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.
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:
-----
Greg
Blanchett
Q1 Fall Blau (Compass Games, 2016. Since then, I have chosen topics based on the Glantz books I've picked up and then the next SDS will be based off [Jack] Radey's book.
Q2 For an answer to Question 2, Mr Blanchett directed me to the Designer’s Notes in the Fall Blau rulebook.
Number crunching was what really sparked the start of this project. I was playing A Victory Lost against Mark Simonitch and he was constantly moving units around to make sure he had the magic 5-1 odds. I thought, "This is way too gamey; I like how Iron Tide and the Victory in the West system use hidden strength chits." After considering situations that had a similar 'Bulge' type feel to them, I remembered that no game has really gotten this particular campaign right, "historically". I was convinced (especially when seeing the replays of the latest edition Drive on Stalingrad) to embark on this journey to try. I wanted to keep things simple because of the size of the game; and this particular system fits that well.
Operation Typhoon is often mentioned as one of the few playable monsters. When you read the rules, you will see those basics are intact, with a few twists thrown in. These come from my years of solo experience and the change in scale. The air rules are very simple in application, but took a bit of space to write out. I have included plenty of examples to aid key concepts. A couple testers were actually taught the game by me in 5-10 minutes before play. So don't be afraid of the size of the rulebook. I've tried to mesh everything so it fits together and is easy to remember. If you know the Operation Typhoon rules, you should feel right at home.
Fall Blau
has key differences which will stand out to those who have played Operation
Typhoon. When it comes down to command in FB, I had to give more freedom to the
player, simply because of the numerous instances of restructuring that happened
during this campaign. To keep a fixed structure like in OT or TKG (or even
VCS), I would have needed many more counters to swap out during the game.
Combat is not mandatory like in OT, but you still have the soak off rules. Lone
weak units can now be Overrun and there are small changes to the advance and
retreat rules which may take a conscious effort to remember, but I think it all
makes sense and keeps the flow. Above all, I want this to play as smooth as OT
by representing the flowing campaign of 1942, much as OT does the slow plodding
advance of winter 1941. I want this to be a simple to approach game like AVL.
However, since with AVL there is no way to recreate history during play, I had
to induce a bit more complexity in mine. Leaving the complexity of Dean's Case
Blue at the opposite end of a spectrum, I’m striving to hit roughly middle with
Fall Blau. As everybody who has tested with me so far can acknowledge, I'm working
for a fun, historical based, monster game that can appeal to players of both
AVL and Case Blue.
-----
Gregory
Smith
Q1 Although I'd been gaming and
tinkering since high school, probably 40 years later, in 2012, I was wrapping
up The Hunters (Consim Press, 2013. I was somewhat busy on active duty
in the Army before then, but in retirement, I decided it was time to get
serious.
Q2 I had always loved 0B-17: Queen of the Skies (Avalon Hill, 1981) and after watching Das Boot again for the third or fourth time, for some reason it just clicked in my head that the basic system of running into encounters as you travelled would work for a submarine. And sure enough, it did. It took a couple of years of tweaking with friends, and it took John Kranz to accept it for publication, but it was finally done in 2013. So, the genesis was something as simple as having watched a historical movie.
-----
Harold
Buchanan
Q1 I played games when I was young,
then stopped to have a family. And when my kids started to move out of the
house, I started back again. I’d always dabbled with design but never really
extensively or to completion. So, on Liberty or Death: the AmericanInsurrection (GMT Games, 2016), I was motivated by playing a game by Volko
Ruhnke called Andean Abyss (GMT Games, 2012). Volko had created the COIN
system – card-driven [with] four factions, extraordinary asymmetry in
capabilities and victory conditions.
I was moved
by the game and I’d had an interest in American Revolutionary history for
years, including living in Boston – the heart of the American Revolution – for
a couple of years when I was in grad school, and I thought it was interesting
how the American Revolution fitted this COIN model that Volko had created, with
the Patriots being the insurgents and the Government role played by Britain,
and then ancillary roles filled by the natives as a conglomerate and the
French. So, I put together a game using that system, to play with my friends,
and that was it. We had fun and it was okay, but I didn’t even think of
publishing it.
