divisions. Perhaps the tenderest pressure point is the harbor on the country’s Atlantic coast, far from Managua and surrounded by jungle. But the Contras also struggle to project that far. It’s a pickle all around.

Of all its pickles, however, none are more vinegary than the looming gaze of the continental hegemon. The United States is never absent from either side’s thoughts. While the Contras don’t have to worry about actual resources, they are subject to American pocketbooks. Depending on the current status of U.S. aid, their operations can target between two to four regions at a time. This encourages the Contras to spend at least a portion of their attention attending to their paymasters, whether through the event deck or by occasionally passing to beg for more attention.

The Sandinistas, for their part, must also keep an eye on the Yankees. There’s no avenue for directly tanking funding to the Contras; the inner workings of a corrupt American presidency are far above the Sandinistas’ ability to influence. But there are ample cards in the deck for applying international pressure. This makes the Sandinista player somewhat reliant on the sequencing of the event deck, but it also prevents their operations from becoming rote. More than most of Rangazas’s scenarios across both The Guerrilla Generation and The British Way, and indeed more than most of the main COIN volumes, Government players must consider every possible avenue for undermining their opponent. Where these titles usually present their government factions as clear frontrunners in terms of wealth and manpower, here they feel fragile and outmanned. They’re the region’s big dog, but their hookworms are funded by the most powerful empire in human history.

Which makes the Iran–Contra Affair such a big deal. Whenever the Contras require extra help, they can pass to bump up the aid track. The price is an extra evidence token in the Iran–Contra box. This isn’t guaranteed to trigger; in fact, it’s even less likely than the People’s Prison being uncovered in Uruguay or Abimael Guzmán being captured in Peru. But if Reagan does happen to get caught funding a violent insurgency that wantonly targets civilians, the ramifications are considerable. With no further ability to increase their funding, there’s a very real chance the Contras will wither on the vine.

Where the previous two scenarios existed in isolation, this draws greater attention to the specter of American involvement in Latin American politics. There’s the wider situation to consider. For The British Way, Rangazas connected all four scenarios via a meta-campaign that traced the larger anti-colonial movement against the British Empire. The Guerrilla Generation includes a similar option, one that’s both more focused and more ambitious. This campaign, called Resisting Reagan, allows players to tackle both this scenario and the next one side by side. It’s a massive undertaking, requiring familiarity with both scenarios and an additional set of campaign rules.

Which is why it will have to wait for its own chapter in this series. Hey, I can only do so much at a time. Look at the bright side: bonus fifth part! Yay!

(Right? Yay?)

All told, Nicaragua is not only the strongest of the three scenarios we’ve played in this multipack, and not only one of Rangazas’s best uses of this long-running system about counterinsurgencies, but one of the best expressions of the wider COIN Series, period. It draws clear delineations between its besieged (and increasingly problematic) revolutionary government and the foreign-backed commandos raising hell in the countryside, presents a novel gameplay scheme in the constant ebb and flow of its insurgents, and, perhaps most importantly, draws the player’s attention outward to the wider problems of American imperialism besetting the titular guerrilla generation on all sides. As my play partner put it, this might be the first COIN scenario that he would request we play again.

But another session in Nicaragua will have to wait for Resisting Reagan. First, we need to examine the multipack’s fourth and final scenario, and the one most personal to me: El Salvador.

A complimentary copy of The Guerrilla Generation was provided by the publisher.

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