As part of the survey conducted for the article recently posted on A Fast Game, I sort permission to publish each designer’s response in a follow-up post. I didn’t anticipate the number of respondents, or the weight of text contributed (all up, around 37,000 words), so what had been envisaged as a single supplementary post will now be split over three posts. I encourage anyone interested in game design to read through these contributions. Some are brief, others quite long but all are worthwhile.
I have decided to present the collected data in alphabetical order by first name, in keeping with the taxonomy used by Boardgamegeek.com. This raises my librarian hackles, but it seemed to make sense while collating the data during analysis, and at this point I no longer possess the wherewithal re-format the entire set.
The respondents were asked to offer answers to two questions:
Question 1: What was your first wargame (or historical game) design; not necessarily your first published game – that you worked up to a point where it felt “done”?
Question 2: Why did you pick that topic or historical situation to make a game about?
In most instances, I have numbered the responses. Some respondents didn’t strictly follow the two-question format and answered in a more free-form manner. In these other cases I have dispensed with the question number schema.
For ease of reading, this appendix has been broken down into five parts. The other parts can be accessed using the links below:
-----
Mark
McLaughlin
Q1 My first wargame design was Dark
Lord - an LOTR strategic game. Citadel
optioned it, gave me a small advance and was working on it... when they lost a
trademark battle with SPI (which came out with War of the Ring). I was still in college... but three years
later I got a contract to design War and Peace (1980) for Avalon Hill...
and the 7th edition of that title came out last fall by Avalon
Digital... so 46 years after the first printing it is still going strong (and
is available on Steam in the digital version: Napoleon's Eagles)
It was "done" when my developer at AH said it was "done"... and that was Frank Davis, who by the way is still designing games (and who is still a friend).
 |
| War & Peace, now in it's seventh edition. A big game warrants a big box. |
Q2 I picked Dark Lord because at the time there was no strategic war game on LOTR... as for War and Peace (, it is a funny story. I had just gotten married and came home to find my key did not fit in my office door - the company had folded while I was on my honeymoon (it was an ad agency). We were living in Maryland, and I thought, well, I have been playing AH games since middle school (my first was Waterloo) so why not write to them and see if I can get a tour of their offices and see how they make games.
Don
Greenwood responded and up to Baltimore I went.
While there, Tom Shaw, the VP came by to take Don to lunch and said,
"bring your friend." We went to the restaurant, and as I was raising
a spoonful of the crab soup to my lips, Tom asked "so what is this game
you want to pitch to us?"
I had not
come up there to do that. I did not have anything in mind... but when
opportunity knocks, it is a good idea to answer the door. Between that moment
and the dessert, I came up with and pitched the idea for War and Peace. Went back to the office and signed the
contract. The rest (nearly 30 games later) is history.
-----
Mark Simonitch
Q1 The first game that I actually
finished was a WWII North Africa game called The Legend Begins (Rhino
Game Co., 1991). I made a full demo of it and sent it to Avalon Hill around
1989 as a game submission. Don Greenwood sent me back a polite letter saying
the company was going in a different direction but did mention he was
impressed. I had worked on it too long to give up, so about a year later I set
up my own game company, Rhino Game Co., and self-published it.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4884/the-legend-begins-north-africa-1940-42
Q2 In my youth I was very interested in
the North African campaign and played Avalon Hill’s Afrika Korps game
(Avalon Hill, 1964) more than any other game.
I think it
was the “legend” of Rommel and the Afrika Korps, and the fascinating back and
forth advances across North Africa that inspired me.
There were already many games out on the North Africa campaign, but I wanted to highlight the excitement of Rommel’s initial advance to Tobruk and the battles around Tobruk.
-----
Martin
Melbardis
Q1 My first wargame design that felt
100% complete would have to have been Conquest: Fall Blau back in 2020, which
was later changed to Campaign: Fall Blau (Catastrophe Games, 2023) when
later picked up by a publisher.
It was
actually the second game I managed to complete for a contest over on BGG. The
feedback and interest for this game really pushed me into further polishing it
through several iterations until it felt perfectly tuned and balanced. I can't
stress enough how much the blind playtesting from the contest really helped me
get it to the point of feeling 'done'.
I had
completed a few smaller games for fun before Fall Blau but mostly I was moving
from design to design without ever having completed much at all. I was always
full of ideas that I wanted to explore without ever finishing anything enough
to call it "done".