Then, out of
respect for Volko Ruhnke, I sent him a message just saying, “Hey – here’s what
we did,” just to show him he’d motivated us to do something, and I said I was
going to be at ConsimWorld Expo in Tempe, AZ, and if he was there I’d love to
meet him.
Volko sent me back a note saying, “I won’t be there, but Gene Billingsley, the
President of GMT Games will be, and he wants to see your game. I thought,
That’s kind of cool, but, so what?
So, I showed
up there with everything in immense detail and presented it to Gene, and he had
three or four other COIN experts to play the game, and Gane came back to me the
next day and said, “We want to run with this game.” So, it was kind of
happenstance; I never really intended to design anything for publication, and I
said, “I can do this, but I’m going to need Volko’s help and some help from
your shop to develop it,” and Gene said, “Absolutely, whatever you need.”
Liberty or
Death now on its fourth printing; it’s probably pushing 20,000 copies in
circulation, perhaps one of the most popular games in that whole COIN series.
Again, all because I wanted to do a little hobby game for my friends, and it
sort of blew up from there.
Q2 I’ve been an amateur
historian/student of the American Revolution since I was young. I’ve read tons
about it, tried to touch on all the games associated with it. And Like I said,
I lived in Boston for two years; I grew up in Ohio, I lived in Boston and then
in Huston for two years for Grad School, and now I live in California. None of
those places, except for Boston, have much to do with the American Revolution –
Boston has everything to do with it. It’s the start and finish of the American
Revolution.
And not just
for military considerations, but the political issues that came out of that
period are so closely associated with debates we have in the United States
today, they were formed 250 years ago. For example, we have a Senate, and we
have a House; the Senate represents small states, and the House represents
population, and they’re very different, and they’re different because the
framers of the Constitution decided that they didn’t want to leave the little
states out. And so that big state/small state debate continues to this very
day. I was just watching the news earlier and I heard an argument about it.
It’s all
quite interesting; the power of the State as it’s pushed down from the equality
of All men are created equal – at the time, all white men were created equal.
We’ve made progress since then, but it was a good start. Short of the Magna
Carta, the US Declaration of Independence was really the key document in
separating from royal authority, allowing men to make their own choices.
There’s a lot of things like that I’ve just been so interested in.
So, my love
for the American Revolution propelled me to make a game about it. That’s where Liberty of Death came from. Now,
I’ve designed two other games since then, and one of them is another American
Revolution – Northern theatre game, Campaigns of 1777 (Decision Games,
2019), that appeared in Strategy & Tactics magazine. I’m sure I’ll
visit it again before my career’s over.
-----
Harry
Rowland
Q1 That's easy, Empires in Arms
(Australian Design Group, 1983), designed when I was 13 when I first took up
playing historical games (Blitzkrieg (Avalon Hill, 1965) and France,1940 (Avalon Hill, 1971) being my first two ever purchased). The game is
based on the SPI 1812 (SPI, 1972) strategic game (not the hex based
version which also came in the package) only expanded to all of Europe from
1805-1815.
I thought it was finished when I was 14 (1972), but it wasn't until I moved to Canberra and met up with Greg Pinder, Neil Mackenzie and other members of the Canberra Wargames Society in 1978 that we dug the game out and started working on it before releasing it ourselves in 1983.
 |
| Empires in Arms (ADG edition), featured on the cover of Fire & Movement magazine in 1984. |
Q2 I've always been interested in the
Napoleonic period and when I played 1812 I thought it was a great game and
would make a good basis for a strategic Napoleonic game.
I also
started writing notes about a world war II game at the same time (which I think
I still have somewhere in a box) as that is my second great historical interest
(ancients being the third, which is going to be my next game, 0) but that
didn't go anywhere. However it perhaps then is no surprise that the second game
Greg and I started working on in 1983 was World in Flames (Australian
Design Group., 1985).
In both
Napoleonic and WWII history, fortunes changed dramatically and constantly in a
short space of time which makes them both excellent case studies for
simulation.
-----
Hermann
Luttmann
Q1 I've been playing wargames since I
was about 14 years old, I think - so, 1970 or so. And I started doing
development for 3W and Clash of Arms in about 1994. The miniature stuff was all
in the mid-to-late 90's. I started designing in 2010 ... so that would be a
whopping 40 years of gaming before I started designing! That sounds like a lot.
