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:
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Adam Starkweather
Q1 My first designed game was also my
first published one - The Devil’s Cauldron (2008) by MMP. As for being “done”, I was a novice at making
games, so while I’m proud of the end results and people seemed to really enjoy
it, looking back on it, there was much I would change now. Happy to still be here and working on my
final iteration of the game system now for my Anzio game from my company [Anzio: a Lost Opportunity (Bring It On Games, ~2027)]. 25 years makes a
difference.
But generally, for most of my career, I’ve been captive and had to honor deadlines - so it was done when it had to be done. That did teach me that there is a time when a game is as done as it is going to get - so while I’d love to have a few more months on some of my MMP and Compass projects, I am experienced enough to see diminishing rates of return on constant revisions and edits. I know when to let my baby go.
Q2 Until I started my own game company, I often was told by my publishers what they wanted - or if they wanted what I was about to work on ("Angola? Are you freaking kidding me?”). Now, at least for the first few games from my company, I’m making games that either I or someone else has spent significant time on, so it is close to ready to make. Either the research is 90% done or the art is close to done. These two things take up a ton of time. After that, I’m now able to choose games I want to make.
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Al Nofi
Q1 Some background. I was in Boys’ High, Brooklyn, ‘57-’61, and had an interest in things
military. Rummaging through the
collection at the main building of the Brooklyn Public Library, I ran across a
copy of Totten’s American Game of War (D. Appleton and Company, 1880) a
Kriegspiel-style game from the 1880s, as well as The Coast Artillery War Game (Government Printing Office, 1916).
I cobbled together a game with elements from both. Then a classmate introduced me to the
original Avalon-Hill game, Tactics (Avalon Hill, 1954), in my last year
or so. He had dropped out of school and
joined the army, but was medically discharged due to an injury after about 18
months, due to an injury, and returned to school. While in the army, he’d been introduced
to Tactics. That’s how I discovered
hobby wargaming. Then AH General came
along, creating the wargaming community. After a couple of short articles in The General, I found myself
playtesting for with Jim Dunnigan, who was working on Jutland. From there on I was involved in most of his
projects, while beginning to writing for S&T, which Jim shortly acquired.
So, to Question 1, my first wargame was the one I cobbled
together in high school, which was essentially a late-nineteenth/early
twentieth century game of a war between two notional nations, sort-of gluing
together elements of both the Totten and Coast Artillery games.
My first published came much later. After writing and doing research for Strategy &
Tactics games, one day, having just read Oman’s book on medieval warfare, I
said to Dunnigan, “Why don’t you do a game on the revival of infantry in the
Renaissance?” He replied, “Why don’t you?” The result was Renaissance of Infantry (SPI, 1970), followed by Centurion (SPI, 1971).
Q2 I’ve only completed maybe a dozen or so games, not counting a couple of second editions, with a half-dozen or so begun but never completed. Most of the games I’ve designed came about because I was interested in the subject, and wanted to see how it would work out as a game.
I’m actually not so much interested in wargames as a competitive exercise as a way of exploring the possibilities of a situation – the unanswerable ‘what ifs”, which makes games design a tool driving research. On several occasions, working on a game has required answers to questions that were not addressed in even the most detailed books about a particular battle or event.
A very good example comes from when we were working on SPI’s The Marne, in 1972. In one playtest, toward the end of the development process, the game had unfolded as one would expect, with the Germans sweeping the French and British down into the heart of France, with Paris on the western ends of the armies. Suddenly the German player ups and says something that the 1914 Germans clearly didn’t plan on doing, “I’m going to attack Paris.”.
Well, it turns out that no book on the opening campaign in the west – not even the German and French official histories, with all their meticulous detail, mentions the pieces after the fall of Liege. It took two or three weeks of careful digging before we found where they were, in an article in a service journal. After Liege, the slow-moving guns had been dispatched to besiege fortress Namur, while fell on August 25th, and were then dispatched to bombard Antwerp, and so were over 200 miles from Paris during the first days of September.
The Gettysburg Campaign offers a more credible “what if,” supposing that Lee had not dispatched Ewell to Harrisburg, but rather kept him closer to the rest of the army. Naturally a game doesn’t ‘prove’ that doing so would have altered the outcome of the campaign, but it would help us better understand the potential consequences.
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Alex Knight
Q1 Because this question revolves around the feeling of being done, it's virtually impossible to answer. Hammer and Sickle (GMT Games, ~2027), which will come out via GMT hopefully in 2027, is the game of mine with the oldest significant system DNA, going back to when I started it in 2019. But it has massively evolved and continues to do so as I'm now working with an artist and a developer to craft the game into an actual product. So, until it is actually released to the printer/manufacturer, I couldn't consider it "done."
Land and Freedom (Blue Panther, 2023) would be a more
technically accurate answer, because Blue Panther published the game in 2023,
and at that point my endless iterations and tinkering were put on pause. Yet,
they have renewed again, as I'm now working with a new artist and publisher,
Fort Circle Games, to release a second edition to be released in early 2027.