I honestly
think that in my case joining a major BGG game design contest, with all the
extra eyes, encouragement and deadlines it put on my project, it really helped
me get over the invisible barrier of procrastination in game design. I always
dreamt of creating wargames. However, after Fall Blau I think that finally
shook the impostor syndrome and gained enough self-confidence so that I finally
KNEW THAT I COULD design wargames.
Q2 Most of the time I can watch a movie or documentary, read a book or simply see an inspiring image or miniature and get an idea for a wargame. Creativity comes to me in waves and it mostly flows with how I spend my free time. In the case of Campaign: Fall Blau, I believe I was inspired by a documentary about the Eastern front in WW2.
In my humble opinion... nothing really beats the Eastern front in wargaming and so once that wave of inspiration hit me, the choice was an easy one for me. I also specifically picked operation Fall Blau as this operation was likely the turning point of the Eastern front and likely for the entire war. I felt like while this campaign (along with it's major battle of Stalingrad) is already very well represented in wargames, I could offer my own fresh new alternative perspective for wargamers by introducing a fast-playing solo game with only cubes, cards and dice with a surprising amount of depth.
-----
Maurice
Suckling
Q1 Freeman's Farm: 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019).
Q2 I had recently moved to the USA and
to Upstate NY, close to the battlefield, and had taken a new job which gave me
time, and a little funding, to research games on the topic of Saratoga. I
played all but one game (out of print) that had ever been published on the
topic and wrote an article for an academic journal. (Simulating Saratoga: How Saratoga-Themed Board Games Function as Experiential Historiography
October 2020 Board Game Studies Journal 14(1):83-108).
In the process of writing that article I found myself thinking about how I might approach the design of a game on the same topic. It was far from a unique topic, but I still felt there were other feasible approaches to it that had yet to be explored. For one thing, I wanted a game that was faster and didn't take several turns of a predictable British approach to the Bemis Heights to really get started. A game about the American Revolution also felt like an appropriate topic for a Brit living in the US.
-----
Michael
Rinella
Q1 Around 1989 I designed a complete
game that was Axis and Allies (Nova Game Designs, 1981) but only the
Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945. In
hindsight it was far ahead of its time.
Q2 I liked both Axis and Allies and
Avalon Hill's Russian Campaign (Jedko Games, 1974). That was the reason.
-----
Michael
Taylor
Q1 Tinian. [Released as Saipan &
Tinian: Island War Series, Volume I (Legion Wargames, 2010).]
Q2 I have a strong interest in the WW2 Pacific Theater. I chose Tinian because there were no games on this subject that I was aware of, and I have a lot of reference material on my bookshelf. I coupled this game with one on Saipan. Even though many games on Saipan have been published, I included Saipan because of its relationship with Tinian. I have continued this trend and have about a dozen WW2 Pacific games in various stages of completion, but only Tinian and Saipan have been published.
My absolute
requirement for a game design is that I have a strong interest in the subject.
After that, the reason will vary.
1. A lack of
games on a subject. This can be one that was never done, rarely covered, or
when a new, fresh game is long overdue.
2. A new
game is needed. This can be because of old, outdated, poorly written rules,
flawed research, and/or poor graphics. In some cases, a different scale or
approach is needed. Of course, all of this is based on my own personal opinion.
3. To make a
small, easy-to-learn game from a larger, more complicated game.
-----
Mike
Denson
[Note: below is an edited transcript of a conversation had with Mike Denson via the Last Hundred Yards Discord channel. I went into the conversation thinking, "I have five... no, six squad or section level WWII tactical games; I don't need another one." Mike was very generous with his time, and we chatted for nearly an hour, mostly talking about how the LHY mechanics work and how the game plays out. After that conversation, I bought a copy of The Last Hundred Yards, Volume 3: Solomon Islands (GMT Games, 2022), and pre-ordered all the reprints on the P500 list. You have been warned.]
Q1 I’ve only designed one, The Last Hundred Yards (GMT Games, 2019).
Q2 I’ve been playing wargames for sixty-three years and have played just about every kind—operational, tactical, World War II, Napoleonic, and many others. For years, I lived in large cities such as Houston and Austin, where I regularly had friends over to play. When I moved back to a small town in East Texas, however, I no longer had a local gaming group.
