lewpuls's blog

In many “natural” games, such as sports, and in many traditional board and card games, every participant begins with an equal position and prospects to every other. This is symmetry. We can look at game design as devising interesting ways to break up symmetry, to introduce asymmetry. Some of these are achieved through player choice, some through randomness, some through uncertainty, and some through choice or caveat of the designer.

Two military/political aspects of the ancient world hold a fascination for me, because I've not found or seen a really satisfactory way to represent them in games. These are the problems of "the bump" and of tribute.

This is a discussion of how some games include a cycle of converting resources through some means of production such as factories or agricultural facilities into assets that are usable to help succeed in the game. These assets are often physical things but can be capabilities or even victory points themselves.

This post was precipitated by a question from a reader regarding how often or how persistent he should be in trying to get an email response from a publisher, after initial contact.

What it has become is an attempt to describe, up to the point of my limited knowledge, what tabletop hobby game publishers are like and how they work. I don’t know all the publishers, of course, and in particular I’ve never had any contact with German publishers. Yet I think I can tell new game designers some things that might help them understand how the industry works.

“War” games are fundamentally different from “battle” games, although most people would call both wargames. In the former there’s an economy and the war is essentially about controlling a better economy that ultimately gives you the preponderance of force. The focus tends to be strategic rather than tactical with maneuver contributing to gaining or keeping control of economic locations.

In a battle game you have an order of appearance that rarely changes, and no economy. Then the focus tends to become tactical, finding better ways to butcher the enemy before they butcher you. There may be objectives that are locations on a map, but if you slaughter enough of the enemy you’re likely to take those objectives. Maneuver then contributes to killing the enemy (or scaring them off) not to capturing/controlling economic resource/production locations.