Wargame movement

In many games you have to move them one at a time, which helps alleviate the issue. It's easier to track that you're finished with one than remember that you have X points left on this guy and Y on that one.

However, I don't think a lot of rules really address the issue well. I think people mostly just muddle through, which works ok until you have huge numbers of guys out there. When I play stuff where it might be an issue we have a pouch of little resin chits I made that we use to mark things like that. I think that's a common solution, put a marker or 8mm D6 down by the figure or chit.

There's a related problem in some scoring systems too. For example, the Carcassone rules don't say anything about tracking which cities have been scored for farming points (American rules) and which haven't. It can get pretty complicated. The solution's pretty easy, put a meeple down on all scored cities, but I don't think the rules say anything about it.

In general, making people remember things like that is a major pet peeve of mine that I think a lot of games don't address. It also shows up in bidding schemes. For example, say you bid on turn order, and then next turn you bid in reverse order. How do you remember the order? It's been a problem in a design I'm working on now, where the bid counters are essentially getting put back into the pool and there's no record of the previous turn order. I don't want to provide another counter because it's supposed to be a low fiddly-bit game. Usually it's ok, but if there's been a lot of action we have to sit for a moment and think about who went when.

Maybe develop a sling, a quivver, or holder (look to your theme for the proper device) to hang on the character and place a signal counter you cna slip or drop in as his or her condition changes?

I play a lot of wargames and have never had much of a problem with this. I do have a game that I am thinking about using double sided counters for so the counter can be flipped when the unit has been used. Overall, if you move all of your pieces at once, it is pretty easy to keep track of which ones you have already moved.

Xan Lynch

www.rentoys.com

This is one of the main problems I have been working on in my game. It has pretty much boiled down to 2 different ways of handling movement of lots of pieces.

1. Each player can move a set small number of pieces each turn. In Chess this would be 1, or like Larienna's game 3, but it could be any number as long as people can remember what they have already done. There is a varient where you have a set amount of general move points to spread around, you could use all on one piece if you want to. Or like in Risk you can in a sense move as much as you want until you end your turn.

2. Every piece is ordered in some fashion. Such as the example of numbers on the pieces, position on the board, or D&D's system for initiative/combat order. This makes it easy to keep track of what has all ready moved, but if you have a lot of pieces, it may get sluggish.

I am currently favoring the second for my game, but am wondering how much to tweak it.