Terrain, and time

Back in November I mentioned some time objectives.  One of those was to be able to fit the whole event into 4 hours, with 3 hours of play.  Implicit in this is the expectation that the game would be played on a club night, so set-up and clean-up have to roll into this time.

So, one of the objectives here has to be a way to dress the table that looks OK for a game, but easy to transport and set up.  To quantify that all required terrain must be able to fit into a backpack that can be transported by public transit.

That does not rule out grander constructs, but the design of the game cannot required them in order to work.

I Go, You Go, We Go, Hugo?

My first miniatures gaming experience was Charge!; early on I got used to writing orders and moving my figures at the same time as my opponent. Always seemed to work well, and we never that I recall had a problem that could not be solved by breaking the moves into quarters.

More recently published rules work that way as well. Both Command Decision and 1870 use a chit to express commitment to an order with the details worked out in a shared movement phase.

Other rules use a system where only one player, and generally one formation, is moving at a time. This may be a completely alternating system where I move all my units and you move yours, or it may be an interleaved system where sides alternate moving subunits either picked by the player or by a card draw.

My main experience to compare these two approaches in rules for the same period and level of play has been Command Decision and Blitzkrieg Commander. Both are excellent systems, well supported, with an enthusiastic following.

Both games were full of surprises, but they came from completely different mechanisms.

In playing Command Decision I found that most of my decision making took place in the few minutes I spent laying chits. During the shared movement phase I discovered the implications of the intersection of my decisions with my opponent's. My heart would sink, my hope would be buoyed up, but I would not be making decisions.

Playing Blitzkrieg Commander, I find myself constantly making decisions. Do I try to get another action, do I shoot or do I move if I am the player who's turn it is? Do I use my opportunity fire now, or wait f I am the non-moving player?

I like making decisions. There is a momentum to how battles are fought, especially in the days before radio, that should constrict how quickly a formation can reverse a decision made and disseminated an hour ago. But within the bounds of that overriding decision, there should be decisions for the player to make constantly through the game.

Lets make that an objective:

• Every player should have decisions to make constantly through every turn.

Another audience to consider (especially since I am liable to be one while developing the rules) is the solo player. Inherently, in solo play, only one formation is moving at a time. I am not sure that having to wear both hats at once to work out shared movement situation will be all that much fun.

So, looks like I will be going with some variation on I Go/You Go. But I am not sure of the details yet.

Just a quick aside on sequence of play. While I like fluidity in rules, I do (probably because I played boardgames for so many years) like to see pretty much every key activity allocated a place in the sequence of play. The SoP is not just an order in which things are done. It is a checklist to make sure that we do not forget anything.

Lets talk about time for a second

First, lets review one of our guiding principals. I pulled 6 hours out of the air for a duration, but after a perfectly unscientific but interesting poll on wd3 and some other discussions I have decided to halve that, and set 3 hours for a target. That is not long for a big battle; I am also allowing some slack since 4 hours seems widely acceptable. But it is easier to use up setup, take down and chat time.

The members of a group I had a chance to play Triumph of Will with mentioned that they never got to use some of the interesting features of those rules for rallying troops and bringing them back into action because they only had a pub evening to play the game. I want to avoid that problem.

So, a 12 hour battle in 3 hours of play -- we will have to trip along with an average of 4 times time acceleration. Of course, not every turn will take the same amount of time to resolve, but that average will be have to be kept in focus. Time and motion study time, I guess.

Considering wargame rules for the Franco Prussian War

Every project needs a well defined object. Here is mine:

To produce a set of wargames rules with which I can:

• Refight the battle of Mars-La-Tour
  
• as a fun 2 to 8 player game
  
• on a 6 foot by 4 foot table
• using Pendraken 10mm miniatures
• in under 6 hours

The rules, of course, must be usable for smaller actions in proportionately less time and space -- but not battles where the size of one force or the other falls below the basic resolution of units.

So much for the positive. There are a few negative objectives as well:

• The game must not be "fiddly." My fingers are arthritic and my vision is blurring. This means that base sizes must be reasonably large and small status and tracking markers must not be too numerous or tiny.
• The rules must not require specialized terrain boards -- they must work with more-or-less ordinary wargames terrain, preferably from my existing stock.
• No rosters. Status tracking displays I can build and put on the table or fine, but I dislike paper checklists.
• The game must not be frustrating. A game must be challenging, but the player must believe that he wins or loses based on his own decisions most of all.
  

It is also important that the rules follow as much as possible a proper point of view. It is a good general guideline for a wargame that an Army commander should control corps and know where his divisions are, and that a corps commander shoudl command divisions and know where his brigades are. While details below that level can be technically very interesting, they do not belong at this level of games. There are many tactical games that address that level very well indeed.