Nuclear War Expansion Cards
Created by Bernard HP Gilroy and students
(c) 2005 Gilroy. Free for non-profit use.
More information (including a consolidated list) is available.
Top Secret
Asymmetric Warfare

Card
Text

Your enemy is bogged down fighting an insurgency in a recently-occupied land.

There are 5M initial insurgents. Every turn your enemy loses 1d3 M people, then rolls a d6:

1, 2
3 M insurgents killed
3, 4
status quo
5, 6
1 M new insurgents

Your enemy can also kill insurgents by detonating a nuclear warhead, but only half (round down) of the listed dead are insurgents. (The rest are normal citizens.)

This card persists until all insurgents are gone.


Additional Notes and Information:

Asymmetric warfare occurs between two powers that are radically unequal in conventional military terms. The winning strategy for the weaker power, then, is to fight unconventionally and to never, ever get drawn into a classic set-piece battle. The goal of the stronger power is to entice the other into exactly that sort of battle. Asymmetric warfare became common during the de-colonization of Africa and Asia that followed World War II. Asymmetric warfare is known for its viciousness, longevity, and general chaos.

This is perhaps the most political card I've made but I stand by it.

In game theory terms, this is a modified drunkard's walk, with (appropriately enough) asymmetric boundary conditions: The number of insurgents can get arbitrarily high but can't sink below 0 (obviously). As is often the case for drunkard's walks, it's a nasty process. I wrote a Python script to simulate the outcome:

Number of simulations: 1000000
         == average kills: 17.21
         == average number of rounds: 8.60
         == max kills: 277.00
         == max number of rounds: 131.00
         50% of the time, there were 11 M killed or fewer. 
         50% of the time, the insurgency lasted 5 rounds or less. 
-=- BhpG 2005 0719