by Brooks Barber

Sykes-Picot is my first published game. It's not the first game I've designed, mind you — that one was and still is terrible — but it's the first one I've seen all the way through the process. It's also my first foray into historical game design. I had several ideas for historical subjects, and a friendly fellow designer recommended I work on the one I thought I could finish, so I did, and I did, and it's here now.

Why historical design? I've studied history for twenty-five years, a portion of that time professionally, and I love the process of exploring new ways of looking at old events. I consider myself lucky to have found a community of people doing this within the context of my favorite hobby.

The process of designing Sykes-Picot has also been a process of discovering how games can model history. History is not simply "what happened"; it is the process of analyzing the known record, the interpretation of facts within new contexts, and the advancing of arguments about the world, so I am quite pleased with the intersection games create between history and art, both of which allow us to approach old ideas with new eyes.

I have been mildly obsessed with the Sykes-Picot Agreement since I first learned about it nearly twenty-five years ago, early in my studies of Middle East history and culture. The story, as it's usually told, sounds like an urban legend, something you'd see on the History Channel between shows about aliens building the pyramids. In the winter of 1915-16, the British entered into secret negotiations with the French about how to divvy up control of the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, despite the outcome of World War I being far from decided. (The British, for example, were not far from defeat at Gallipoli.) And, oh, did I mention that the British had already made other secret agreements with Russia, Italy, and the Sharif of Mecca?

During these secret talks, Sykes and Picot literally colored in a map of the Middle East, at one point even drawing a straight line "from Aden to the second K in Kirkuk", to separate what would eventually become British-influenced Iraq and Jordan from French-influenced Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. Italy and Russia were also granted territory on the edges of the map, and the "even then a quagmire" Palestine landed under international control, whatever that meant.

The original Sykes-Picot map, showing the French territory (A) and the British territory (B)
This whole thing stayed under wraps until the post-revolution Bolsheviks started rooting through old Romanov papers and decided to announce the agreement to the world, kicking off a diplomatic nightmare for the British late in 1917. Their surreptitious double- and triple-dealing was in the spotlight, and they had to take responsibility, especially with the Arabs, who had played such an important role in disrupting the Ottoman war effort in the Middle East. When seen through the privilege of historical hindsight, the whole thing is scandalous and verges on the unbelievable. Why did they think they could get away with this nonsense?

Given all of this rich historical nuance, Sykes-Picot could have been a very different game. It could have been highly immersive, rich with minute details involving backroom dealings and paper correspondence. It could have involved multiple players vying for the best deal in the ever-shifting landscape of World War I, all trying to eke out some small opportunity to claim contested bits of soon-to-be-former Ottoman land.

But that is not the game I chose to make. To me, that game doesn't fully reflect the reality of the situation. Rather, that version of the game is how I believe the European powers wanted to portray themselves, and what they wanted others to believe about the whole affair. They positioned themselves as masters of global diplomacy, negotiating the fate of an entire region for the safety and security of the people living there — and in many ways, this narrative continues to be parroted today in think piece after think piece about how the Sykes-Picot Agreement shaped the Middle East's future. In truth, however, this event wasn't so grand as all that.

Francois Georges-Picot, the French diplomatInstead what I chose to capture in this game is the capricious and absurd nature of the Sykes-Picot Agreement: lines haphazardly drawn and zones colored in without real thought given to the people underneath their strokes; arbitrary boundaries that would never be fully realized, yet still contributed to the cascading ethnic and religious violence throughout the next century; positions on the map that were considered primarily through the filter of imperial priorities; two men putting a stamp on a region, shaping its future in many ways, by ignoring its past.

I knew early on that I wanted to emphasize this smaller space, what happened in that room, and my task became finding the right mechanisms to bring this forward. I was adamant that players should literally color in a map, just as Sykes and Picot had done. I wanted players to feel just a bit silly, passing pencils (or even crayons) back and forth to fulfill the requirements of their imperial claims. That idea carried all the way through from the first iteration to the final product, with the pencils replaced by dry erase markers.

I had to make certain sacrifices for this to remain a two-player game. It's the Sykes-Picot Agreement, after all, and I wanted to keep players in the mindset of those two men. Russia and Italy, who were later brought into the agreement in order to secure their support, are not in the game at all. The official Sykes-Picot map doesn't reflect their allocations either; this was a natural consequence of maintaining a tight focus for the game.

