State of Play: With The Hammer – building a playtest set

 

 

 

I read once that Jad Fair from the band Half-Japanese never tunes his guitar before
going on stage, saying it's more rock-n-roll that way. I guess this is an analogue to my
approach to this kind of stuff. The map is a print out from an Officeworks photocopy/
printer (on an 80gsm A3 sheet), the Peasent Band tiles are knock-off Scrabble
pieces, the counters are hand laminated and the meeple are refugees from a
game I literally stripped down for parts (Romolo o Remo (Giochix.it, 2013). 

It’s a failing on my part that I struggle with some technologies, sometimes. I’ve tinkered with VASSAL at different times in the past (maybe I need to go back to Ardwulf’s primer video for a refresher), and while I’ve downloaded Tabletop Simulator (TTS), I’m pretty sure I’ve never been able to get anything to work on the damn thing. I have, this year, finally tried out Rally the Troops (this is a boon for anyone who can't make a face to face game, and something I'm new to but keen to explore further; a big shout-out and thank you to T2 and M from the Adelaide Wargamers FB group for the platform tutelage and lessons in humility). This is a platform I’m comfortable with because it’s been built by people who play physical wargames, to best mimic that experience in an online environment. But I’m not here to talk about all that today – I’ll circle back to RTT in a future post.

As I mentioned in my last post, I put up my hand to playtest Ray Weiss’s new title, With The Hammer: Thomas Müntzer & the German Peasant War in Thuringia (Conflict Simulations Ltd, ~2025 - this is a link to the pre-order page; WTH doesn't have a BGG entry yet). With the Hammer isn’t exactly component-poor, but looking at the manifest, I thought it was a project I could tackle.

Let me say up front, I don’t relish this kind of stuff. I ‘ve never put together a print-and-play game, and I’m simply not equipped to mount and cut oodles of counters.

Playtesting is a different thing. It’s a chance to give something back to the hobby that has helped keep me sane through some tough times, so I’m willing to put some extra effort in.

Building the perfect beast

When released,  With The Hammer will have a 22”by 17” map, a Noble Board, sixteen cards (twelve poker-sized, four tarot-sized), a set of pawns and discs for the four Peasant leaders (in four different colours), three red blocks representing the Noble armies, nine woodgrain discs for the Peasant Bands (with stickers to apply to the Noble Army blocks and Peasant Band discs), and a half-sheet of counters.

After getting a set of the print files from Mr Weiss, a visit to Officeworks secured colour copies of everything I needed (well two trips, since the first batch didn’t include the Peasant Bands). The map was easy – 22” by 17” is close enough to an A3 sheet. The Noble board is used to mark the activities of the three noble armies. For a playtest set, an A4 sheet of paper would suffice.

Now, I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to toss unused or superfluous game parts. I have stitching boxes full of spare blocks from Commands and Colors, and Columbia and Worthington block games. No discs though. No matter. I used three Columbia blocks (from Richard III (Columba Games, 2009) and Athens and Sparta (Columbia Games, 2007); Columbia tend to use the same colour shades for all their block games).

Noble Army blocks (at full strength) on the (untrimmed) Noble Board;
trimming build-time by not trimming.

Speaking of trimming, the Noble Army blocks were re-laminated (rather untidily, I'll
admit) after a change to their Strength matrix. Still, they'll do the job.

For the Peasant Bands, I tried to get some one-inch wooden discs from a couple of different craft shops; I’ve seen these before, though they’re probably closer to 3/4”, but would have been fine for my purposes.

Peasant Army tiles and "blanks" (in the actual game these will be round and
much nicer-looking.

Such was not to be. It may be because so much of the space is currently devoted to Christmas-themed products, but nowhere had the discs I wanted. So, I improvised. Some crafty folks use Scrabble (Unknown, 1948) letters to craft plaques with affirmations and such. You can buy bags of about a hundred tiles on eBay and AliExpress, but one store had a bag of about thirty oddly shaped and slightly thinner than regulation, but there would be big enough to do the job (and have some left over for the loose component-hoarding boxes).

Leftover blanks (or potential new game pieces).

The card images and the Noble Army labels came as picture files. I’ve had some practice with this over the years in both my work- and hobby-lives; I copy-pasted the images one by one into a Word document, reducing the images individually to the required size using the ruler at the top of the screen, then placing them together on pages to reduce the amount of printing required. I managed to get the whole lot down to about six A4 sheets for the components and one A3 for the map, about $4.00 in printing total.

The Event Card deck. These came up much nicer than the ones I made up
for The Great Northern War playtest.

