This is how The British Way ends: not with a bang but a whimper. Of the four scenarios in Stephen Rangazas’s vivisection of 20th-century British colonialism, Cyprus is the briefest and least rules-heavy inclusion, a suitable outcome for a conflict that was comparatively minor when contrasted with the counterinsurgencies of Palestine, Malaya, and Kenya. Exhausted by colonial occupations across the globe, the British Empire was spread too thinly to enact a full response. Instead, it elected to utilize the lessons of occupations past to sway international opinion and brutalize the insurgents into surrender.

As we will see, the outcome proved unsatisfactory to everybody.

Cyprus contested.

In order to understand the Cyprus Emergency of 1955-1959, we need to rewind about fourteen hundred years. No kidding.

Positioned in the naval crosswinds of the Levant, the island achieved strategic and commercial importance as far back as recorded history allows. Early hunter-gatherer and village communities were founded there, including some of the oldest water wells ever discovered. Greek settlers came to the island in waves, first the Mycenaeans during the twilight of the Bronze Age, and later after widespread collapse flung the old order into disarray. These early Greeks incorporated Cyprus into their mythology, marking it as the birthplace of Aphrodite and Adonis and the home of Pygmalion. The centuries saw it changing hands as powers waxed and waned. It was ruled by the Hittites and the Assyrians. Alexander the Great conquered Cyprus and leveraged its navy against the city-state of Tyre. Centuries after the Romans inherited it, Cyprus weathered the division between Western and Eastern Empires. The Umayyads raided and then colonized it, coming to blows with the Byzantines until the island was declared a condominium, held in limbo between Arab and Greek interests. The Knights Templar, the House of Lusignan, the Republic of Venice, and eventually the Ottoman Empire laid their claims at its doorstep.

The arrival of Britain was something of an oddity. As part of the secret negotiations that hallmarked the late 19th century, the Ottomans entered into an agreement with the United Kingdom. The Ottoman Empire had been declining for some time, and the rapidly growing Russian Empire was gnawing at its borders. In the same spirit that saw Britain waging the Great Game against Russia in Afghanistan, the British accepted administration of the island to prevent their current rivals from acquiring it. Before long, Cyprus had become an essential base along the logistical network that ran from Britain to India.

Except rivalries had a tendency to swap positions in those days. When the Ottoman Empire entered the Great War on the side of the Central Powers, Britain declared the island an official colony.

Whether this was good or bad news depended entirely upon what type of Cypriot one was. There were two major blocs: the majority, comprised of Christian Greeks who welcomed British rule as a possible route to reunification with Greece — “Enosis,” which soon became a full-fledged rallying cry — and the Muslim Turkish minority that feared being dispossessed, as had happened to the Muslim Turks of Crete within living memory. But the Greek Cypriots’ hopes for Enosis went unrealized. By the time the British celebrated the 50th anniversary of their rule over Cyprus in 1928, many Greek Cypriots had reached a boiling point. As an ally of Britain, Greece intervened, suppressing anti-colonial sentiment in newspapers and turning a blind eye to more sweeping British penal codes. But there was no containing the nationalistic fervor. Riots became commonplace. The Second World War came and went. Uprisings against the British Empire in Palestine and elsewhere demonstrated that a new feeling was prevailing internationally. And thus it happened that in 1950, the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, the EOKA, was founded.

Whew. History can be so dang big.

Struggling over opinion.

This is the crowded political landscape that The British Way’s fourth and final scenario tackles. One player commands the British colonial administration while the other leads EOKA.

Although it’s subtle, Rangazas indicates how both belligerents were torn by internal dissensions. To start, the Empire is divided between two major centers of power. Their most reliable pieces are troops, tan cubes that are completely invulnerable to attack, but are also severely limited thanks to British conflicts elsewhere in the world — and depending on which cards are drawn, might be drawn into the Suez Crisis. To alleviate this shortfall, the British must rely on their police forces, drawn largely from the Turkish population. These pieces are an essential component of the occupation, allowing the British to repair any damage from Cypriot uprisings, but are also vulnerable to infiltration and attack. They also represent differing objectives. While the British intend to retain control over the island’s naval bases, the Turkish Cypriots hope to achieve Taksim, their answer to Enosis, which would partition the island into Greek and Turkish sections.

For their part, the EOKA can’t decide what sort of insurgency it will be. Its founder, George Grivas, was a Greek Army officer and veteran of both world wars. After the success of the insurgency in Palestine, he regards violent activities and assassinations the surest route to Enosis. The Archbishop of Cyprus, Makarios III, takes a different perspective, arguing that attacks should be limited to sabotage.