Around that
time, I reconnected with a cousin I had not seen in many years. He was a
Vietnam veteran who had never played a wargame, so I persuaded him to try one.
Because of his experience as an infantryman, he was interested in tactical
combat rather than operational-level games. He also wanted something he could
enjoy over a beer without having to spend hours studying complicated rules.
We tried Advanced Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1985) and Combat Commander (GMT Games,
2006). ASL was far too complex for what he wanted, while Combat Commander did
not appeal to him because of its card-driven system. Eventually, I pulled
counters from one game and a map from another, and we began improvising—almost
like two kids playing with toy soldiers.
We met every
Friday, and after a few weeks I realized I needed to start writing down the
rules because I could no longer remember how we had handled things in previous
games. Although I had never designed a game before, I had decades of experience
playing them and understood how game systems worked.
What began
as two or three pages of notes gradually became five pages, then a collection
of handmade maps and increasingly detailed rules. I eventually found a graphic
artist in Houston who helped produce professional-looking maps. We continued
playing, testing, and refining the game until the rules had grown to twelve or
fifteen pages.
I then
introduced the game to several other friends. They enjoyed it and encouraged me
to publish it. At the time, however, I had no idea how to begin that process.
I knew Dean
Essig through a small gaming event he held at his headquarters in Illinois, and
I went up there a couple of times. He’s one of my favorite designers, and I had
played a lot of his OCS—Operational Combat Series—games.
I called him
and said, “Dean, I’ve got a game I’d like you to look at. I’m not looking for
you to publish it, I just want to know whether you think it’s actually a game.”
So, I drove
from Texas to Homer, Illinois, and we sat in his kitchen for two days playing
it. He gave me the thumbs-up. He liked the game and told me not to let anyone
change certain features that he thought made it work.
After that,
I looked around at how designers normally submitted games to publishers.
Usually, you had to prepare a proposal, explain what the game was about, submit
all the required material, and wait for someone to get back to you.
GMT Games held its annual Weekend at the Warehouse in Hanford, California. I owned a lot of GMT games, so I packed up my game, flew to California, walked in the door, and asked who owned the company.
They pointed
across the room and said, “That man over there.”
I asked his
name, and they told me it was Gene Billingsley. So, I walked over, introduced
myself, and told him I had designed a game. Gene is a nice guy, and we had a
good conversation. We talked about the large number of tactical games already
on the market. Over the course of the weekend, he had several of his friends
play my game, and afterward he told me he would get back to me.
Three or
four weeks later, Gene called and said GMT was interested. The next step was
meeting his two partners: Mark Simonitch, who handled the artwork, and Tony
Curtis, who handled the financial side of the business.
I drove to
Dallas and met Mark and Tony in Tony’s dining room. We played the game, and
they asked me a lot of questions. That was probably sometime in December or
January. Then Gene called and said, “Okay, we’re going to publish your game.”
Most
designers begin by choosing a subject, conducting the research, and then
designing the game. That wasn’t how it worked for me. I designed the game first
and did most of the research afterward, primarily to verify the design, and to
refine it and make it publishable.
I probably
read sixty or seventy books, especially firsthand accounts. I wasn’t as
interested in what the generals had to say. I wanted to hear from the privates,
lieutenants, captains, and colonels—the people who were actually there.
The central
theme of the game, from the very beginning, was the human element––small unit
behavior in combat. Most tactical games are built around weapons systems: armor
thickness, rates of fire, penetration values, and similar factors. They often
place less emphasis on the people behind the guns.
I decided
that everything in this game would be viewed through the lens of what a real
person might do in a foxhole or under pressure in a particular situation. My
emphasis was on tactics and human behavior.
For an
example, suppose you are a captain commanding an infantry company. What
pressures are you facing? For one thing, you cannot fully control time. Someone
may be wounded. You may be waiting for artillery support. Something that was
supposed to happen may not happen. At the same time, you still have an
objective, and you do not have all week to accomplish it. You have a limited
amount of time––but time is not something someone can control.
The other
thing I wanted to emphasize was that officers cared about their men. They did
not want to waste their lives. In some games, you might begin with nine squads
and finish with only one squad remaining, but because that squad occupies the
victory hex, you win.