So, at this point the game isn't done, but you could say that the first edition
of the game is.
 |
| Land and Freedom is now available to play on Rally the Troops. |
Q2 I've always been drawn to the
Spanish Revolution and Civil War for a number of reasons, most significantly
because it included the largest experiment in worker-controlled industry and
agriculture within a modern economy, and therefore represents perhaps the most
instructive case for how a future without state and capitalist oppression could
potentially function. My fascination extends to the perhaps paradoxical caveat
that the layers of failure for that experiment, being subsumed by the
Republican state and then ultimately buried by fascist violence, reveal even
more about the task of building any kind of optimistic future.
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Allen Dickerson
Q1 By Swords & Bayonets (GMT Games, 2025) was my first design ever, but it was not the first I ever attempted. I had been trying to build another set of GBACW games on the war in Louisiana, but had gotten a bit stuck on the orders of battle (specifically the Rebels). I had a few maps done though.
Q2 I chose the battles in
BS&B because they fit the parameters of the package: SMALL IN SIZE/SCOPE
(less than a division on each side) As you may know, BS&B is marketed as a
"starter pack" for GBACW, minimizing player overhead so that they can
come to grips with the system rules and mechanics (without being overwhelmed by
a Shiloh- or Gettysburg-sized situation).
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Amabell Holland
Q1 If memory serves, I worked somewhat simultaneously on both the game that would become Stamford Bridge (Tiny Battle Publishing, 2015) and Blood on the Alma (Lock ‘n’ Load, 2012). The former was picked up by Victory Point, spent years in their queue waiting on a developer, and then was given back to me when I found myself suddenly the editor of a wargame magazine in need of a pack-in game for the first issue. Blood on the Alma I signed around the same time with Lock N Load back when it was under Mark Walker's purview, and it would end up being my first published game.
Q2 For Stamford Bridge, I was always interested in medieval history - knights and vikings and what-not - and I was looking for something very simple (with a very tiny form factor) that I could pitch to Victory Point. At this point in my career, I just wanted to get things published and try to learn the business. It's the same reason why, and even around the same time, I designed Northern Pacific (Winsome Games, 2013), a train game, for Winsome (a publisher which specialized in train games): I wanted to get work out there, I wanted to work with experienced developers so I could learn my craft quickly, and I wanted to design for very specific and small form factors so I could do all this relatively quickly & with a higher chance of the game getting signed.
For Alma, I had read a book on the Crimean War and I thought that battle had a lot of crazy things in it - the British not knowing the range of their own rifles because they hadn't bothered to talk to their allies, Lord Raglan disappearing with his staff behind enemy lines, the Russian center commanded by a guy who was drunk off his ass. There's a lot of juice there for a young designer who wants to flex a bit, and wants to practice doing something very chrome-y (especially in contrast to something very restrained like Stamford).
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Andy Loakes
Q1 My first game design (and
first published game) was Toulon, 1793 – Napoleon’s First Great Victory
(Legion Wargames, 2014).
Q2 Napoléon has always fascinated me and been a significant part of my wargaming (miniatures first and then board wargaming). It always struck me as curious that whilst Toulon was such a pivotal battle for him (and well known amongst Napoleon aficionados), it had never been made into a game. My idle assumption was, for many years, that perhaps it simply didn’t lend itself to such. When I got back into the hobby, more earnestly than ever and after a 20-odd year hiatus, in the early 2000s, I was tempted to try my hand at design and why not look at this neglected topic. And, somewhat to my surprise, I found there was indeed a game to be had.
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Art
Lupinacci
Q1 Russia Besieged (L2,
2004) was my first wargame design. It
was brewing in my head for decades so the rules for the game and the general
outline and scope developed very quickly.
A little history before I continue...
The Russian Campaign, 2nd Edition (Avalon Hill, 1976)
was my very first wargame purchase. I immediately fell in love with the game,
Avalon Hill and wargaming in general. I
couldn't get enough of the game at the time and played one copy until it was
threadbare and had to buy another. In those days, you really got to know a
game, especially a good one.
As time passed, the game started to wear on me because of
its simplicity (this is really a compliment not a slur) and some of its
shortcomings due to it being a small and simple game. l wanted a game that had
more meat to it. Not on the level of Drang Nach Osten! (GDW, 1973).
Something that was the next step up but at the same scale and roughly the same
footprint.
Designing something wasn't what I was thinking of at the
time. I was more interested in improving on an already great design and maybe
getting it published in an article for the GENERAL. With the demise of SPI and
the hobby going into a death spiral at the time, games were not being produced
at the same frantic rate they are now and certainly not on every topic
imaginable. I wanted a better game and started making some notes for a possible
future design.
The opportunity came up to republish Streets of Stalingrad
and for a few years I was distracted with getting that project off the ground.
Streets of Stalingrad followed quickly by The Russian Campaign 4th Edition
and Deluxe Bitter Woods (L2 Design Group, 2003). Realizing I had a mechanism to make my dream
of a good Army/Corps level East Front game a reality I put my nose to the
grindstone to publish Russia Besieged.
