We're very excited that our 2026 Spring Online Workshop will be featuring The Congress of Vienna and the Shape of Europe, 1814-1815 by Terry Breese and Phillip Garland. For members who want to know more about the game before signing up, Intern Kyla Toombs sat down with Terry to talk about the development of the game.
Can you introduce yourself and tell me how you got involved with Reacting to the Past?
Sure, my name is Terry Breese. I am not a career academic. I spent 36 years of my adult life in the Foreign Service of the United States, representing the United States in embassies around the world. My only teaching experience at that time was two years at the Marine Corps War College as the State Department Chair. And of course, games, planning exercises, and tabletop exercises are a big part of military education. This is to say, I already had an interest in games before I encountered Reacting to the Past.
When I retired, I managed to persuade the head of the political science department here at University of Central Florida to give me a chance to teach. And we invented a course based on some of the stuff I'd done at the Marine Corps War College. Given my interests and experience, I immediately started looking at ways to make games and simulations part of the course. And then when I was over visiting one day at the Faculty Development Center, the deputy director there, a guy named Eric Main, handed me a copy of Mark Carnes's Minds on Fire. I went home and read it, and I said "This is what I want, this is what I want to do."
To someone who's unfamiliar with peace conferences, what is Congress of Vienna about, and why should they play it?
The Congress of Vienna was convened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The peace treaty with France had already been signed in Paris, and basically the provision of the treaty called for a general conference of all the parties involved in the war to meet in Vienna to try and settle all of the outstanding issues, because there were all kinds of territorial matters. Napoleon had rewritten the map of Europe, he'd changed everything, and the question was how to go about restoring it now. Could it even be restored?
And that was what the goal was, to create a durable international order that would maintain peace in Europe. And to a certain extent, it succeeded. People sometimes, although erroneously, referred to the following century as "the long peace" because there was no major European war from 1815 until 1914. There were lots of smaller wars, but nothing like what had happened before or happened afterwards. And so that's the way I've structured my class of honors diplomacy: about the search for order in the world and about how we've done the Peace of Westphalia, the peace treaties ending the wars of Louis XIV, the peace treaties ending the Napoleonic Wars, and then we move on to the post-World War II order. There's this constant search for order and stability in an international system that is fundamentally anarchic. The Congress of Vietnam represented, in effect, the first great conference trying to do that and set the rules for international relations.
What has your students' overall reactions to The Congress of Vienna been?
Overall, I will say every student who writes something back in the student evaluation process always talks about the simulations being the part of the class they liked. I've had students often ask me, "Do I have any other classes I teach?" So, I think the students enjoy it!
I will say the one thing they really struggle with is understanding the geography of Europe. You throw it in this whole mass of names of places. And even though we've tried to find really good maps that clarify where these places are, I think it's difficult for students to really get that. So I now include in the prep session a discussion about Europe's geography to try and orient them to where all these places are. That's part I think they do find difficult to grasp with.
Yeah, geography's always been hard for me. Who is your favorite character in Congress of Vienna?
That's really hard. You know, there are so many great characters who are there. Castlereagh, the British delegate, is, you know, cold, logical, restrained. He's the very model of a British gentleman. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, is a man who has survived everything. He's served Louis XVI. He served Napoleon. but he now serves Louis XVIII. And along the way, he's also gotten fabulously rich. Metternich of course, defines the Conference and the coming age. But the kind of guy I kind of really enjoy and always try and make sure is in the game, even though he's a minor character, is Cardinal Consalvi. Cardinal Consalvi is there representing the Pope and the Papal States. And he has relatively little power. He has no army. He has no empire to control. But nevertheless, he has a certain moral authority, and he has the clarity of what should work to maintain peace. So I always try and make sure even if we have a smaller class, that Consalvi is included among the mix of characters.
Were there any other games that were particularly influential in the development of the Congress of Vienna game?
I mean, everything is built on other things. As I said, I also used Paris 1919 in this class. And in some ways, they have similar structures. And I will say, I think we've borrowed some things that we thought worked well in Paris. And I think Paris has things that were reflective of things that we did. The games in some ways are quite similar. They have a mix of the major powers who have a dominant control, and then a mix of smaller powers who have lots of other things they have to worry about. But most of all, they have to find a way to influence the great powers to get on their side. So that kind of, there's an overlap there.
I also, of course, got a lot of the writing ideas out of in The Needs of Others about the Rwanda massacres of 1994-95. And I will say, from that I just drew on how to organize things, how to do the structure of the writing, because as you know, the Reacting format has evolved somewhat over the years we've been writing this game. And each time we think we've got it down, there's a change and we go back and rewrite everything to match the new styles.