The twelve random event cards printed, hand-cut to size, front-and-back, and sleeved them with slightly narrower bridge-sized cards to give them some stability. The four tarot-sized cards I also cut out by hand (I really need to get myself a little paper trimmer for this kind of thing), bought a fifty-pack of tarot sleeves, and stiffened them with cards “borrowed’ from my 7^th Sea RPG Sorte Deck (essentially a game world-themed tarot deck, with really nice cards). As these are never turned over, I didn’t bother with backs.

The starter team for my first game. The four tarot-sized sleeves were the most expensive
component in the whole project (they only come in packets of fifty). 

The most labour-intensive part of the it was the counters. The printed game will likely have seventy or so counters and markers, including supply markers, conversion markers for the locations the Peasant leaders have successfully brought into the fold, and a draw pool of Freelancers, unaffiliated Miners and Landsknecht units, as well as the usual Turn and VP counters and such.

My makeshift counters, not pretty but they'll do the job. From top row, left to right:
Turn marker (well, d'uh), Victory Point marker (VPs are tracked on a pendulum
track), Heldrungen Siege Rating marker. Second row: Supply markers (1 point/
2 point), Depleted and Exhausted Locale markers. Third row: Propaganda
marker, Freelancer markers (Landsknects and Miners).

As I said, I’m not kitted out to mount and cut sheets of counters, but I did have a baggie of 5/8^th unprinted counters left over from another game (I’m not certain, but I think they may have been from Devil Dogs: Belleau Wood 1918 (Worthington Publishing, 2019) – I remember there being a lot of left over counters from punching that puppy). The next stage involved hand-cutting (I really need that trimmer) the fronts and the majority of the backs of seventy counters, then pasting the cut-outs on the front and back of these counters. I took a guess at the excess counters I used, and it worked out; it turned out there were about eighty-four in the bag. At least they were pre-rounded. This I did by picking up the cut-out face for application, placing it on the end of a glue stick, then rubbing it over the end like a pool cue-tip until it was well coated, then applying it to the counter (checking first it was the right way up for the reverse images) and sliding it around until it was square. About 120 times. I stumbled across this technique while prepping a playtest set for The Great Northern War (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024); it’s a little more labour-intensive, but I haven’t had any curling or delaminating on any of the counters. With the trimming it took maybe an hour and a half.

Starting set-up (the Artillery-Point marker should be on the General track,
but otherwise good to go).

So now I have a complete game. Nearly. The rules are being adjusted, and some of the components have changed (the steps for the Noble Armies, for example began as 2.5 through 10, but now are a less math-challenging 3 through 12). Actual play has been held up with the personal matter I alluded to in my last post, and the fact that my regular partner in crime tested positive for COVID last week and has been in exile at one end of his house. When I have a couple of games under my belt I’ll report in again, but it looks like a promising game, both a diversion and an education.

 

  

State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 2

  

   

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

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

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

Leading tricks

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

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

Mistakes were made

 

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

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

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

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

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

The process

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

State of Play: playtesting Great Northern War – Part 1

 

  

I’ve been taking some time away from my regular playing and writing lately because I’ve been working on something that I didn’t feel at liberty to write about. But it’s now out in the world, and I can now talk about a new game from designer Ray Weiss and his company, Conflict Simulations LLC, Great Northern War (CSL, 2024). Let me say at the outset that this isn’t a review, because I haven’t seen the finished product, but this is the kind of game that might be lost in the maelstrom of neat games from small publishers, so I wanted to highlight what I think makes Great Northern War special. I’m going to look at the game in two parts. Here, I’ll show you what my kit-bashed prototype looked, and talk a little about how it all fits together. In the second part I’ll talk about the playtesting process, the inevitability – and the virtue – of making mistakes, and how we (probably) helped make a really good game a little better.

I’d been proofing the system rules for Afrika Army Korps, the next game in Conflict Simulations’ DAMOS series. CSL has three DAMOS titles out currently, Army Group North (CSL, 2019), Army Group Center (CSL, 2019), and Army Group South (CSL, 2019). These can be played in one grand campaign game with combined maps.

While I was going through the DAMOS rules, the Great Northern War rules arrived. Ray had set up a Table Top Simulator module for playtesting and asked if I’d help out, but I’m a klutz when it comes to technology and could not get it to work.* But taking a first pass at the rules, I was intrigued; this was a different beast to any wargame I’d come across before. I really wanted to see how this would work, so I asked Ray for the artwork, and he forwarded me the files.

Build me a game

DIY Control Markers (not pretty, but functional).