That is not
really a victory. It is a Pyrrhic victory. You have lost nearly ninety percent
of your troops. In reality, your own men might have shot you before you ever
reached that point.
In this
game, once you accomplish your objective, you calculate a final score. That
score is based on how much time the mission took and how many casualty points
you suffered or inflicted.
For example,
each squad has two steps. If one of your squads takes a step loss, the marker
on the Casualty Track moves one box to the left. If it takes two step losses,
it moves two boxes to the left. If the enemy takes a step loss, the marker
moves one box to the right.
Each box on
the track has a Casualty Point Value, typically three Casualty Points. In this
example, you need a final score of thirty or less to win, thirty-one to forty
for a draw, and if the final score is greater than forty you will lose. If you
completed the objective in twenty-six minutes, but you suffered two more
casualty steps than your opponent, then you must add six points to your
score––three Casualty Points for each step loss. That gives you a final score
of thirty-two, resulting in a draw.
Success is
therefore a function of how well you manage your casualties, avoid unnecessary
risks, and deal with time and initiative—factors you cannot completely control.
A company
commander cannot control everything. He has to manage confusion, pressure,
uncertainty, and unexpected events. In other words, he has to manage chaos.
Chaos is a
major part of the game.
-----
Morgane
Gouyon-Rety
Q1 The very first game I brought to something resembling completion was a multiplayer game named "Le droit de la lance" (lit. "The right of the spear", probably should be "Spearwon" in English), which covered the wars of Alexander's Successors on a system twice-derived from Diplomacy. It was based on a Diplomacy derivative named Les Diadoques (Casus Belli, 1991) by French designer Jean-Marc Zaninetti, which was published as a magazine game in 1992 in French game mag Casus Belli. I was in engineering school at the time and we played it extensively with my gaming group there, prompting me to dive deeply into this fascinating period of history. As I grew quickly frustrated with the very bare bones design of Les Diadoques, I started adding players, various elements and, let's be honest, quite a bit of chrome, which resulted in a much meatier game by 1994, when it went through it one and only play as PBEM, with something like ten players, many of them were, at the time, prominent French players, including two Diplomacy World Champions. I was the referee, and from what I recall, a significant part of the diplomacy efforts that took place over the next months was directed at me, with players trying to convince me to "improve" the rules, somehow always in their favour... 😉 Aged 23 at the time, I had no idea how to proceed from there and figured I should file the game rules under French copyright laws, which I did. However, the game, as far as I know, has never been played again.
In the
following years, with life becoming busy with work and family, I did work on
and off on a number of concepts for a "proper" (or is it
"ultimate"?) Diadochoi game, as I kept reading and learning about the
period, which allows me to conciliate my love of Ancient history and of the Art
of War. But nothing concrete, no
prototype came out of this, though the notes still take a significant chunk of
cabinet space today... Until for some reason in 2013, nearly twenty years
later, I came up with the idea of porting the Twilight Struggle (a game I
mechanically admire, but dislike theme-wise) to the Hellenistic era, though not
with the Successors, but rather one century later, with established kingdoms,
and made it into a playable prototype in a few weeks of creative folly. Nothing
remains mechanically of this initial prototype, but this eventually became Hubris: Twilight of the Hellenistic World (GMT Games, 2025), which was released
last year by GMT Games. Ironically, it was yet another game, started one year later
in 2014, but drawing on some of the lessons learnt from this first version of
Hubris, which became my first released game in 2017 as Pendragon - The Fall of Roman Britain GMT Games, 2017), another of my pet historical periods...
Q2 I remain to this day fascinated by
the period of the Successor Kingdoms, on which I now own close to 100 books.
Why?
First for the greater-than-life characters and the amazing historical setting, which started as a kind of sandbox situation with no ideology, but simply pure individual ambitions. And most of them being remarkably militarily talented. As I sometimes say, imagine if Napoleon had somehow triumphed of Russia and England, establishing a Europe-wide empire, only to die with a child heir, leaving his marshals fighting it out to seize his succession, or carve themselves new kingdoms...
Second because this is one of the periods of history that fascinate me, those I call "hinge periods", because they represent the change from one historical paradigm (here the Greek classical world) to another (the Roman empire). A hinge period not only politically, but also in terms of civilisation, science, art, religion... The (relative) merge of the Greek and Middle Eastern traditions, which formed the basis of the so-called "Graeco-Roman civilisation".
