State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 2

  

   

You can read part 1 here, but it’s not absolutely necessary (unless you're into DIY prototyping on a budget). Also, Great Northern War’s designer, Ray Weiss, posted a short video up on YouTube offering a visual tour of the final product, which you can watch here.

Great Northern War (CSL, 2024) is an operational-level game depicting the first decade or so of the war prosecuted by Russia and her allies against Sweden and the newly crowned, eighteen-year-old King Charles (or Karl VII). The conflict came to be known as to as the Great Northern War, or the Third Northern War (or, in some countries, confusingly, as the Second Northern War). The war began in 1700 and ended in 1721, which the game covers in just six turns. This is what I should have led with in my last post. You know, for context. Great Northern War is a novel, small-footprint game that’s out now (you can order it direct from the publisher here), and I got to be a part of the playtesting team.

I wanted to be involved in the playtesting to see how the game worked, but Great Northern War had a steep learning curve for me because I’d never played anything like it before. Many of the constituent parts of the game are familiar – point-to-point movement, action bidding, dice-roll plus build points (a pre-selected card) for a combat value, cards that create rule exceptions, adjustable hand-size, and taking penalties now for benefits in later turns. The biggest hurdle for me was the trick-taking mechanic. It’s so simple, I kept looking for the complexity. Let me tell you – there isn’t any, mechanically, at least.

Leading tricks

To lead a trick in Great Northern War, you declare your intention – say, to move a Leader a couple of locations, or to try to activate one of your reserve leaders onto the board – and select a card from your hand to lead with, then your opponent selects a card from their hand to respond. It their card is lower in value than yours, you can proceed with your action. If it’s of a higher value, or of the trump suit, you can’t do that thing you wanted to do, and your opponent gets their turn. It’s such a brain-crunchingly simple way to give every decision more weight, I don’t know why more games don’t use it (maybe they do, and I’ve just been living under a rock).

Each time you try to activate a unit, you have to ask yourself, “how badly do I want to do this?” and “How hard is the other guy going to try to stop me?” The first couple of rounds you’ll just be gathering your forces, maybe trying to move to strategic advantage, but as soon as you get the measure of your opponent and start to get a sense of their operational imperatives, every choice becomes frustratingly, deliciously difficult. The trick-taking mechanic forces you to think about what you want to achieve in the round (which could run to nine or ten turns each) with the incomplete knowledge of what cards you’re holding at the moment. The game should play out inside of two hours, but if you or your opponent are prone to analysis paralysis, add another hour or two to that count.

Mistakes were made

 

When I first got the files, the game was nearly there, but still a little raw. It wasn’t a brain dump – most of what was on the page was coherent and made sense - but not everything was clear from the rules. There were a couple of crucial details left out. This isn’t a criticism of the game – it’s one of the reasons you get bunch of people to playtest your game for you before releasing it on an unsuspecting public.

I broke one of my own dictums early on in the testing, which is something my father told me more than once; “There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid people who don’t ask questions because they don’t want to look stupid. One of the missing pieces was that there were Russians and Swedes and there were allies of either the Russians or the Swedes. The rules didn’t spell out from the get-go who here whose allies. The first draft of the rules said simply that there were 27 leader discs (13 blue Swedish and 14 Green Anti-Swedish). It left the Ottoman leaders out altogether in the component description, only picking them up a page or two later. The Swedish were easy to pick, as we the Russians and their Polish allies. The rest were a bit of a mystery. So, rather than asking the question, I tried to work out which were which from the numbers. For my first two playtest games, Swedes played with the Saxons in cahoots, while the Russians had the two Georgs. It sorted itself out eventually, but I should have sort clarification when it first came up. One way to help the designer or developer of a game you’re playtesting is to ask a lot of questions. I wasn’t the only person working on the game, and another of the other testers must have brought it up with Ray, because the next rules iteration had the above handy explanatory pi

As I said in the previous post, I was never taught card games really as a child, so the whole trick-taking mechanic was new to me. I understood the random draw of a trump and the role of the trump for the turn, but I didn’t quite understand the power of the trump. In Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games, 2018), the suits represent nationalities or coalitions – two represent the Americans and the Commonwealth (and Free French, Free Poles, etc.), while the other two represent the Germans and the Italians. The neat trick with Hitler’s Reich is, when each player plays the same value card, the Germans always win ties, but the Italians always lose in a tie. Without exploring further, I assumed that a played trump card would win ties, but beat any other suit as is the case. In this instance I did ask the question, and Ray cleared it up for me. A short explainer made it into the rules for any folks unfamiliar with the like me.

The acquisition of cards took a little working though as well. The jokers, face cards and aces in GNW are separate from the draw deck, and they have escalating powers. You can try to “purchase” them, one at a time, by leading a trick. If you’re successful, you can pick up the card and use it or hold on to it, depending on what it does. Some cards begin the game in front of one or the other player, being solely for their use, subject to certain game conditions being met (this wasn’t perfectly clear in the initial rules version I saw, but it should be obvious enough for new players in the printed rules).

After the first couple of plays, the Decision cards were making a lot more sense. I don’t think every single one came out across the playtest games I played, but I grasped the potential of each one to add to my game or to foil an opponent’s intentions.

The process

This wasn’t my first rodeo; I’ve done a bit of Role-Playing Game proofing work and some playtesting in the past, but this was my first wargame. Everyone has their own way of doing it, and I suspect different designers or developers may be looking for different things from play-testers. Some might have a form to fill out or a specific set of questions they’re looking for answers to. In this case Ray Weiss offered the rules and components and said have at it. I think he was already confident he had a workable game but was looking for some finessing. I can late to the playtesting, so I don’t know how radically the game had changed from what it was in the beginning; what I received was a really well-balanced game already (either side could win and did, and with fortune smiling on your card draws, you might even be able to snatch victory in the third or fourth round).

Early playtest game. Saxons mistakenly in service of the Swedes.

I like to think my contribution to the game was probably more in the presentation of the rules than in the game itself, but that’s my skillset (though it may not seem so reading this). The game mechanics had been stress-tested before it got to me; all that was left was the polish. I confess it was nice to be able to work with Ilya Kudriashov’s gorgeous map rather than a typical function-over-nice playtest board.

Playtesting forces you to think differently about a game. These days I look at the dames I play differently because I’m thinking about how to present it in a review. Playtesting pushes you to think about a game another stratum or two deeper, looking at why a particular mechanic is fashioned the way it is, and whether it accomplishes what it sets out to do. And whether it might be better done in another way, or ignored altogether.

After this experience (you always remember your first), I’d be happy to step up to the plate and take on another playtest. Ray has mentioned on Facebook working on a solo game about John Brown’s raid on the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry, so that would be interesting. Meanwhile, a new iteration of the DAMOS series rules should be coming through sometime soon.

Great Northern War is now available directly from the publisher and decerning purveyors of fine wargames.