#Dune sandworm manuals#

Sandworms destroyed all the armies they touched, except the FremenвЂ™s, who could ride them around the board. The Atreides player could look at cards that remained face down for the rest of us. And every player seemed to be able to break the rules in different ways. Rules had caveats, caveats had exceptions. Understanding any card required consulting a reference sheet that read like the fine print on a credit card statement. Opting for the вЂњbasicвЂќ rather than вЂњadvancedвЂќ version of the rules, it still took two and a half hours for us to get through the first turn. It quickly became clear that, rather than simplifying DuneвЂ™s dynamics, the game aggressively leans into the bookвЂ™s Talmudic complexity. So I persuaded some unsuspecting friends to try it.

The game, whose object is to conquer the entire territory of Arrakis, seemed like a helpful way to understand DuneвЂ™s microcosm of galactic conflict. On a recent Sunday afternoon, I brushed the dust off of an original Dune board game I had found in my late fatherвЂ™s house, a pristine cardboard relic released in 1979 that sat untouched on a shelf in my office for two years.

For the military officers and intelligence analysts who still read and reread Dune today, it presents an uncanny reflection of the state of geopolitical competition in 2021-from the pitfalls of regime change to the terra incognita of cyberwar. Written even before the advent of AmericaвЂ™s war in Vietnam, Dune captures a world in which war is inherently asymmetric, where head-on, conventional military conflict has largely been replaced with all the subtler ways that humans seek to dominate one another: insurgency and counterinsurgency, sabotage and assassination, diplomacy, espionage and treachery, proxy wars and resource control. вЂњI donвЂ™t roll my eyes about that anymore.вЂќ) (вЂњAt the time, when people said вЂThis is a war for oil,вЂ™ I would kind of roll my eyes at them,вЂќ he notes regarding the Iraq War. It told the story of a young man who leaves a lush green world and arrives on the far more dangerous and arid planet of Arrakis, which holds beneath its sands a critical resource for all of the universeвЂ™s competing great powers. Kort read the book during moments of downtime over the next weeks, as he led his platoon of 15 soldiers and four tanks through the Kuwaiti desert, and later when they took up residence in a powerless, abandoned building in Baghdad.

#Dune sandworm manuals#

So he bought it and carried it with him to the Gulf, the only novel he packed in his rucksack along with his Army manuals and field guides. Despite its 800-plus pages, its small print made it a relatively compact cubic object.

The 23-year-old second lieutenant was intrigued by the bookвЂ™s black cover, with an inset image of a desert landscape next to the title and the silhouettes of two robed figures walking across the sand. Just before his deployment to Iraq in 2003, Ryan Kort spotted a paperback copy of Dune in a bookstore near Fort Riley, Kansas.