need assistance in board game design

Hi There,

I was around 15 myself when I was bitten by the wargaming bug - now, more years later on I publish them. Here's a link to order a reasonably priced and spiffy "How To" book for beginning wargame designers.

http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG82-3001

and the on-line How to Design Wargames Handbook below is free:

http://www.strategypage.com/prowg/default.asp?target=wargameshandbook/contents.htm

These books won't keep your mind from wandering from task to task but they do provide some good background and "how to" ideas when you're ready to buckle down and focus in on what you what to simulate.

Good Hunting!

Hi Brett. Welcome to the boards!

Your questions are very good. They are things we've all wrestled with at one point or another.

There are many good links and articles on "how to" concepts here in the forum itself. Check out the "game production" forum and you'll find posts -- often with links to articles -- on making boards, cards, and counters.

If you browse the topics in the "game design" forum, you'll find many discussions regarding keeping rules balanced between realism and playability. Many of these discussions concern games other than war games, but the same theories apply to war games.

So, my first piece of advice is just "browse these forums". It will take a bit of time, but it's not as bad as you might think.

Second, I suggest diving in and making a simple prototype, no matter how crude. I understand your desire to make something that looks like a real game right off the bat. However, you'll probably find that you throw out your first 2 or 3 prototypes, so there's really no point in making them any better than they have to be in order to test your designs.

Here's the world's simplest how-to for such a prototype:
1) Print a hex grid onto regular A4 (8.5x11) white paper sheets. If you need a template of hexes, search the forums for the word 'hex'. Several people have submitted templates in the past.
2) Glue these sheets to thin cardboard backing to make yourself a map.
3) Use colored pencils or markers to fill in the hexes with terrain and man-made features like towns.
4) Use Word to lay out a counter sheet. Print it, glue it to cardboard, and cut it up into individual counters.

You've now got your map and counters. They won't look that good, but you'll be able your rules.

As for making your ruleset fun-yet-realistic, I have only one piece of advice: decide which kinds of decisions you want your players to have to make, then create the simplest set of rules that force these decisions. The mechanics you use don't have to accurately model the real world -- they just have to force the a decision that reflects a real-world decision.

Here's what I mean. Do you want your players to worry about resupply? If so, create a simple mechanic to reflect this. For example, maybe each unit has a color -- red, green, or blue. When you move a unit or fire from a unit, you roll a colored die. If the die matches the unit, you flip the unit over to it's "resupply" side and it can no longer shoot until it stocks up on munitions by coming in contact with a "depot" unit.

That's not very realistic, but it's very easy to understand and quick to use. Most importantly, players now have to consider the location of their Depots when deploying forces. The resupply mechanic isn't realistic, but it enforces realistic decision-making on the players.

I've babbled on enough. Good luck with your designs! Don't get too wrapped up in "how to" and "what rules". Just make a prototype and playtest it (first by yourself, then with others once the solo play is fun). Chances are you will make several prototypes before you get one that's any good, so don't get discouraged.

Keep us posted on your progress!

Mark

First off, welcome Brett!

Personally, I think the above is the example of almost everyones mind. Most people typically switch from one subject to another with varying degrees of success. My typical day is to come up with 4 to 5 ideas and then throw them away. Why? Because one element doesn't fit, or the game doesn't sound as good on paper as it did in my head.

A realistic game, isn't that what most people want? I know I do but the amount of time it would take to play a game that stays true to the world around you would be amazing. Throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a design sometimes doesn't cut it. Take some of your favorite elements and design a game around those. A central mechanic is where most games begin, but changes occur during the design process. I once read an article on Avalon Hill's Nexus Ops. The game started out as king of the hill with a fantasy theme. Then, after being sumbitted to publishers mission cards were added and the central monolith (or the hill) gave various powers instead of a win.

My first design was Tempest. A tile laying, warfare game where each players goal was to be the last one standing. It mirriored the games that I knew: Risk and Diplomacy, but it didn't accomplish anything else. Because of that it sits on the shelf, waiting to be redintroduced to the world.

Now, the above quote explains the best thing you can do. Start off simple and progress from there. The above also describes why most of my games never make it anywhere. I never started with a simple game. Thats why I'm back tracking. For now, I'm going to stick with simple games. Later on, who knows. Maybe a monster will be unleashed. Maybe I'll begin to like simplicity and stick with designing card and dice games.

Good Luck!
Justin

*By the way, it's nice to see another teenager on the boards. There's a year difference between me and you (I'm 14), but it's still cool. We should have a chat one day.

Thanks, Brett

Hi Brett,

It has been my observation that focus is very much the key to a successful design and devopment process. During the design phase, that means it is not going to be possible, in any practical way, to get in everything you have read about a particular historical topic. Instead, go over your research notes on the event you are trying to depict and decide what you thing the key 2-3 elements were for the event. Was it a major deployment or movement error by one side, or did both sides make such errors? Was it a particularly brilliant plan by one side? Were both sides competent but did some event from outside have an influence that was major? Was one side or the other particularly good at one thing or another, while the other side had other skills or lacks? That sort of thing. Then, concentrate your design on displaying these key elements. That is, make the major mechanisms and systems of the design around the things you want to show about the event.

Development is the section of game production where hopefully a second set of eyes works on the design and trys to make sure that any initial focus of the design that might have gone astray is returned to the fore and that testing provides an idea of which mechanics need adjusting, removal, or if new mechanics are needed. If the designer is also doing development, you have to be really ruthless with your initial ideas, and willing to toss out most anything that is not working toward the initial goals as well as retaining playability. The finest design in the world is pretty useless if it cannot be played.

Finally, play testing, the second half of development, again requires focus. Here, the goal is to make the game as easy to learn and as easy to play as possible without sacrificing the initial goals of the design, and at the same time to develop whatever mechanisms and scoring systems are required to give each player a somewhat even chance of winning the game.

The main thing is that through out all of this, you really have to focus on what your intial goals with the design were. If you lose that focus, it is very easy for the design to spin out of control and end up not being either what you want or anything that can eventually be played by anyone other than the designer.

Oh, as an aside, I notice that in the various posts I have read since finding this forum, no one has mentioned storyboarding. I have always considered storyboarding to be an essential part of any historically oriented board game design. Briefly, the concept is to find or construct a history of the events the game is to depict from the books you are using for research on the topic, and then step the design through those events. It is essential that an historically oriented game be able to duplicate the events in some rough sort of manner for the scales chosen for the game. If it cannot, they you do not have an historical game, you have an historical fantasy. Or an "alternate' history. A form of Science Fiction, basically. There is nothing at all wrong with this, unless that is not what you wanted. Note please that most designers do not want their design to force the players to a strictly historical result, so I am not suggesting this is the point of storyboarding. Rather, the point is to test the validity of the mechanisms of the design by assuring that if the players make the same moves and actions as happened historically, there is a pretty good chance they will get the historical result. Think of it as a validation check on the design.

Best
Stephen Newberg