Memory fades now after 20 years but long-time friend Rob
Beyma was recruited to be the developer along with Lembit Tohver as key players
of the Design/Playtest team and we slowly started to bang out the rules and
order of battle. The game easily went two years into playtesting and fleshing
out the rules before it was eventually printed. We had a huge playtest team
spread over the various printings and my thanks and gratitude go out to Rob
Beyma who ended up being the driving force in making Russia Besieged what it
is.
At what point did it feel, "done"? (chuckling to
myself)... probably after the Finnish Expansion (Compass Games, ). Compass Games published a Deluxe Edition Russia Besieged and a Player's Guide. I think that was the crowning glory to all my
time and efforts. It took 20 years!
Why? Well, time brings on new discoveries and new
information. When you put out a product
you love, you simply want to keep it the best it can be and accepting something
is wrong in it didn't sit well with me.
Over the years I corrected a few OB mistakes and adjusted a few rules to
keep the game the best it could be for an Army/Corp level game. I am very
satisfied with where the game is now....and unfortunately, it is out of print!
Hopefully, by the time you read this, I will have found a
solution to bringing it back in print. Russia Besieged, in its various forms
has sold over 6,000 copies and is still played today. A testament to the blood, sweat and tears we
put into making it an excellent East Front game. I would like to see one more
print run with a mounted map.
Q2 I picked this topic because
of my keen interest in military history, especially, in WWII. My grandfather
was in the Italian Army in North Africa and I saw a picture of him leaning on a
German Panzer III and heard many a war story when I was young and it got me
interested. I was interested in North Africa but the Russian Front was where my
true interests lay. I had read so much
about Stalingrad and Kursk that this made it a natural place to start. My
interest in WWII was so keen I eventually graduated with a major in
Contemporary European History primarily focused on the war years and what led
up to World War II.
The game that got me truly interested in wargaming was France,1940 (1971) by the Avalon Hill Game Company. I was drawn to it by the
artwork and colors of the map. The Russian Campaign, however, sealed the deal.
As I mentioned in the previous answer, I loved and hated
this game and it is what made me want to improve it to my liking. The Russian
Campaign brought together a number of ideas from other designs, rolling for
weather each month, air power increasing the odds, double impulse movement
system as well as an economy. It was an elegant design that added a ton of
flavor without a mountain of rules.
What more could you want? Well, I eventually wanted more. I
wanted to be able to bypass strong points, Blitzkrieg style, I didn't like the
River treatment where the graphic split the middle of a hex, the air power rule
was a little too restraining and I didn't feel it reflected reality, and I
didn't like the sea movement rules for the same reason. What's more, I didn't
feel it reflected the wearing down of the German army accurately enough as the
war progressed and really wanted to see step reduction in the game. Also, the
Order of Battle was woefully inadequate and I wanted more. The weather
treatment in The Russian Campaign made me lose my hair, especially if you
rolled MUD in Sept/Oct and snow in March/April, the German player was doomed. I
wanted more variables and a less punishing outcome.
These were the driving forces that motivated me to design a game on a topic I loved (WWII East Front) using a number of games as my foundation (Battle of Moscow (GDW, 1986), Stalingrad (Avalon Hill, 1963) and The Russian Campaign) eventually culminating in Russia Besieged.
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Ben Hull
Q1 In the late 1970s my best
friend and I played many miniatures (mostly WWII and some medieval) and made
our own rules. We also experimented with Squad Leader (Avalon Hill,
1977) variants. This was the start of the desire to design games. These early
efforts were all for our own enjoyment and were "done" in that we
played with the custom rules and enjoyed it. The first true game design that
was intended for broad use was This Accursed Civil War (GMT Games, 2002)
that I designed in 1999-2000 on battles of the English Civil War. The version I
originally designed I sold online as a Desktop Published game (DTP). This led
to its being picked up by GMT Games in 2001.
Q2 My
friend from the 1970s games found a book while working on his PhD in History
from Gervase Markham from 1630s which I borrowed. It sparked a real interest in
the period and read many more and bought several games from the period
including GMT's Lion of the North (GMT Games, 1993) and Rob Markham’s games. All this
worked with a long-time interest from reading C.V. Wedgewood in high school and
the film Cromwell.
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Bill Molyneaux
Q1 I did a lot of play testing
over the years late 80s up to the 2000s for several designers like Denis Bishop.
[My first] game was The Struggle for New France (Schutze Games, 2013). It is now in a Second Edition thru Blue
Panther games. It was first published by
Schutze Games.
Q2 I am a French and Indian War re-enactor and
studied a great deal on the conflict and then I geared my games for historic
sites such as Fort Ticonderoga , Old Fort Niagara, Fort Frederick, Old Stone Fort
and many others.
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Bob Kalinowski
Q1 My first game was published –
after a six-year journey through three publishers. It was the Prussia’s Glory (GMT Games,
2002) quad game for GMT. But on the way to that, the first battle that the
system was developed to capture was the battle of Zorndorf. I worked the
prototype and a beta version, and submitted this to Strategy and Tactics in the
mid-90s. I forget their exact reasoning, but after much delay, they decided
they didn’t want the game. So, I kept working the system, and getting data for
other battles (Prag, Kolin, Torgau), and submitted it as a four-battle Quad
idea to Command Magazine in the late 90’s.