Put these together and you get a rather streamlined COIN experience, one that feels closer to a traditional area control game than the nuanced board states that are the norm for the series. There is no distinction, for example, between sabotage and terror. Indeed, the relatively light nature of EOKA terror is depicted via sabotage markers alone, while their more overtly violent impulses (or Grivas’s willingness to recruit schoolchildren to the cause) appear only thanks to event cards. Similarly, series staples like control and loyalty/opposition are nowhere to be seen. There are only two major axes to consider: international opinion and British political will, with the former influencing the latter alongside sabotage and various events. It’s not accurate to say that neither side attempted to sway Cypriot allegiances, but Rangazas suggests that local stances were more or less calcified by 1955. All that remained was whether the British could be dissuaded from remaining in-country or persuaded to pave the way for either Enosis or Taksim.

Of course, the British are still willing to resort to extreme measures to retain their colonial interests. Makarios III might be exiled to the Seychelles, an event that historically inflamed the Greeks, although the game still posits that this might be more useful than letting him stick around. Mass detentions and collective punishments are common, and torture again rears its ugly mug. Unfortunately, the British imported new torture methods from suppressing the Mau Mau in Kenya, such as inserting a boiled egg under a prisoner’s armpit or into their anus or vagina. Of those options, I can tell you which one I would prefer.

Still, the British response was relatively restrained, both historically and within the game. Historians have discussed how British racist attitudes likely shielded the insurgents in Palestine and Cyprus from the worst abuses that afflicted those in Malaya and Kenya; the same goes for the fact that neither of these insurgencies were led by communists. Because the Jews and Cypriots appeared European and had “safe” politics, the colonial regime couldn’t get away with treatments that drew too much attention or overly distressed their forces. The British never fully removed their gloves, or at least only did so when they thought it might escape notice.

The conflict is best framed by international exigencies.

One of the recurring notes of this series has been the inherent limitations of the COIN Series and the two-player restrictions of this particular set. Cyprus puts these on full display. Playing this scenario, one gets the sense that Cyprus is a morass of clashing interests. What precisely those interests are is tougher to discern. Like most COIN volumes, the story is told principally from the perspective of its headliners, the British, whose objective is to retain control over those military bases. When it comes to the conflicting interests of the Cypriots, things get more cloudy. As both a series and a system, these games tend to prioritize the operational over the ideological, a state of affairs that’s hardly apolitical in that it winds up favoring states and empires over separatists and rebels. After all, this is the COIN Series, — shorthand for COunter-INsurgent — not the IN Series. In some installments, certain perspectives go missing entirely. Recall how the Palestine scenario almost entirely lacked any Arab Palestinians. The same goes here for Turkish Cypriots, whose goals are folded in with those of their colonial overlords.

What remains striking about The British Way at large and Cyprus in particular, however, is its willingness to propose that British counterinsurgencies hardly conform to the gentle “hearts and minds” image the modern United Kingdom has so carefully fostered. Even this emergency, probably the least covered in primary school history courses, doesn’t hand down a favorable sentence. The colonial forces aren’t as free with their collective punishments, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make use of them. In fact, the most effective British strategy is simply to detain everybody in sight, imprisoning crucial EOKA pieces. (Although in play terms, this has led to an imbalanced metagame in which the British avoid enacting curfews at all, prompting developer Joe Dewhurst to craft a variant that makes curfews more appealing to the British player while also easing the EOKA’s ability to recruit extra manpower.)

This is also where The British Way flourishes thanks to its overarching campaign structure. While it’s possible to play these scenarios in isolation, their fuller ramifications are clarified by the longer-term considerations the campaign affords. Ironically, were one to play these scenarios in order of complexity, Cyprus would rank as simpler even than Palestine. But it’s useful to place Cyprus in its proper time and place. The Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine has sparked imitation across the globe. The British are quagmired in both Malaya and Kenya. International opinion has begun to sour against them. In that light, the British player often finds themselves looking at a global map pockmarked by the abscesses of colonial withdrawals and a reputation that’s fraying around the edges. While they might not seek outright victory, it would be prudent to save face. A mediated status, occupying the no man’s land between victory and defeat, only makes sense within the larger context of the campaign.

Geopolitics.

But as in other scenarios, a managed exit from Cyprus merely kicked the can down the road. The British negotiated an outcome that satisfied nobody. They kept their military bases but helped establish an independent government that was governed by a Greek Cypriot president, Makarios III himself, and a Turkish Cypriot vice-president. The peace would not hold, and the following decades were marked by intercommunal strife, peacekeeping missions, military juntas, Greek coup d’état and Turkish occupation. The Cyprus Problem, as it’s called today, remains unresolved.

That’s perhaps the game’s biggest takeaway. The British Empire may have eroded, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of its many occupations have faded. Today’s world is still marked by the sharp edges that were left in the wake of colonial withdrawals. Stephen Rangazas unearths four such actions, reexamining British myth-making and helping to contextualize the world we live in today — a world in which we are all, to varying degrees, inheritors of the British Way.

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A complimentary copy was provided.