Interestingly enough, my first working game design that our gaming club used
consistently was a set of Napoleonic miniatures rules called "L'Ordre
Mixte". That was followed up by a set of ACW miniatures rules called
"Tattered Flags", which the club also adopted for regular play. Those
ACW miniatures rules were actually the basis for my first published boardgame
design called "Gettysburg: The Wheatfield" by Victory Point Games,
and it was a hybrid miniatures/board wargame.
Q2 I was an avid Napoleonic and ACW
miniatures gamer, and that was supplemented by steady play of the La Bataille
series, the Napoleon at War quads, Terrible Swift Sword, and the Blue &
Gray quads. So, I was well versed in the history and tactics of both periods.
The story of the Wheatfield at Gettysburg just sparked my imagination as a
story that needed to be told in game format, so that's why I went with
"Gettysburg: The Wheatfield". It was a confined area of the
battlefield and only lasted a couple of hours, so the game could be physically
smaller and have a relatively short play time. But over 20 brigades crossed
that field in that small amount of time, and the field changed hands multiple
times. It was just such a dramatic and colorful story to tell, and I felt I
could do it in an accessible, fun way.
-----
Ian Weir
Q1 My first complete game never had a
title. After many subsequent iterations it became Charlie’s Year (Red
Sash Games, 2004). The first (unpublished) version took about 48 hours to
create, plus a few weeks of research; the map and counters were drawn with
coloured pencil and the rules were lifted from the old Frederick the Great
game. The published version was resurrected after about 8 years and took
another 6 or 7 years of R&D to reach a form that anyone but myself would
play. It became the basis of my Lace Wars series. The game underwent further
development post-publication, resulting in three official editions. Reaching
the definitive 3rd edition took another four years or so.
Q2 I simply wanted to game that particular historical event. It dealt with things I had been familiar with since childhood. At the time I first designed what would become Charlie’s Year there were no games on that subject, to my knowledge. Even after publishing the first edition there might have been one other game on the topic, but I don't think so. There were two main drivers for dusting off the idea and making it a commercial product. First, the game is about the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and at that time we were approaching the 250th anniversary (I did not complete the game in time). Second, myself and a few friends were kicking around the idea of forming a game co-op, as you do; that became Red Sash Games (which was never a co-op; I had more time on my hands than the other guys so I ran with the idea).
-----
Ilya
Kudryashov
Q1 What was my first wargame? The very
first one was based on the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. I started
working on it not because I was interested in Hungary per se, but because I had
bought a collection of documents about that invasion at a store. This
collection included correspondence and ambassadors’ reports, but most
importantly, it contained a complete operational schedule for the Soviet troops
that participated in the invasion, as well as operational documents from Soviet
intelligence describing the deployment and composition of the Hungarian army.
When you come across such interesting data, you really want to do something
with it. This was in the mid-1990s. The prototype map was drawn on a large
sheet of wallpaper, onto which sheets of hexagons had been glued. But this game
didn’t make it past testing—the forces were too unevenly matched, and I never
figured out what to do with it. So it was more of a failed foray into wargame
design. The first fully completed and tested game was set in medieval Russia
during the 12th–14th centuries. It wasn’t strictly a wargame; it was largely a
political and economic game, but with fairly simple mechanics. It featured
several scenarios, including individual historical ones as well as a long
scenario that spanned the entire period in about 30 turns. The French game Europa Universalis (Azure Wish Enterprise, 1993) was a major inspiration for me in
creating that game. As a result, it was even published in a small magazine
intended for history teachers. Looking back, I see that it was an interesting
experience; I still have all the components from that game, and I plan to
finish it, incorporating modern mechanics, and pitch it to a publisher.
Q2 I’ve tried making several games, and
each time my reasons for choosing a particular theme were different. As I
mentioned, the situation with Hungary was based on historical documents that
allowed me to get started. For the game about medieval Russia, I was inspired
by Europa Universalis, but I wanted to make the mechanics much simpler and the
game more fun and dynamic. In the case of the game about Izmail—(The Siege of Izmail (Hollandspiele, 2018) currently my only game published in the
U.S.—I wanted to choose a battle that is well-known in Russia but little-known
to American audiences. Everyone knows who Suvorov is, but few people know about
the storming of Izmail. Count Orlov’s 1890 book also played a major
role; based on internal Russian staff documents, it provided a fairly detailed
breakdown of the Ottoman garrison at the fortress. It seemed much more
realistic than the traditionally inflated figures in the Russian command’s
official post-battle reports. This was also a key factor in choosing the topic,
because to this day, the composition and strength of the Ottoman armies in
individual battles remain shrouded in a thick fog.