They were going to do it, then had their financial crisis. The 4 battles got cut to two, but by then,
Command was on the verge of folding. Ty
Bomba released the rights back to me. I then submitted to GMT, and it got
published.
Q2 I loved Napoleonic history, the epic battles, and the colorful uniforms. When stationed in Washington D.C. as a Navy shore tour, I hit the Pentagon library a lot. I was quickly captivated by the Seven Years War material, and all of Frederick’s great battles – and uniforms that were just as colorful as in the Napoleonic era. At that time, there were few battle games on the SYW; GDW had small treatments of Lobositz and a portion of Prag; Clash of Arms had a few of the gigantic SYW games done. The GDW games were somewhat light, and not very colorful, and the COA games were just too big for me to want to play beyond a “once in ten years” mega effort. So SYW battles were largely virgin territory in the wargame world at the time – and nothing out there hit the sweet spot for me.
I loved the S&T Napoleon Quad games – not for any
strong attempt at “simulation,” but for their good playability and reasonable
“big picture” depictions. I got the idea
to develop a system for a SYW battle that was a notch heavier, gave a nod to
Linear warfare aspects without getting consumed by them, and – as all my
reading made me realize – covered the crucial Approach Marches that so much
determined the eventual outcomes of the battles. This could be captured in a Battle/Approach
March split start/length format; it would let players (and ME!
I solo 95% of my games) get a
battle done in 3-4 hours, and a full Approach scenario in 6-7. That would give the wargame world a Seven
Years War battle (or eventually, 8 battles) they could play frequently, and
finish in an evening, along with good variability due to the Approach March
version, and numerous optional additional “forces in the area” augments to
change things up.
And, to date, 25+ years later, there still isn’t much else
in the light-moderate SYW battle system niche, so I’m glad I did it!
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Brad Johnson
Q1 I know this is a survey about first designs, but
I'd like to say that the first game of any type that I helped get to a point
where it felt "done" was Sword of Rome (GMT Games, 2004),
which was designed by my friend, Wray Ferrell, and published by GMT Games. I became the developer of that game after the
original developer, Volko Ruhnke, was forced to withdraw due to work
obligations. Wray was very open to my
feedback during the development and playtesting process and I feel that I
contributed some significant elements to the final design.
This is important because it not only cemented my friendship
and design partnership with Wray, but also established a relationship with GMT
Games for both of us that gave us a platform for serious consideration of our
future designs. Sword of Rome directly
led to the first of my own designs that I was able to get to "done"
-- Time of Crisis (2017), which was co-designed with Wray Ferrell and
also published by GMT Games.
I had previously dabbled in many different personal game
design projects for decades, since I was in high school, and none had ever
advanced from being a collection of vague ideas to the point where I even had a
playable prototype. I must confess I
tend to have a wealth of ideas but a relatively low drive to actually work
through the difficult parts of the design process. I found that having Wray as a partner,
another person to whom I could feel a sense of obligation for finishing the
project, was key for me to be able to work through that difficult process. Plus, two heads can definitely be better than
one when it comes to brainstorming solutions for thorny problems. Nonetheless, it ended up taking us multiple
years and many iterations to bring Time of Crisis from
the initial idea to a game that was ready to play.
Q2 A somewhat lengthy chain of personal events, if I may be indulged:
I was never terribly interested in history through my high
school and college education. Although I
certainly played and enjoyed a variety of historical games during those times,
including such classics as Diplomacy and Civilization, none really sparked a
true interest in history until I experienced Republic of Rome from
Avalon Hill in 1990. I had never seen a
game quite like this, that really made history come alive for me. Coincidentally, a novelization of the years
of the Roman Republic leading up to the Marian-Sullan Civil Wars was then
published in the US in 1991, and this book kindled the fire of my interest in
Roman history.
Within a couple years of that, the internet was really
taking off for broad public use and I joined an online game of Republic of
Rome. I first encountered the name Wray
Ferrell in that game, whose Eagle faction formed an alliance with my Wreath
faction, although we did not carry on any communication immediately after
that. The next games that fascinated me
were We the People (Avalon Hill, 1993), which introduced me to
card-driven games, and then Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (Avalon Hill, 1996),
which became for me the ideal product of CDGs and Roman history. I soon started playing online games of
Hannibal, and in the type of coincidence that feels like the universe is trying
to tell you something, my first randomly-assigned opponent was Wray
Ferrell. Due to our shared love of Rome
and card-driven games, plus a general similarity in temperament, Wray emailed
me his initial draft ideas for Sword of Rome, seeking feedback.
After the success of Sword of Rome, Wray and I discussed
what would be our next project. We both
had been considering the concept of a grand strategic game covering the entire
fall of Rome, as a "book-end" to Sword of Rome (which originally had
the working title, The Rise of Rome.) We
quickly settled on that as our theme of choice, but what about mechanics? Around that time, Dominion (Rio Grande
Games, 2008) had been published to great acclaim, introducing the concept of a
deckbuilding game. I proposed merging
two modern classics, card-driven wargames and deckbuilding, to create a new
style of game (although obviously many others had the same good idea, and games
such as A Few Acres of Snow (Treefrog Games, 2011) beat us to
publication by quite a few years.)