This is why,
now that Hubris had been released, and its game engine matured, I am drawing
back on all that accumulated knowledge (and archives) to start work on a new
game using the Hubris engine, covering the Successors' Wars, and tentatively
named today... "Spearwon" 🙂
-----
Nicola
Contardi
Q1 My first design was All is Lost Save Honour: Campaigns of the Italian Wars 1494-1530 – Vol.1 (Europa
Simulazioni, 2006). Incidentally that game was the reason I founded Europa
Simulazioni. Then other ideas and projects followed it ...
Q2 The reason of my first design and then my first publication, was that there was no real simulation nor a good game on that subject/period. I think that Early Modern era offers a very vast multitude of new subjects for games that are not yet exploited. The period is interesting to me because it was an era of impressing changes, not only in the way of waging wars, but also in living, thinking, arts. The old world, the middle-ages, was dying once for all, and our era was being born. An epoch also of crisis, religious, social, cultural... something which is very similar today era in a word.
Still, this
is my favourite era for wargames (and honestly, I'm fed up with the 5,000th
Bulge game...).
-----
Pascal
Toupy
Q1 I designed my first wargame when I
was twelve years old! It was actually a set of miniature rules that I created
so I could play more “seriously” with my Napoleonic-era Airfix figures. I was
reading accounts of battles such as Austerlitz and Waterloo, and I tried to
recreate the same feel using my miniatures and a few D6s. I also spent
countless hours poring over the Funcken books, which helped enormously with the
sense of immersion. Solo games followed one another in the family attic, and
over time the rules kept growing and becoming more refined.
Then one day
I discovered the French magazine Jeux & Stratégie, which featured
articles about wargames, and I suddenly realised that other people were doing
the same kind of thing I was!
Many years
later, I dug out my old notebooks so that I could play those rules with my son.
I started improving them again, and since he was much more interested in World
War II, I adapted the system to that period. I also began using the rules at my
local club to introduce younger players to wargaming. They received such a warm
response that my fellow gamers encouraged me to publish them. That is how Pijamas
Vae Victus—an acronym for the French phrase Papa Il Joue Avec Moi Aux Soldats,
roughly “Daddy Plays Toy Soldiers With Me”—was eventually published in 2014 by
the French wargaming magazine Vae Victis.
Q2 Back in
the 1980s in France, if a teenager wanted to explore history, the two most
accessible periods were World War II and the Napoleonic era. To me, the
Napoleonic saga felt more epic, more colourful, and more romantic. The real
spark came when I received a set of Airfix miniatures as a birthday present.
From that moment on, I wanted to bring those battles to life on the tabletop.
----
Paul
Hellyer
Q1 That was Blue Riband, a
historical simulation about the construction and operation of transatlantic
liners in the early 20th-century. It was designed to recreate the conditions
that led to the Titanic and Lusitania disasters. So players would build and
operate these liners with perverse incentives to emphasize luxury and speed at
the expense of safety. It was never commercially published but available for a
time through a print-on-demand service.
Q2 I had some personal interest in the stories of the two ships and I wanted a topic that offered public domain material, so I could make the game realistic without having to pay licensing fees or worry about getting sued. I was also interested in making player psychology and scoring objectives part of the simulation: so it's the scoring objectives that put players in the same mindset as the owners of the White Star Line and Cunard, and it's what motivates them to potentially make the same questionable choices that happened in real life. These same motivations carry over to Prime Minister GMT Games, 2023) and Tsar (GMT Games, ~2027).
[Note: I
enjoyed some back and forth with several designers while working on this
project, and Mr Hellyer was one of these. I had mentioned I’d toyed with
including a third question, but decided not to make it even more difficult to
respond. Paul answered it anyway.]
Bonus
question: How did that first experience influence subsequent designs?
Making Blue
Riband was fun, but it was also largely a failure, as often happens with a
first design. Before starting work on the game, I read lots of advice on board
game design and found that one of the most common tips was to work out the
design before you make any components. I took that to heart. I spent a lot of
time working out the rules and mechanics before thinking about components. And
then when it came time to design the components, I quickly realized that my
concept was totally impractical. It would have cost hundreds of dollars from a
print-on-demand service and would have taken up more table space than most
people could accommodate. I also realized that some ideas that seemed good on
paper didn't turn out so well when rendered in playable components. So I had to
make radical cuts to the design and what I ended up with was a poor
representation of my original concept and of course it didn't play as well as
it should have. So, after that, I tossed the advice I had read and did things
my own way. I start with research, then begin collecting public domain images.
