Description
Following
Balance of Power, designer
Chris Crawford stuck to the big-picture approach but shifted the focus from power politics to macroeconomics. In a grassroots simulation of industrial production and allocation, players balance a country’s military and social spending to survive in an environment of fictitious nations competing for land and resources.
Key element in the turn-based
The Global Dilemma is a basic tree of industries such as coal mines, lumber mills or gunpowder factories. The entire production chain culminates in only two results: an increase in either military strength or population. Guns or butter.
The careful balancing and channelling of the industrial production, stripped down to the most basic mechanics, is
The Global Dilemma’s fundamental challenge. A growing worker population is vital for the economy. A strong military is vital for conquering neighboring provinces, their resources and population.
At the same time, rivalling countries threaten the borders, and troops must be deployed to the vulnerable spots on the map. Superiority in numbers wins the abstract clashes of armies. The expert difficulty level adds a diplomacy system in which nations form short-term economic alliances.
The Global Dilemma sees Crawford refine his particular brand of socio-global simulations, reducing complex issues to basic cause-and-effects chains that have a distinctly educative edge. As usual, a well-written manual details the game’s mechanics. Crawford continued with
Balance of the Planet (1990).
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Trivia
The back cover gives the last names of several world leaders of the 1980s: Gorbachev, Carlsson, Ceausescu, Thatcher, Honecker, Jareuzelski [SIC - should be Jaruzelski], Bush, Castro, Kaifu, Kohl. These refer to:
- Mikhail Gorbachev: Communist General Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991
- Ingvar Carlsson: Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden from 1986 to 1991 and 1994 to 1996
- Nicolae Ceausescu: Totalitarian President of communist Romania from 1965 to 1989
- Margaret Thatcher: Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990
- Erich Honecker: Socialist General Secretary of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1971 to 1989
- Wojciech Jareuzelski: Socialist General Secretary of Poland from 1981 to 1989
- George Bush: Republican President of the United States of America from 1989 to 1993
- Fidel Castro: Socialist President of Cuba since 1959
- Toshiki Kaifu: Liberal Democtaric Prime Minister of Japan from 1989 to 1991
- Helmut Kohl: Conservative Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from 1982 to 1998