-----
Ivan
Notario
Q1 My first design was about the last
years of Roman Hispania (La Caída de Hispania (self-published, 2018)).
It's a historical period that is not very well known, mainly because it's a
very local subject focused on the Iberian Peninsula, and also because the Late
Roman period has very little surviving information. I found the lack of sources
both challenging and interesting, and I wanted to explore that part of history
through a game.
Q2 I picked this topic, and this very specific moment in history, because it has been almost ignored by wargame designers. You could say that Gettysburg, Waterloo and Normandy make up 50% of all wargames ever made, and I wanted to put the focus on something completly different. I think there are still many fascinating historical periods that deserve more atention from designers.
-----
James M.
Day
Q1 MBT, which was my first set of miniature
rules. It was set on the Eastern Front during WWII. It subsequently evolved
into my first published board game, Panzer (Yaquinto Publications,
1979).
Q2 My first area of interest was actually WWI and WWII naval warfare. At the time, there were very limited options for miniatures and virtually no board games. So, I decided to focus on ships on land -- tanks.
-----
Javier
Romero
Q1 My first wargame design was The Spanish Civil War. It wasn't my first published wargame (that dubious honor belongs to Iberos, published in 2002 by Ludopress). TSCW was going to be published by Command magazine, then by Moments in History from Germany, and finally was picked up by GMT Games, which published it in 2010, some 15 years after I first began working on the prototype.
Q2 First because I felt that there wasn't a Spanish Civil War simulation that I felt right. Back in the mid-1990s we had only a few older titles, and For Whom the Bell Tolls [Europa series] (Game Research/Design, 1995) that, for all its complexity, it didn't felt right for our war. In particular for the early stages.
Second, because like almost everyone else in Spain I have relatives on both sides of the struggle-in July 2026 we will be commemorating the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. My grandfather Pedro fought with the Nationalist, the grandfather of my wife fought for the Republic, and a great uncle of her fought for the Republic, fled to France and later joined the French resistance.
Third,
because the first wargame I ever played was a simulation of the civil war. I
became a wargamer at age 13, when an uncle of mine presented me with a copy of LaGuerra Civil Española (Nike and Cooper Española, S.A., 1981) a game on the
Spanish Civil War. Within a few weeks of playing the game, I began to create
house rules for the game because I felt that the rules of play were too
simplistic… and so it began.
-----
Jeremy
White
Q1 This probably won’t be a helpful
answer, but I would have to say a Gettysburg game I designed when I was ten. I
had discovered Avalon Hill’s Victory in the Pacific (1977), which my Dad
brought home one day, and it was an aha moment. Inspired and excited (maybe
‘agitated’ is the right word) I painted areas with green paint on a big
cardboard sheet, and painted 1 inch x 1 inch counters in blue and gray paint
cutting them out with scissors. The problem was, in Victory in the Pacific
ships don’t have movement factors and most move into a space from a port or
into an adjacent space and then move back to port at the end of the turn. I
didn’t know how to port that into a Battle of Gettysburg game. That didn’t stop
me, however, I played anyway, role-playing movement. I scooched the blue and
gray squares along roads from one area to the next until they bumped into each
other and then I rolled dice. Combat was ported from the only wargame I knew
and it worked well enough although I had to figure out what a "critical
hit" meant for an infantry division (as opposed to an aircraft carrier).
You asked
for my first 'done' game, and so here it is. It felt done to me and I played
it. And then my father bought me a published hex and counter game on
Gettysburg, and whoah… hexagons and movement points!
My standards
about what a playable game is, or should be, have changed since then, but
that's only because I attempted to enter the world of published games. Back
then, I didn’t need to write rules I just needed to play the game using
whatever rules came to me at that moment. Back then, the game got played and
'done' was not a relevant term.