After a trip to Officeworks for the colour printing, I set about building my own copy of Great Northern War. The result wasn’t pretty, but it was functional. The game components are cylinders labelled with the unit facings, like a Columbia block game, but for ease I used left over Commands and Colours: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) blocks, the spares you always get in the sets. French (navy) and Russian (green) blocks with allies in other colours matching as close to the instructions as possible and glued the printed-off leader labels on them with a glue stick. I used wooden blocks from another game as the supply dump tokens and used some blank 9/16ths chits as reversable control markers. The play map I printed at A3 size – about 140% larger than the actual board, partly to compensate for the oversize pieces, partly because I’m old and big enough to admit small print can be a challenge.

DIY Leader markers (Ottomans not mounted yet).

I had a cheap set of playing cards and some spare Avery label sheets and made my own Decision Cards (face cards, aces, and jokers). The game is influenced by the Event Cards of Hitler’s Reich (GMT Games, 2018) that can be purchased by the player for a one-off or on-going benefit, at the cost of a card from their hand (sometimes two), reducing their temporary hand-size. Hand-size is something I’ll swing back to in a minute. The 10s are also separated out. These can be purchased as well, and their virtue is you can play them once per round, but they stay with you (they don’t go back into the draw deck), and they don’t count to your hand-size.

DIY Decision Cards (and tens, Black suits for Swedes, Red for the Coalition).

How it works

The remainder of the deck – the twos through nines, minus the drawn trump card – make the draw deck. Each turn, the players are dealt a hand each, according to their hand size (this is a crucial factor in the game; again, like in Hitler’s Reich, if you can manage to reduce your opponent’s hand-size to zero, you get an automatic victory – and control of trade in central Europe for the next twenty or thirty years). When to play a trick, or respond to a trick from your opponent, you’ll be using a card from your hand. Each time a trick is played, both players draw a replacement card from the draw deck. When the deck is empty, all the cards are reshuffled, the turn marker moves up, and a new trump is drawn.

Trick-taking is the driver of the game. Whatever action you want to take, you’ll probably have to lead a trick. If you win, you get to do the declared action; if you lose, play goes to the other team.

Initial set-up, with Turn and Diplomatic Appeals tracks, and 

blue cubes (off-board) for Swedish supply  depots. 

Each turn, a new trump suit is drawn and marked on a track on the board. When playing a trick, the higher-value card will beat the lower one, but a trump suit card will beat anything except a higher-value trump. Before Great Northern War, I’d never played a trick-taking game before – growing up we never even had a deck of cards in the house – so this was all new to me.

Both sides begin with some of their Leaders already placed on the board. Leaders represent the military leader and their associated strength of numbers. To deploy a reserve Leader, first you’ll have to win a trick. To activate a Leader for movement, you’ll have to win a trick.

Combat is a little different. When you engage in combat, attacker and defender will each choose a card and place it face-down in front of them, to be revealed simultaneously. The card value will be added to the command value of the Leader engaging in the battle, along with any modifiers, then each player rolls a pair of dice, and that result is added to the total. The higher number wins (draws to the defender), but the margin of victory is where things get interesting. A margin of a couple of points might see one or the other side have to retreat a space or two to avoid a loss point, but a big enough margin could see the losing side’s troops removed from the board, and if a recovery roll goes badly, even permanently from the game.

Setting up an early game (Hand-size tokens missing, Anti-Swedish
track-marker at wrong end of track).

There is a lot going on in Great Northern War. It really is a simple game to learn and play, but it’s strategically deep, with multiple pathways to (a potential) victory, and the brinksmanship with the trick-leading driver adds a constant undercurrent of stress. As does the general hand-management required to ensure you’re not caught out cardless. Taking your opponent’s capitals will reduce their hand-size (there’s a handy hand-size reminder on the right-hand side of the board) but taking them and keeping them is harder than you might think. Combat is swift and often brutal. And every time you want to take an action, even something as simple as waking up a general and getting him to haul ass to the neighbouring town or set up a supply dump, there’s a good chance that your intentions will be frustrated by the turn of a card.

I’m trying hard not to write a review of the game – I’d feel weird about reviewing something I was involved in developing, even this tangentially – but I will go a little further into what I think the game gets right and who it will likely appeal to.  Here I've tried to offer a glimpse at how the game works, in pretty broad brushstrokes. In Part 2, I'll take a deeper look at the game's internal interactions, as well as some of the dumb mistakes I made on the road to learning all of that, and what came out of it in the end. 

 

* This was all on me. In truth, we replaced the old desktop a month or two before Christmas, and I’d simply forgotten to install it on the new machine. If You have access to TTS, I believe the playtest module may still be available; search for Great Norther War on Steam.