Our first proof of concept was a fast prototype to use a
deckbuilding and card-driven action design to play a game chess (predating For the Crown by Victory Point Games (2011)).
That successfully gave us the seed of the triple action point system in
Time of Crisis. We brainstormed through
a number of failed iterations which made us realize that the enormous scale of
centuries of the Roman Empire was just too much for the game we
envisioned. Wray suggested reducing the
time scale to a more constrained period and proposed the Crisis of the Third
Century, about 50 years of some of the most tumultuous Roman history. This proved to be the key to making the game
more manageable and approachable. Despite that, we still needed to playtest our
way through many incremental iterations before we finally arrived at the Time
of Crisis that was eventually published by GMT Games.
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Brian Asklev
Q1 I started out with Nothing Gained but Glory (GMT Games, 2010) in the Musket and Pike Battle series.
It was an easy starting point as a designer as it was a game in an existing and well-functioning series so the only things I needed to worry about was order of battle and map research and how to translate that into a classic hex and counter system with as few special rules as possible (although I can certainly be argued if I was successful in keeping the number of special rules low😄).
Q2 I was at the time super
enthusiastic about the Musket and Pike series, and as a Dane interested in the
military history of the 17th century there were just a lot of battles that were
obvious candidates for that game series. But since must of the literature on
them were in Danish or Swedish it was hard for me to push the series designer
to do them, and in the end he persuaded me to give it a go myself - and since
then I have been unable to stop designing wargames 🙂
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Brian Train
Q1 The first complete wargame I designed to the point where it felt done was Pusan Perimeter (Schutze Games, 1999), in late 1981. It was a regiment-division scale game on that early phase of the Korean War, when the UN forces were backed into that small corner of the Korean peninsula.
I was still a new wargame player, so the rules were
somewhere in between Avalon Hill Blitzkrieg (1965) and simpler SPI.
I remember playing Patton's 3rd Army (SPI, 1980) (the
issue game in Strategy and Tactics #78) at the time and drawing some
inspiration from its chrome.
I thought I had invented the idea of "secondary Zone of
Control", in a rule where a US division could interdict enemy movement two
hexes away from its location (I was thinking about its ability to use
divisional artillery and spotter aircraft locally). Turns out I hadn't; years
later I discovered something like it had been done in James Dunnigan's Bastogne
game from 1969.
It was completely hand-made: hand-typed rules (6 pages);
hand-typed and drawn chart and table (one of each, 1 page in all);
hand-coloured map with photocopied hand-drawn hexes; hand-made counters (about
85).
Obviously only one copy exists and even it has lost the
counters.
 |
| Photos courtesy of Brian Train. |
Q2 When I was a kid one of the books my father had on his shelf was This Kind of War, the famous if impressionistic history of the Korean War by T. R. Fehrenbach.
I don't know who made the maps but they featured map marking symbols for the military units on them, and there was a guide in the back to reading them. This is where I learned my NATO symbols, at age 10!
Anyway, the map of the Pusan Perimeter seemed to me to capture an interesting battle quite neatly... the forces were arranged in a more or less rectangle so would use up most of the map-sheet, it was a tense situation overall with the North Koreans at the end of their tether and the UN forces badly battered. And best of all, both sides got to attack in order to make a good showing in the game, which also had a time limit of September 15 when the Inchon landing turned everything on its head.
All in all, I think I made a simple game about an
interesting situation.
It was not the first game I made an effort to distribute or publish, that came later... in 1999 I did dress up the game considerably and clean up a lot of rules and OOB problems, and it was published in very limited quantities by Schutze Games of Australia. People seem to like it!
From the very beginning of my playing wargames in 1979, I noted a lack of games on the kinds of conflicts I wanted to play, namely post-WW 2 conflicts.
This was 1981 and there were few if any Korean War games
available, still less any that focused on the tense Pusan Perimeter phase of
the conflict.
So, though it would be another 10 years until I designed my
next games (Civil Power (BTR Games, 1996) and Power Play, (Schutze
Games, 1998)) I already had a taste for wanting to design on topics that no one
else had touched, just because I wanted to see more of what I wanted to play in
the world.
-----
Brien J.
Miller
I played my very first wargame in 1969. It was Midway
(Avalon Hill, 1964) and I was at a friend’s house in Guilford, Connecticut. At
the time, I lived in Branford, the town just west of Guilford, where I had met
my friend in junior high. At the end of our junior high school years, his
family moved to Guilford, so on Saturdays I would bike over to meet up with
him.
It was at his house that he brought out a series of games.
Midway was one of them, and another was a baseball game, one of the early
versions before more complex games appeared later. Nonetheless, I was
immediately taken with Midway. I had been a ship model builder since I was
probably twelve years old, so seeing the top-down images of the ships—and
discovering both the U.S. Navy and Japanese Navy ships involved in the
battle—was a major attraction.
I later went on to obtain games of my own. The first was one
I found at a flea market in New Haven, Connecticut: the very first edition of Gettysburg,
(Avalon Hill, 1958), which used long counters and a square grid rather than
hexes. That would have an influence years later when I began designing games of
my own.