Q2 Why a Gettysburg game? I had an
interest in the American Civil War, thanks to my parents who thought visiting a
battlefield was a good idea for a vacation. Those kind of parents. We had books
on the subject, and I was zany crazy about maps. I had already been employing
toy soldiers and sometimes marble sets on the family room floor to play
battles. I would open a book to one of the maps and arrange the marbles in
lines, emulating what I saw in the map. So, I suppose I was a miniatures gamer
before I discovered hex and counter games. The omniscient point of view was
enticing, and the feeling of power, of thousands of soldiers crashing against
each other in organized lines, was strangely fascinating. I obviously needed
mental help! And I got hex and counter games instead.
-----
Jim Krohn
Q1 Space Empires: 4X (GMT Games,
2011)
Q2 Because I love Sci-Fi and, in the 90's when I started the game, I felt there was nothing quite in the space that I wanted. I did not plan on it being published but, when it was finished, I enjoyed it so much that I started shopping it to game companies.
-----
Joe
Fernandez
Q1 My first published game was Storm of Steel: Ju87 Stuka Eastern Front (Compass Games, 2023). The hardest part
of the game process is always the rulebook. There comes a point where
playtesting feels done (although it never truly is) so incorporating all
the notes from playtesting into the rulebook is the last process. After that, I
feel confident it's completed. There will always be "what did I
miss?" in the back of your head. Sometimes dozens of people have looked at
the document, chart, table, etc., and dozens of people missed it! Of course,
rulebooks are one, if not the biggest, player complaint about a game. So
finalizing a rulebook should be the "done" part of the design
process.
Q2 I am a WWII aficionado historian
since my childhood, and always wanted to play a game that provided me with more
than pure mechanics and more of an immersive narrative experience. I love
Avalon Hill's B-17: Queen of the Skies (Avalon Hill, 1981) and wanted to
merge that concept into a dive bomber squadron setting for a legendary
aircraft. In doing so I sought to make something different: a game where the
player had to make tough decisions regarding crew and machine, a light simulacra
of the burden of command.
-----
John
Gorkowski
Q1 In the Trenches (Grenier
Games, 2009), a game of tactical ground combat in WWI, was my first
"completed" wargame. I presented a free "print and play"
version to the gaming public in a folder at Consim World circa 2008. The
following year, Grenier Games worked with me to print and sell hard copies.
Tiny Battle Publishing took over in 2015 to retail an ITT series in ziplocks.
Along the way, several fans remarked that, of all my games, this was their
favorite.
Q2 I chose to model World War I tactical ground combat because through my reading of WWI history I came to understand that people had conflated the strategic and tactical pictures of WWI for widespread misunderstanding of warfare during that era. While it's true that much of WWI saw strategic stalemate, at the tactical level, even seemingly frozen lines exhibited considerable dynamism. Indeed, it was in those micro-movements, and the efforts to expand them, that the components of WWII Blitzkrieg evolved. In that I saw a tension between troop concentration versus troop dispersion that made a compelling theme around which to build a tactical game. It certainly helped that few tactical WWI games were available, unlike WWII which was already very well covered.
-----
John
Poniske
I was raised
in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's stomping grounds. I attended Athens
High School, no more than 10 miles from New Salem, where Lincoln launched his
career. My best friend wound up caretaker of the estate where Lincoln tried his
first case as a lawyer. So, you see, I
got a healthy dose of Civil War history early on in my life.
I grew up in
a family that encouraged playing board games. For Christmas and my birthday, I
would always receive a new game or two. As a child, I marveled at our basement
game closet. Sometimes I would just open the double doors and stare at them the
way sportsmen stare at their trophies. Every chance I got I would go to
friend's houses, or my friends would come to me, and we would play all the
popular games put out in the '60s, but - unlike many of my friends, I
gravitated toward historical based gaming. The American Heritage Series,
and some of the early Avalon Hill titles were my favorites.
When I
discovered girls and "partying" my interest in games waned. But then,
in my final year in the Marine Corps, I met a fellow NCO who revived my
interest. Rick Young was a highly intelligent, highly competitive gamer who
knew way more about the gaming industry than I did. Together we rolled dice to
many Avalon Hill and SPI games both on shore and on ship. Once we ended our
tours of duty; Rick had a surprise for me. He asked me to playtest his new
wargame design, EUROPE ENGULFED (GMT Games, 2003).
