Wargames

I've nearly completed a game of this type. I based mine on A Game of Thrones, which I can recommend as an excellent game. Battle in AGOT is non-random and mainly determined by troop strengths and a couple of other factors, but each player has a set of cards of varying strengths and can contribute one to each battle. Before the battle you can see all of your opponent's cards (and he can see yours), but then you each select a card secretly and show them simultaneously; then they are discarded. This means that battles have no random factors but are still risky and unpredictable.

AGOT is a great game but it is probably not what you'd call a "simple" game; there's a lot going on in it. The game I've been developing is called Brimstone and it's designed to be like AGOT but simpler and "lighter." I started with AGOT's combat system and simplified it by eliminating the cards, having only one kind of troop, and simplifying the command system. To retain a bit of uncertainty (since I took away the cards), each player in a battle can pay a secretly-chosen number of "stones" (money) to increase his combat strength. There's a limit on payment, so that an overwhelming force can't be defeated by an opposing overwhelming payment. And stones are in short supply so there's an incentive for a player to spend less than the limit. Play-testing has shown that in most battles the payments and battle outcome are predictable, but once in a while there's a surprise that keeps the game interesting.

Combat in AGOT is definitely more tense and interesting than in Brimstone. I am not surprised, since Christian Petersen is a vastly better game designer than I am, even when I'm stealing his ideas! But maybe this discussion will give you some ideas on what to do with your game.

You can read more about Brimstone in my journal here at BGDF, and you can read about A Game of Thrones at BoardGameGeek.

GameMonkey makes a very good point, and reminds me of a related point. How many players is your game for? Games that rely heavily on diplomacy (small 'd') and negotiation usually only work well with lots of players. Diplomacy (the game, with a big 'D') requires seven players. A Game of Thrones is best with five players (or six, with an expansion) and degrades in quality with four or three.

So if you're shooting for lots of players, then a simple combat system will encourage your players to negotiate, threaten, bribe, ally, and betray. If you want fewer players, that may not work as well, and of course won't work at all for a two-player head-to-head game.

There are many sorts of "diceless" Combat Results Tables (CRTs) that have been developed over the years. In Avalon Hill's Kingmaker you attack by moving into a defender's area and determine an odds ratio but draw a card to see if you win at those odds, i.e. the card says "2 to 1 or greater odds wins today." Some cards say "Bad Weather Today" and the attack does not occur/succeed - no matter what the odds.

In another AH game, Civilization, a player attacks by moving into an area with defenders and then both sides start alternating the removal of units - the weaker side first. The catch here is that as soon as the combined number of units equals the "resource support" level of the area, fighting stops and may thus leave both sides in the possession of the area.

Many years ago, Metagaming's Warpwar star ship sci-fi game had a true diceless CRT where each side shoose a "posture" (attack, dodge, retreat) and made a timing decision where these were compared on a matrix and the results read off.

From what I've seen, as a rule of thumb, the more tactical the scale of your wargame the more wild and unpredictable the result should be (i.e. perhaps dice should be the randamizing mechanism).

If meaningful prediction is what you're after, as a way to increase strategy, then dice whould work just fine. Don't rule out custome dice for this, if they're appropriate. But if raw numbers are what you're after, just remember that summing dice allows the bell curve, which acts as a huge predictor of success.