Throughout high school, I acquired more games and played
them with other friends, notably Avalon Hill’s Waterloo (Avalon Hill,
1962). At about the same time, one of my relatives introduced me to the
television show Star Trek. I had already watched a lot of science-fiction
programs and movies, including Lost in Space, but it was a major motion picture
that locked in my interest—continuing to this day—in astronomy and spaceflight:
Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Star Trek, however, offered a different vision of the
distant future. By this point I had also become heavily involved in playing
games from Simulations Publications Inc., or SPI. I had the idea of taking the
rules and design concepts from SPI’s USN (SPI, 1971) and applying them to a Star Trek-like
science-fiction game—although, of course, entirely in two dimensions.
This involved an elaborate hand-drawn map. At the time, even
though I was only a sophomore, I was already taking drafting at the senior
high-school curriculum level because I had come into it with a strong graphical
and artistic ability. I took large pieces of cardboard to make the map base,
sprayed them black, then dashed white dots across the surface to create a star
field. I went back in afterward and hand-painted or drafted the planets and
systems that the ships could travel to. I did much the same thing with the
counters, except that I hand-painted every one of them at half-inch size, which
was something of a challenge.
I also managed to type out the rules derived from USN,
modifying them as I went. It is worth remembering that this was at a time when
there were no personal computers and certainly no voice-to-text entry.
Everything was typed on an old-style manual typewriter.
The rules were probably never truly complete, and the game
was really designed for me, although I shared it with my friend in Guilford and
a couple of other friends in Branford. It wasn’t really a finished, playable
game, but it set the table. It gave me my first taste of what designing games
could be like.
That was actually my first “design.” It would be some years
before I tackled a title intended for publication, in the early 1990s. Prior to
that, I had written and submitted additional rules for SPI’s monster game War in the Pacific (SPI, 1978), adding a detailed submarine component. I had
long recognized that it was the United States Navy submarine force that was
primarily responsible for devastating Japanese merchant shipping through an
extended campaign that ultimately helped break the economic system sustaining
Japan’s war effort.
Those rules were never published, although I did receive a
thank-you note from SPI. More importantly, the effort gave me considerable
experience in creating and inserting complex rules, along with playing-piece
artwork, into an existing game design. That, too, would have a significant
influence on my later published work.
In the years that followed, I started my own publishing
company, Games USA, where I published the first two titles in my Eagles of the Empire game system: the 1812 Napoleonic battle of Borodino (Games
USA. 1994) and the 1807 battle of Friedland (Games USA, 1995). I then
joined forces with Avalanche Press to publish the third title, covering the
1807 Battle of Eylau [Eagles of the Empire: Preussisch-Eylau (Avalanche
Press, 1999)].
Collaborating with Avalanche allowed me to contribute to a
number of their designs, most notably the War at Sea games, for which I
designed and graphically executed the counters and maps, as well as a number of
charts and tables. I supported a good number of titles with Avalanche, and the
work received very positive reviews.
While collaborating with Avalanche, I returned to the
submarine campaign concept I had originally developed for SPI’s War in the
Pacific and began turning it into a fully standalone game. The design
synthesized the storytelling of Clay Blair’s deeply researched Silent Victory with a little-known work by Dr. Robert E. Kuenne of Princeton
University, published by Yale University Press, titled The Attack Submarine.
Kuenne presented a statistical analysis of the submarine as a strategic weapon
of war, capable of strangling an enemy’s shipping and supply lines rather than
simply being used against other combat ships.
In the modern age—particularly following the first
generations of nuclear submarines—the strategic circumstances changed
considerably. The Soviet Union, for example, did not present the same sort of
strategic maritime shipping network to interdict. But Kuenne’s analysis helped
demonstrate why the U.S. Navy submarine campaign against Japan had been so
successful, while the German submarine campaign against Britain and, later, the
Allied powers ultimately failed.
Synthesizing Blair’s storytelling with the analytics and
algorithms presented by Kuenne allowed me to create a design approach
integrating essentially data-driven systems with the narrative of the submarine
campaign against Imperial Japan. I titled the resulting game Silent War
(Compass Games, 2005).
Avalanche showed no interest in publishing the title,
although they did provide some early playtesting. Shortly thereafter, I moved
on from my collaboration with Avalanche but continued working on Silent War.
In the early 2000s, I was contacted by one of the founding
members of Compass Games, who had seen discussions about Silent War on online
forums. He expressed interest and invited me to meet with them. At the time I
was living in New Jersey, but I had an opportunity to travel to Windsor Locks,
Connecticut, where I met the three founders at the Hilton Hotel at Bradley
International Airport.
It was there that I showed them Silent War, and they
immediately decided they wanted to publish it. During those discussions, I
suggested several changes, primarily moving to larger playing pieces—because
gamers were getting older—and using long counters for the submarines, which
would allow more detailed images of the boats to be placed on them.
Compass was ecstatic about the idea and gave me full control
over the final development of the game, its graphics, and the overall product
design. I also provided Compass with their logo and what became known as “the
boot,” the black bar at the bottom of most of their game boxes containing the
logo and company name.