I was proud
of him, prouder still when the title was picked up and produced by GMT in 2003.
I was also intrigued by the process and challenged myself to learn more and if
possible, break into the industry as well. I had always played with existing
game rules. In grade school I created Marines in Stratego which were able to
cross the pond squares on the board. In the late '90s I dabbled in Civil war
design. I roughed out two designs, The Red River Campaign - which died
aborning, and Not Just A General's War, a card driven approach to the
whole war that involved politicians as well as generals.
Having
attended Avalon Con religiously since its inception, I approached several
attending publishers in 2008-2009.
Multi-Man Publications, or MMP, was already interested in my newly
revamped Civil War game (which MMP aptly named Lincoln's War, MMP,
2013), showed a keen interest in another design I had just finished, King
Philip's War (MMP, 2010. So my first two designs were published in 2010. I
continued to crank out designs on largely esoteric historical subjects for the
next decade, not only for the glory of publishing but because I was so
fascinated by the research.
Most recently I completed my first new design in seven years, RECONSTRUCTION: AN UNCIVIL PEACE, which I will be demonstrating at W.B.C. this fall. The design grew out of the extensive research I did on Reconstruction when writing SNAKEBIT. To be honest, it demanded to be designed. For months I couldn't get the idea out of my head. Now, it's not only complete, it has been accepted by Compass Games. I trust its historical content will teach players a great deal about a much-misunderstood period of our nation's history.
As a retired
high school social studies teacher, I've long advocated for the use of board
games in the classroom, not only as learning tools but as tools to develop
social behavior and controlled competitiveness. To this day, I believe
boardgames remain a much-neglected teaching tool. I'm grateful my family introduced me to the
genre.
-----
Jon
Southard
Q1 My first published design work of any
kind was a set of scenarios for Seven Years War miniatures battles. I enjoyed gaming with model soldiers but had
noted that all the focus was on historical battles. Those are interesting but not always the best
or most balanced game situations. These
were published in a gaming periodical, and I believe were later adapted by
another person for Civil War battles.
Q2 This was a very good apprenticeship
because it taught me the importance of scenario. A lot of attention in game design gets paid
to system, but scenario is very important too; more scenarios equals more
entertainment. I've tried to remember
that in all my subsequent work, sometimes with more success and sometimes with
less.
-----
Joseph
Miranda
Q1
Trajan: Roman Campaign in the East, AD 113 to 117 (S&T 145 – Decision Games,
1991). My design objective was to show warfare from the perspective of the
Romans and Parthians, to place the player in the positions of the original
commanders. The map uses a Ptolemaic style geography. The critical element is
that movement along roads from city to city is deterministic, since the routes
were well planned with itineraries and such. Movement cross country is another
matter. Combat is chaotic, with chances for total victory to total debacle.
Numbers do not count as much as leadership and weapons systems, so you have the
potential for another battle of Carrhae where Crassus was wiped out by the
Parthian horse archers in 53 BC. There is also a political dimension with the
play of Stratagem markers. Trajan provided the foundation for three succeeding
games in the series: Caesar in Gallia (Decision Games, 1993, Roman Civil War (Decision Games, 1993), and Germania (Decision Games,
1995).
Q2 To show how a campaign worked in the classical world, going beyond the material factors to include the shifting sands of politics and diplomacy (see the Stratagem markers). The Romans often appeared to be fighting against destiny but somehow they made it work and in many ways created the template for the modern state and warfare. The Parthians were no slouches either. Trajan led the Roman army to the Persian Gulf. And Western armies are still there!
-----
Kevin
McPartland
Q1 My first fully completed game design
was Tahiti: Clan Warfare, Polynesia 750 AD (3W Games, 1994). Yes, I was
lucky enough (or tenacious enough) to get my first design published. Before
that I had played around with game designs set during WWII (both operational
and strategic in scale) that featured assigning resources to construct the
forces that you fight with. None were ever completed because of one big
problem: I was not able to reconcile the difference in time scale between
production and operations. For example, it takes years to complete a
battleship, but in that time, you could fight dozens of campaigns with that
ship, or even sail around the world several times. Meanwhile, I was busy
designing variants for other games. One of these (a variant for Civilization)
was published in The General magazine.
