[Umbrella]

I did one of these with the board game Navajo Wars, which drew some interest until my wife's cat walked across the board and ruined the game. I'm going to do a new one with Labyrinth: The War on Terror. I'll use a vassal board for two reasons. 1) Avoid the cat fiasco, and 2) take screenshots of the board to post.

I'll go into some details as I go along, but the main jist of the game is that the solitaire player is playing as the US, and trying to defeat the Jihadist AI player. The AI is determined from a complicated series of flowcharts, which I won't be going into great detail. I'll be starting from the "Let's Roll!" start point, which historically is the world immediately after 9/11.

The game is a card driven game, with US and Jihad events, and/or operation points (ops). If you've played Twilight Struggle, you should be familiar with this mechanic. If the US plays a card with a Jihad event, that event must occur. So there will be times when tough decisions will need to be made.

The things the US can do on their turn are War of Ideas, Disrupt, Alert, Deploy, Regime Change, Withdraw, and Reassessment. I'll go into more detail as these happen, but the general ideas are as follows:
War of Ideas - Interactions with other countries to become more US friendly.
Disrupt - Remove Jihad cells from the map.
Alert - Prevent terrorist plots from happening.
Deploy - Move troops around the world.
Regime Change - Overthrow an Islamic government.
Withdraw - A special way of withdrawing troops.
Reassessment - Changing domestic policies toward terrorism (US posture, see below).

The Jihad player can perform the following actions:
Recruit - Place cells on the map.
Travel - Move cells around the world.
Plot - Initiate a terrorist plot.
Jihad - AKA Minor Jihad. Worsen governance in a Muslim country.
Major Jihad - Overthrow government and establish Islamic rule in a Muslim country.

In addition, in solitaire play, there is an event called radicalization, which has special rules.

The US player wins automatically if they can get 12 resources at good governance, or 15 countries at fair or good governance. Jihad player wins if they get 6 resources at Islamic rule, or 15 countries at poor or Islamic rule with US prestige of 1, or they have a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) plot go off in the US. In addition, when the cards run out, for the US to win, they need to have 12 resources. I'll use three decks for this game. Each Muslim country has a resource value of 1-3, which is how resources are determined for victory conditions.

A couple of other things about countries. Countries are identified as either Muslim or non-Muslim (except Iran, which is a special case). For Muslim countries, they have governance and relation. Governance can be good, fair, poor, or Islamic Rule. These are in order from best to worst from a US perspective. Relation can either be ally, neutral, or adversary. You can deploy troops to ally countries, and you cannot perform War of Ideas on adversaries.

Non-Muslim countries have something known as posture instead of relations. This can either be soft or hard, and represents their attitudes towards terrorism. As a note, Israel is always at hard posture. Every other country, including the US, can be either. Non-Muslim countries also have a fixed governance. Most of them are fixed at good, although there are a couple that are fair.

Some other important concepts are prestige, funding, troop situation, and GWOT (global war on terror). Prestige is how the US is viewed across the world, and affects War of Ideas. Funding is Jihad funding, and affects recruitment, and the amount of cards the jihadist gets. Troop situation is how many troops the US has all over the world, and affects the amount of cards the US gets. And finally GWOT is the worldwide posture towards terrorists. If this differs from US posture, there are penalties towards War of Ideas. In general the world shifts towards soft, while the US tends to be hard.

This is a very broad overview. I'll explain things in more detail as they come up during the game. I'm a novice at this game, so I'm sure I will make some mistakes regarding the flowcharts, as well as strategy mistakes, since I don't know the game very well. Also, if anyone has any questions about rules, or comments about strategy, I'll do my best to explain.