So, from a never-completed and never-published space game,
through the self-published Eagles of the Empire series, collaboration with
Avalanche Press, and finally several published titles for Compass Games—not to
mention all the additional graphical design work I did for other Compass
titles—the journey through game design has been a lot of fun, and one filled
with some really good folks.
-----
Bruce Harper
Q1 My path to game design was unusual (I think). I
played the original Avalon Hill Rise and Decline of the Third Reich
(Avalon Hill, 1974), and at one point I wrote a long letter to them with
numerous questions about the rules (back in the day when that was the
procedure). I also suggested that maybe the Western Allies should be allowed to
grant aid to Russia through an Allied-controlled Turkey.
I received a reply to all my questions, including a notification that my Turkey
suggestion would be included in the next edition of the game. That seemed very
cool!
A year or two later, the person handling the Q&A for Third Reich (Larry
Bucher) asked if I would take over his duties. I agreed, and became the answer
person for the game.
I found that many of the questions stemmed from gaps in the rules, and when
this occurred, I edited the rules.
Over time, I began to edit rule paragraphs where no one had (yet) asked
questions, although the rule wording invited them.
Finally, I began to consider substantive rules changes (i.e., changing a rule
which seemed to have an obvious omission or inconsistency).
This led to the fifth edition of Third Reich, then Advanced Third Reich,
then a Pacific version (Empire of the Rising Sun (Avalon Hill, 1995)),
then finally A World at War (GMT Games, 2003).
To your questions: I think A World at War is close to being "done"
now - the game covers such a broad topic (all of World War II) that there is
always room for some improvement. Thankfully, that is very rare.
Q2 The topic was more or less an accident, as described
above.
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Bruce Maxwell
Q1 As a child and teen during the ‘70s and ‘80s, I
was fascinated by warfare. I built huge numbers of plastic kits for planes,
tanks and warships. This led to playing wargames, with a particular interest in
modern warfare. I bought every game that SPI published covering a possible
NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict. One of those games was Würzburg (SPI, 1975, which was
a simple game published as part of SPI’s first Modern Battles (SPI,
1975) Quad. I played that game until the ink began to wear off the game map.
As fun as the game was to play, the game system was quite
simplistic. I began to think about how I could make the game more realistic.
That led me to working on a set of House Rules, and that in turn birthed the
idea that maybe I could design a game from the ground up to more accurately
model how I thought modern warfare actually worked. I bought blank counter
sheets and blank maps and spent the next eight years working on this game as my
primary hobby. I called it “Bear & Eagle.”
I ultimately ended up working for SPI, and when it went
bust, the design team moved to Victory Games. That led to Victory publishing a
second design I had been working on, NATO: The Next War in Europe
(Victory Games, 1983). And that release opened the door for me to publish my
first design (and first love), Bear & Eagle. When West End picked up the
game, they asked me to change the name to Air & Armor (West End
Games, 1996). And that is the story of how my first design got to market.
Q2 Like most children who grew up during the Cold
War, the threat of nuclear annihilation focused my attention on the heavily
armed standoff in Europe. I did not so much pick the topic as the topic picked
me. I always saw a wargame as a challenge. Could I be the better general? And
there was something about proving that I was a good enough general to hold off
the “Soviet hordes” that really drew me in. It was just natural to want to
create a game where I could practice that art.
-----
Carl Fung
Q1 The first wargame design I completed was Goose Green (Multi-Man Publishing, 2023) for TCS [Tactical Combat Series] back
around 2002. At the time, I was just "a guy" who played wargames and
enjoyed The Gamers series of games. I had lots of concepts of designs, some of
which eventually also got fleshed out into finalized designs like Valley of Tears (Multi-Man Publishing, 2023). Goose Green was the first one I
completed and submitted to Dean Essig. It sat in the queue for years until it
was finally picked up to be formally developed. It was released in 2023. This
shows how long a game design can sit in statis, with no guarantee that it'll be
published. I'm lucky in designing games
using The Gamers series of games as the series rules allows a core base of
rules in which to build new designs with the series rules as a base. I don't need
to design from scratch concepts like ZOC or combat as it's all built into the
series rules. I just have to focus on the game specific topic, historical map,
Order of Battle, and other historical tidbits.
My first published game, however, was Iron Curtain (Multi-Man Publishing, 2020). I learned a lot from that experience, which carried onto the design and development of other games, which included Goose Green, which required refinement before it was published.
 |
| Goose Green in play (Courtesy Mike Riley, BGG). |
Q2 I designed the game after reading the book Goose Green by Mark Adkin. The narrative immediately struck a chord with simulating the action in Tactical Combat Series. After sizing out the map, it fit perfectly on one map. The book contained a lot of detail which helped translate the history into a game design, from the Order of Battle, orders issues, enemy positions, intent, reinforcements, and even alternate reinforcements for what ifs. The book was supplemented with additional sources and feeds with my notion that heavy research is necessary to design a game.
