Article 27: The UN Security Council Game First Impressions

Article 27: The UN Security Council Game, if a game ever needed to be more fun that the title this was it.

Luckily it is.

Article 27: The UN Security Council Game gets its title from – yes, you guessed it – Article 27 of the United Nations Charter, which includes these two provisions:

1. Each member of the Security Council shall have one vote.
2. Decisions of the Security Council on procedural matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members.

In this negotiation game, each player represents one member of the UN Security Council and will both present and be presented with different proposals.

So usually at this point, I give a brief overview of how to play. But to be honest I have no idea what to say about this.

It reminded me of Lifeboats, but with a much better overall game. It’s negotiation, someone is ‘in charge’, you have secret goals, you have a vote, and someone wins.

Overview

Each player represents a country, in my case France but it doesn’t matter. You’re trying to get the most influence after X rounds where X is the number of players.

You have a secret goal to pass as many of one type as possible. Also in each ‘vote’, you have 5 secret documents that will show you how each issue will affect you.

So each vote you have to take those into consideration as well as pay attention to what issues the other players are trying to push, avoid or not talk about.

Player Area

So this poorly lit picture is of your player screen. The 5 tokens at the bottom are drawn from a bag randomly and added behind the screen. In this round, if Red passes I gain 5 influences if green passes I will lose 1 (because I have +3 AND -4).

What I’m trying to do is get Red passed in a vote while stopping anything else, or taking bribes large enough for it to be worth my while.

Bribing means you put influence and a token representing your country in a certain area of players’ board depending if you want something in or out, or a vote to pass, fail or abstain etc

Voting

So after a debate, there will be tokens pushed into the centre of the board, or not depending on how things go.

Then the vote happens. Each player simultaneously reveals and token (Tick or Cross) or doesn’t abstain.

One cross and the vote fails, players who vetoed this way pay 5 influence.

If vetoed, play moves on after bribes have been resolved. If not, you gain/lose influence based on your secret objectives and bribes are also resolved.

You only pay for bribes that work, bribes for promises not kept are returned to you.

Result

This blurry picture is of the other part of the game. For each vote, one token of each colour will be added to the track. Votes passed to go to the left and are face up, failed to go to the right and are face down.

Depending on how far up the track they are face up is how many bonus points the person who has this as their secret objective will get.

After each player has been in charge of a vote once, the game ends. Influence is added and a winner declared.

Article 27: The UN Security Council Game Summary

I enjoyed this. Having the issue tokens face up on the board, and going last, means I didn’t get any face up on my board as I didn’t have a chance to manipulate them. I’m not sure if having these face down will make it a bit random though. Then I guess not really wanting red in the middle only to have the token of your type turned up gives you something to vote for.

As far as open negotiation games go this is pretty much the best one I’ve played. It differs enough from Cosmic Encounter for me to not put them in the same group.

I look forward to playing Article 27: The UN Security Council Game again and doing better.

Jesta ThaRogue