Q2 On a family trip the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, we walked into an exhibit on Polynesian culture. I expected hula skirts, leis, and bucolic scenes with swaying palm trees. Instead I was confronted with nasty weapons: swords studded with jagged shark’s teeth, clubs with spikes, spears with harded tips. There was a map of Tahiti on the wall, with the island divided into many clan areas. The clans constantly struggled for control of the island, attacking neighbors for contol of their land.
I took lots
of notes on a scrap of paper, realizing that this was the solution to my scale
problem. What is built much quicker - but moves much slower – than a
battleship? War canoes! The more research that I did, the more impressed I
became with Polynesian culture. My game featuring assigning resources to
construct the forces that you fight with became a simulation of clan warfare in
Tahiti. After Tahiti, I took the system to New Zealand; years later (and after
changing it into a card-driven wargame) it was published by Compass Games as Māori: Warriors of the Long White Cloud (Compass Game, 2022). A design taking the
system to Hawai’i has never been completed, due to the linear arrangement of
that island chain. But my grand-strategic look at Polynesian culture was
published by GMT Games, called Conquest of Paradise (GMT Games, 2007).
The third edition, published by Phalanx Games, can now be ordered on Gamefound.
-----
Kim
Kanger
Q1 Tonkin (2006) for the
VaeVictis magazine.
 |
| Tonkin subsequently reprinted in a boxed Second Edition by Legion Wargames in 2012. |
Q2 I was playtesting a game that covered the Tonkin campaign 1950-54, but meant for the OCS game-system. It was never published but I got interested in making a smaller game myself of the same topic.
-----
Kris Van
Beurden
Q1 The first Wargame design that I
worked on to the point that it was done was Barbarians at the Gates
(Compass Games, 2022).
Q2 In Belgium, we mostly see ourselves as descendants of the Franks, and the Germanic Migrations are a big “origin story” for us. At the same time, we see Rome as the source of our civilization.
Especially
in Belgium, with its Dutch-speaking (Germanic) northern half and its French-speaking (Walloon) southern half, it feels as if those ancient
oppositions (between the civilized Romans and the barbaric Germans) are still
very present.
-----
Krzysztof
Dytczak
Q1
Farmers vs Empire: The Second Boer War & Bloody veld (Strategemata, 2015).
Q2 I was preparing my master's thesis on the Boer War and I had always been interested in little-known armed conflicts.
-----
Liz
Davidson
Q1 My first historical design, and first design, was Night Witches (Fort Circle Games, ~2026) with David Thompson.
Q2 We chose to make a game about the
Night Witches because "Soviet female pilots bomb Nazis" is just cool,
and because it was a topic we were both extremely excited about, which is how
we have continued to choose topics for co-designs.
-----
Marc
Rodrigue
Q1 My first wargame was 1755,
completed in 1998 for self-publishing, but never printed.
Like my
first published wargame Bayonets & Tomahawks (GMT 2021), it covered
the French & Indian War. I had started the "1755" game in the
early 1990s because at that time, I was dissatisfied by all games covering the
full scope of that conflict: too heavily skewed on the British perspective,
lots of interesting elements missing.
1755 was
also a point-to-point strategy game, but with strength values on units and a
classic combat result table (CRT). In 2021 upon the release of Wilderness War (GMT), I cancelled my project because Volko Ruhnke had created the
first truly great game on the conflict. My 1755 game did not compare.
Q2 I am a Québécois (Canadian from French speaking Québec province). The epic of my New France ancestors resisting the much more numerous British troops and navy (10:1 ratio) for more than five years fascinated me as much as the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae.
Also, I love
the great outdoors, trekking, canoeing. So the concept of a big European army
entangled in the forest, against guerrilla-like French troops and Native allies
appealed to me. It presented a unique and balanced mix of conventional and
light troops.
Another
thing I wanted to explore was the "what if" France had sent much more
troops to North America. The sizeable French contribution 20 years later to the
American Revolution gave a base for what was plausible. But I overdid it a bit
in my 1755 design, not taking enough into account the sad state of the 1750s
French Navy compared to its rebirth in 1770s. A mistake I corrected in Bayonets
& Tomahawks.
-----
No comments:
Post a Comment