All of the topics start with a
book or simply just being fascinated by a battle or campaign. During the
initial research, a topic will either garner a lot more interest and want me to
dig more and more, or it will peter out as I will find shortcomings where it
might not work out as a game. Game designs need to strike the balance of
historical accuracy, playability, and fun. There should be something that both
sides need to do. Static or stand and die battles aren't fun and may not offer
interesting choices for one side. The reason why we remember certain game
experiences was because of the events in the game, not necessarily that it
captured perfectly a battle that might otherwise have been dull to play.
Certainly familiar battles (think Gettysburg, Waterloo, and
Battle of the Bulge) make for more popular games because they are familiar to
well-read and amateur historians alike. There is nothing wrong with that
because each game will have its own spin and interpretation of the battle, and
hopefully they are well researched using the latest there is to learn.
Historical research evolves over time. We are still learning new things about
WWII, so familiar topics don't necessarily become trite. Unfamiliar topics can
likewise be interesting, given their newness to players. Yet there might be a
reason why there's not a lot of games on the Madagascar Campaign in WWII. Fascinating for it being unknown, but
playability-wise, it might be entirely dull.
-----
Carl Paradis
Q1 Definitely my first-ever published Wargame, No Retreat! The Russian Front (Victory Point Games, 2008). So much so that I’m currently putting the small finishing touches on the final “Designer’s Edition” right now, almost 20 years later, and it will not differ from the original version by very much. That must be a sign, right?
Q2 Well, I always considered myself as a Gamer first, Designer second. The WW2 Eastern Front has always fascinated me (that, and the Napoleonic period), but I never was fully satisfied, by far, by the countless designs on the same topic. I then tried to playtest and offer input to some future games made on the East Front, but I was never taken seriously.
So, being an engineer by trade, I naturally decided to make
my own game. Then I got bitten by the “game-designer Bug”, and the rest is history!
But my main love is Napoleonic's; Eastern Front WW2 was just more easy and
convenient to make first. And I waited a long time since then before making my
new big move: A huge series of Napoleonic battle games, called Battle Commander, or I should I say “Black Powder” games, as the series will cover
other periods too.
-----
Carlos Diaz Narvaez
Q1 The question touches on something important: the
feeling, as a game designer, that the game is already finished. In that case, I
must say that it was an early version of what would later become my game La Carga de los 3 Reyes (NAC Wargames, 2025), which I simply called La Batalla
de las Navas de Tolosa. I actually created it almost at the same time as
another game about General Custer at Little Big Horn. I’d say both were among
my first games that already had a clear identity as finished games.
I felt that the games had substance, with good rules, a
well-defined and consistent combat system, and that the people who tested them
were interested in continuing to play them and found them quite enjoyable.
Q2 Focusing on Las Navas de Tolosa. The initial motivation that led me to work on this game was that, as a kid, I collected all the wargames from the NAC (Nike and Cooper) brand, and I managed to get everyone except for one that was advertised as being about that very battle. I spent years looking for it, but there was no way to find it anywhere. I thought it might never have been published, even though I’d seen a photo of the game box, and over time those suspicions proved true—there was only one prototype copy.
Anyway, I decided to create what I’d longed for so much, and that was what sparked my interest in that battle, until it ended up becoming my first published game as well.
-----
Charles Vassey
Q1 It was an expansion to S&T's Battle of Borodino (SPI, 1972) sent to SPI in the early Seventies.
First complete game was I think a tactical game on Marston
Moor in my magazine, Perfidious Albion.
Q2 Books, always books. Borodino because of Chris Duffy's book [Borodino and the War of 1812], and Marston Moor because of Peter Young's [Marston Moor 1644: The Campaign and the Battle].
I read a lot of books and probably store a lot away in my head (though much trickles out of my ears) but the true spark is where a rule system I have played (which suffers from the same memory issue) cross-pollinates a book I have read. I usually start by using someone else's game even if in the finished product there is little left of the original.
-----
Chris Janiec
Q1 My first historical game was a Mystery Rummy
variant called Piltdown Man, with eight of the plausible perpetrators of
this early 20th Century hoax as the suspects.
I sent a prototype to the publisher of the series, who declined to
accept it.
My first true wargame design was a prequel to GMT's WW2: Barbarossa to Berlin (GMT Games, 2002)
called WW2: Appeasement to Apocalypse. It was designed to be played either as a
stand-alone or to segue into BtoB.
Of note, both were derivative rather than "clean
sheet" designs, though both featured original elements.
Q2 In both cases it was because
the subject matter interested me. Famous
hoaxes, particularly when unsolved as Piltdown Man was at that time, are always
fun. And the plausible alternatives in
the run-up to World War II and its early stages provide ample grist for a good
game that can also provide a variable starting point for the rest of the war.
-----
Claude Whalen
Q1 My first game design was Kernstown
(Revolution Games, 2019) for the "Blind Swords" system. I had
done testing for the system and when an opportunity came along to design a game,
I took it.
Q2 I've always had an interest in the American Civil War and Kernstown had two battles on the same field. It also was the closest battlefield to my residence so I could get there and back in one day. I was able to carefully walk most of the field and that really gave me a feel for both battles.
I also had dealt with the system designer, the cartographer
and the company owner. All these things made my first design an enjoyable
experience and I've never looked back.
-----
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