It's sometimes said in art that you have to kill your babies. Was there a concept, character, or mechanic that you desperately wanted in the final game but didn't make the cut?
I will say that the original game had a much greater role for Napoleon Bonaparte and his return to power during the Hundred Days Campaign. Phil even had a map with counters on it to represent the armies being maneuvered and competition over who would get command of the Allied armies, things like that. In the end, it just became too much. And so in the current version, Napoleon's entire return to power is a series of announcements that are presented to the Congress delegates as what's happening in the outside world.
And one of the reviewers said, it doesn't seem like Napoleon's return has much impact. And he's right, but that's historically what happened. Napoleon thought he could overturn the Congress and that the internal divisions would allow him to navigate his way into a return to power and peace. But in fact, his return caused the Allies to at least temporarily put aside all their differences and once again declare war on Napoleon! And this time send him off further away where he couldn't cause them more trouble. So in that sense, it was historically realistic.
The other thing that I really hated to have to give up was The Duke of Wellington. Historically, a couple months into the conference, the British delegate, Lord Castlereagh, was called back to London. There was parliamentary business and he headed the government; he was leader of the House of Commons. And of course, managing the government's business and staying in power was far more important than whatever was happening in Vienna. They sent the Duke of Wellington from Paris to take over as head of the delegation. We tried a variety of ways to capture this character change.
Sometimes we tried having one player be Castlereagh and another player be a second member of the British delegation, and then they switch, and Wellington becomes the head of the delegation, and Castlereagh becomes the number two. We've tried having the same student play both Castlereagh and then halfway through the game, change his name tag to the Duke of Wellington. Neither have worked very well, and in the end, we just sacrificed the historical accuracy in the name of play and game mechanics. So Wellington never appears now.
Can you finish a sentence for me? Reacting to the Past needs more games on what?
Well, I'll be selfish. I mean, I think Reacting has a vast number of games already. There are so many of them which I could play, except that I don't teach history, and most of them are historical games. There are a lot of contemporary ones, but they're more historically oriented. I really wish there were more games about diplomacy, but that's selfish because that's what I teach.
As I said, I've used Yalta in one of my classes. I've used The Needs of Others. I've used North Korea Hunger Games. I thought once about using Copenhagen as a multilateral exercise, but I don't think I have enough scientific background to be able to run a game like that. So what, yeah, I wish there were more games about recent diplomacy, things that you could do that have enough of a broad, because that's one thing I really want my class to get is that experience of multilateral diplomacy, not just bilateral or US type negotiations.
Are there any other projects, Reacting or otherwise, that you are currently working on at the moment?
Not really. I think Phil and I both believe if we can get this game eventually to publication, that'll mark the capstone of our goals and efforts. One thing I have been trying to do is using AI to create maps and historical maps. And I have to say, it's not going very well.
One of the maps we don't really have is a map of the parts created Kingdom of Westphalia. So I asked AI, create me a map of the Kingdom of Westphalia as it was in 1812. And it came up with something that looked superficially quite good until you stared at it and realized that they were still showing Holland and Oldenburg as neighbors. And I wrote back and said, no, they've both been annexed by France, which got me a long explanation from AI when they were annexed. Yes, I know that. It changed the color to match France, made other changes. And then I saw it had two different Bavarias on the map! So, suffice it to say it's not able to do it well.
Oh, can I ask what AI you were using?
It was ChatGPT. And it is, you know, that I signed up for an account a couple of years ago just to see what my students would get out of it. And one of the first things I did, I asked to write a biography of myself. I gave it just my name, date of birth. What can you find out? It wrote about a two page biography in which I was a billionaire tech innovator, except I'd also died of cancer.
So then I gave it some more information about myself, and it created a whole new biography. This time I was an artist in New York. I'd also died of cancer. I had all kinds of information about my family, their background, my siblings. It was all complete hallucination. The only facts that were true were the ones I'd given it of when I was born and where I was born and things like that. So it's clearly not capable of actually finding any meaningful information on me. It's capable of regurgitating stuff, but I guess I don't have enough of an online presence that it found any of the true facts about me.
Well, that was my last question for you. Did you have anything else you wanted to add?
No, we had a couple of instructors, I think, use the game in the fall, and I'm really hoping we'll get back some feedback. because Phil and I run this game now, I guess, at least 10 different times. And so I know a lot of it, but of course, I may be seeing it blindly in terms of what I've already done and what I know as opposed to someone who's looking at it for the first time. And I'd like them to tell us; are there things we need to fix? I think overall it's a pretty polished game at this point because we got a lot of comments from the reviewers. And we were, I will say, meticulous about responding to each individual comment, even keeping a chart of what they said, what our response was, and how the text changed.