Mark Sykes, the British representative in this storyAnother consideration is the concept of "international control". Given that Palestine was placed under international control as part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, only later to be moved under British protection in 1920, I think the game does an acceptable job of modeling how "international control" was implemented. The concept is present in the game as a fifth suit, and both players may use it equally to defend their claims, pivot to new diplomatic agendas, or possibly (in the meanest circumstances) ruin their counterparts' plans. It functions as something that neither helps nor hinders your own goals but that can be employed to check an opponent's power when needed.

Next was the map itself. The map isn't just the map here, however; it's the center of the game. The map, and what is emphasized on it, is inextricably caught up with the agenda cards, the area control (facilitated through trick-taking), and the endgame conditions. As I moved through playtesting, I realized that all of these elements had to feed into one another seamlessly for the game to work.

At first, the map was clear and legible, emphasizing actual geographic locations for players to control or influence as part of their goals. The agendas encouraged zero-sum play, not negotiation. Players simply tried to maximize their own goals with little regard for their partner's and to little effect. The game broke quickly when players were at each other's throats immediately. In this model, the trick-taking was not serving its purpose as a tool for negotiation. In combination with agendas built around area majorities and a map with precious few strategic locations, the trick-taking was purely contentious.

An early version of the Sykes-Picot prototype board
I eventually decided to remove the names of any locations from the map, replacing them with symbols, which highlight their strategic importance to the players as imperial agents and obfuscate the lived experiences of the people in those places.

This move served two needs: one mechanical and one narrative. It allowed me to sit in the mindset of alienation and what that means for players of this game, and it allowed me to open up the possibilities of how the game might be more than a zero-sum experience. By alienating players from the subject of their actions, I hope to reinforce the cavalier attitude inherent to empire in dealing with non-European people and places. By encouraging a more expansive endgame, I hope to push players toward reflection on their actions and their consequences.

The difficult question for this design was always the how — through which mechanism could two players actually negotiate over the disputed map territories? It took a while to settle on something that worked. I was tempted early on to increase the game's scope, to add in multiple layers and players, and to create the in-depth and immersive experience I described above.

Then I zoomed into the singular event — the actual meetings between Sykes and Picot — and I knew that's where I wanted this game to live. I thought about the setting in which this event occurred, a plush Edwardian-era parlor room, intimate due to the small nature of the engagement, the kind of place gentlemen might play cards.

So I landed on trick-taking. To my surprise and delight, this worked immediately. Abstracted, a trick in Sykes-Picot is an offering and a response, a snippet of negotiation about what may or may not be claimed on the map. Winning means gaining control of the spaces to be claimed, whether for yourself or your opponent. Losing provides more choices: claiming the card left behind by the winner, changing the triumph suit to set yourself up for later, or converting some of your influence into control. The dynamics of control and tempo inherent to trick-taking lend themselves well to a game built around the dynamics of negotiation.

The final piece to fall into place was the agenda cards. They have been part of the design from the beginning, and they have shaped the gameplay at every stage. Effectively, these agendas form the engine driving the game's incentive structure. Everything else amounts to the mechanisms players use to achieve their agendas. As I said earlier, the earliest agendas were zero-sum, which created a flat, linear experience ending in a gnarled mess of a game. Abstracting them into generic strategic objectives such as controlling ports or cultural centers helped significantly, but players still needed more space to operate.

Sykes-Picot in action at SDHistCon 2024
The game didn't sing until I moved away from a zero-sum approach and structured the endgame conditions in such a way as to let players choose how they want to interact.

In addition to reformulating the agendas to encourage a slightly less zero-sum mindset, I also opened up communication so that players may freely talk about (or lie about) their goals. To me, this is where the beauty of the game lies — it allows players to be as competitive or as co-operative as they wish. Both players can win by fulfilling the same number of agendas, one player can win by achieving more than their counterpart, or both players can lose by achieving none of what they set out to do. Players can arrive at the decision to succeed together, or they can try to manipulate their way into getting more than their counterpart. Given these options, the latter happens more often than you'd think.

Brooks Barber

Agenda cards from the Hollandspiele edition