The available images actually inform some choices about content. I then start
an iterative process of working out mechanics, sketching out components, doing
cost estimates, browsing more images, running simulations of the game as soon
as I've got some rough components together, and revising components. It's an
inefficient process that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to others, but it's
my process. I like the results.
-----
Petr
Mojzis
Q1 I have started with Wing Leader
(GMT Games, 2015) scenarios and got in touch with the game designer. He later
decided to make an expansion with various fan-made scenarios, and so I had
something published. That encouraged me to do the first game The Bell ofTreason (GMT Games, 2025). Having the game (or scenario) done is a gut
feeling, imho. The real publishing cycle is so long in my experience that
feeling "done" comes years before the work with a publisher comes in.
Q2 This is simple in my case. I only want to cover the not-yet-covered historical topics so far. And since almost nobody is doing games about the history of my country, I have plenty of topics to choose from. On the other hand, I try to cover the topics that are not solely local but are in some way potentially interesting worldwide (e.g. appeasement in the case of The Bell of Treason).
-----
Philip
Jelley
Q1 I forget who said it, but “Wargames
are never completed, only published”. I forget which game I thought was ready
to be published, but the first response I had was from Adam Starkweather of MMP
in 2011 for Empire of Rome (Web-published, 2009) - a sequel to Republic of Rome (Avalon Hill, 1990). I recall that I sent in several games, including Our
Chief of Men (The Campaigns of Oliver Cromwell 1648-51) and Mandate of Heaven (Web published, ~2013) a Britannia (Avalon Hill, 1986) -style
game set in China. In the end, MMP did not publish and looking back the games
were not done. All of them have been heavily modified since and I am still
tweaking them here and there.
Q2 I first worked on Empire of Rome in 1995 when I was at RAF Brize Norton, where I had a lot of time on my hands. I was reading Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome series, bought Republic of Rome, and as I was interested in Roman history I expanded it into Empire of Rome. It was a monster game with 50 provinces instead of the dozen in Republic of Rome, and it took an hour to work through the administration each turn. This was later simplified into a solitaire game Rome, Inc. (Against the Odds,2021) , which was published by ATO in 2021.
-----
Philippe
Thibaut
Q1 The game was called East India
Companies and was an area-based movement / turn-by-turn game covering
European expansion in the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia (up to
Formosa). I created it in 1983-84 and sent the prototype to Victory Games and
3W games at the time. It was not published as the American reviewers felt the
gameplay and thematic were too obscure for their market... funny thing is that
this game evolved to become the Europa Universalis game (designed 86-92
and published 93) which has become one big boardgame success (and a huge
computer game success).
Q2 I had been great fan of stories of
the Portuguese expansion in the Far East, of the VOC (Dutch East India Company)
conquest of the crumbling Lusitanian empire in SE Asia, of the history of the
John Company (the British EIC) and the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales...
this was full of incredible adventures and feats, some of them barely
believable but true. One key factor was many readings of books on the matter,
in particular some of the great French historian Fernand Braudel.
-----
Raymond
Fiore
Q1 First design: Cactus Air Force
(Compass Games, ~2027).
[Note: For reasons (presumably business-related) Compass Games made the the decision to publish Mr Fiore's second game, Chopper Pilot Vietnam (Compass Games, ~2026), ahead of Cactus Air Force, which we should see in stores next year.]
Q2 I have been interested in the Pacific War (and aviation in general) from an early age so this was a natural fit. Being a Marine didn't hurt either.
-----
Rex
Brynan
Q1 My first published game wasn't a wargame at all—it was AFTERSHOCK (PAXSims, 2015), a serious game about humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. It grew out of a "game lab" session I organized at a Connections professional wargaming conference in Washington, DC, and was then playtested for several years, by my students at McGill University and by professional colleagues, until we felt it was ready for release.
Q2 I teach and sometimes consult on
complex humanitarian operations, so the subject fit naturally with my work as
both scholar and practitioner. There was also a practical reason: Connections
wanted a conference topic relevant to military planners but not focused on
kinetic operations, so the Game Lab session centered on relief efforts during
the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Happily, those who work in this area have found it useful—the game is used in several countries for teaching military and other personnel about humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) operations: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/aftershock/
-----
Rick
Young
Q1 My first completed design, which was not published, was a Fantasy design based based loosely on Tolkein’s Middle Earth. I designed it while I was in the Marine Corps, during weekends with too much time to kill in the barracks in Camp Le Jeune in North Carolina. It was an Empire building game where four to six players represented human settlements on the coast and they expanded inland, finding orc packs and other nasty’s that had to be defeated and driven further inland while each empire expanded. Eventually the threats became your human neighbors more than the diminishing dark lands, and betrayals occured naturally. It was fun, but not a topic that I felt would have been published or widely received in the mid seventies.
Q2 What inspired my design for that
game was the good vs evil theme that reading Tolkien placed in my young
19-year-old brain.
-----
Robert
Markham
My first game, The Rise of the House of Sa’ud (3W, 1985), with the help of Mark Seaman came about because we were both in a graduate course on Saudi Arabia and I got the idea that there might be a game in it. I had the original design in a matter of days and then Mark added suggestions. I was very happy with the results, but not the art work of the published design.
-----
Ross
Mortell
Q1 My first game that I felt was done
is called The House and is a horror game set in an old mansion. Although
all my friends love playing it, I felt that it was too 'old school' for the
modern market.
I then
worked on Tinian, Saipan and Guam for the CSS series
published by Compass Games.
Q2 My gaming group would have a random number of people turn up every week. I wanted a game that could be played by 1 to 8 players so I came up with the House. Each person plays a different character (Policeman, Priest, Private eye, Boxer etc.) and it can accommodate any player count.
-----
Russ
Lockwood
Q1 I can't remember my first
independent design, but I started by doing variants of existing Avalon Hill
board wargames. These were published in little known amateur wargame magazines Pursue and Destroy (Larry Bost, publisher) as well as Jagdpanther (forget
publisher). Ran "campaigns" for friends using variety of altered
rules.
I first
published original design Snappy Nappy – Napoleonic miniatures rules –
back in 1994 as Shareware. This was popular in computer software circles.
Gamers asked me for the rules and I sent them. They could copy and distribute
as they wanted. I retained copyright, but if anyone liked them, they could send
me what they wanted in cash. I guess I got about $100 all told.
Later, a
rules publisher On Military Matters asked to publish it, so I wrote up a
more comprehensive set. Added a Picasso-like cover I had custom drawn, and ran
games at conventions. Received well enough with a tad over 1,000 copies sold
worldwide. Biggest appeal is one campaign, up to 20 players, and up to 15
separate tables. Players move between tables with their troops. Only "fog
of war" means they don't know what's on the next table. A club in CT was
so taken, they set up SnapCon one-day convention for the last 10 or so years.
Working on
new rules sets, but rather determined to make it as smooth mechanics as Snappy
Nappy.
Q2 I picked Napoleonics because I
wanted a bigger scale game with lots of maneuver. The rules I played were more
straight up bashes.
-----
Ryan
Heilman
Q1 Brave Little Belgium (Hollandspiele, 2019).
Q2 My co-designer, Dave Shaw, and I discussed the idea of creating a wargame while playing Afrika Korps (Avalon Hill, 1964) and Leningrad (SPI, 1979) at the WBC. He explained to me that after visiting Belgium with his wife that he had an idea to create a game on the battle for Belgium at the start of WWI. I thought it was an interesting idea and something not typically gamed so I asked him if I could start working on the basic design for it.
-----
Salvatore
Vasta
Only My Design
 |
| Unconditional Surrender: Case Blue was subsequently reprinted in C3i magazine, issue 28 (2014). |
2) World War 2 military history is one of my "Big 3" historical periods which have always fascinated me. The other two are Ancient Greco-Roman and Napoleonic. For my first design I went with the strategic level sub-genre because I felt it had space for a different design perspective. I enjoyed other games in the sub-genre, even helping to co-design Axis Empires: Totaler Krieg! (Decision Games, 1999). However, none of them seemed to fit what I was looking for in a simulation so I set about to create my own design. Many years later and with a lot of help from others, USE was published and well received, especially around the elements that I set as design goals.
-----
No comments:
Post a Comment