Tabletop Wargames: A Designers’ and Writers’ Handbook

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CHAPTER ONE

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Game design is a very broad topic covering all manner of activities, from multi-million-dollar budget video blockbusters to traditional schoolyard games of the kind played by youngsters from one end of the nation to the other. If we were to cast our net sufficiently wide, our subject would include card and board games of various degrees of sophistication, as well as games of pure chance such as roulette. It might encompass role-playing games (in which players assume the persona of characters in their imaginations), and even live action games (where players dress the part to fight over a battlefield with airsoft guns or medieval style arms and armour). And no doubt you’re able to furnish many more examples of your own.

Well, we’d better be straight from the start – we’re not overly concerned with the huge subject of games in the broadest of senses outlined above. This book is specifically about designing wargames fought with armies of model soldiers over a tabletop battlefield or wargames table. We might stretch that definition a little to include naval or aerial wargames and forces of model ships or aircraft. Or spaceships and dragons for that matter. We call these kinds of games ‘tabletop wargames’ to distinguish them from board, video and other kinds of wargame. Our aim is to describe the methods and practicalities of rules design, and to discuss some of the different ideas and ambitions pertinent to the design and development of tabletop wargames.

A huge Black Powder Carlist Wars game in progress on Michael Perry’s impressive table. The Perry Collection

A shot of a Carlist Wars Black Powder game in progress on Michael Perry’s wargames table. The Perry Collection

Although our intention is to write a book of practical use to those who want to have a go at designing a game of their own, it is also a book for all wargamers with any interest in the mechanics and processes behind the games that they play. Most of all, we hope it is an entertaining book and one that will enhance the enjoyment and participation in wargames whatever your own field of interest might be.

How to Read this Book

The text that follows has been arranged into themed chapters that can be read either sequentially or individually. Some deal with the practical or mechanical side of design, others serve to introduce conceptual ideas or describe non-rules aspects such as organisation, presentation and language. Inevitably a certain amount of technical content arises from things such as dice statistics, probability management and rule semantics. However, we have not aimed to write a technical manual or a reference book of mechanics. In most instances we concentrate on describing different approaches to the art – or possibly science – of tabletop wargame design with a view to explaining some of the processes and pitfalls that every prospective author will at some time encounter. Theoretical and technical aspects are equally important to an overall design and each supports the other to some extent, so most chapters combine elements of both.

The Tabletop Wargame in a Nutshell

In a book such as this it is perhaps superfluous to describe what a wargame is in any detail. It seems only reasonable to assume that you are sufficiently familiar with the tabletop wargame its history and its variety to have developed an interest in rules design in the first place. However, let us begin by laying down firm foundations to build upon and describe something of the nature of the wargame as we understand it.

The uninitiated often picture a wargame only in terms of recreating great battles of history with model soldiers. On those rare occasions when a wargame makes an appearance in a TV drama or movie it is likely to feature two retired colonel-types reliving Wellington’s victory at Waterloo over an elaborate representation of the battlefield with model armies and commanders positioned and manoeuvred in imitation of their real-life prototypes. Needless to say, both participants will be wearing full military regalia and dinner will be announced by the firing of a (real) cannon. You know the sort of thing. That kind of diorama as a wargame – or historical refight – certainly has its place although perhaps only in our imaginations!

In reality it is only occasionally that wargamers will get together and attempt anything so ambitious as a refight of an actual historic battle using realistic terrain and armies that accurately portray those present on the day. Simply building (and then storing) a scale model of a battlefield is a major undertaking and one that is beyond most of us. In any case, many gamers prefer to fight battles based on popular fantasy or science fiction franchises or other purely fictitious settings. Fantasy might offer the opportunity to recreate battles from the pages of a book or the movie screen, but such elaborate set pieces rarely dominate our everyday gaming.

Tabletop Armies

For the purposes of writing wargames rules let us assume we are talking about a game where opposing armies of models clash over a tabletop laid out with model terrain to create the impression of a battlefield. The key words here are ‘armies’ and ‘tabletop’. The army is a collection of models representative of either historical or fantasy forces depending upon our tastes. The tabletop is a substantially flat board or wargames table of a suitable size; what is ‘suitable’ will vary from game to game.

Wargames that seek to represent battles – as opposed to skirmishes or man-to-man combat – are traditionally fought on tables six feet by four feet or thereabouts. That is the usual size of tabletop in common usage by gaming clubs, during competitions and in most gamers’ homes. A few manage eight feet by four but larger and permanent sets ups are rarely encountered beyond the confines of long-term bachelordom. Sheer practicalities and the usual demands of family life suggest that few gamers have room for very large set-ups whilst the ready availability of sheet materials of this size has created a ‘standard’ of sorts.

Redcoats! American War of Independence models from Perry Miniatures. The Perry Collection

When we consider our rule writing we have to first ask ourselves what are the physical sizes of the armies and the dimensions of playing surface we are writing for. To some extent these things are scalable but essentially our rules are aiming to facilitate play and it is therefore necessary to have a good idea of the physicality of the game to start with. So how big is the typical army, how many elements or units does the force have and so on? The size of the force and the size of the tabletop battlefield have to go together because there’s no point in trying to fit a huge army into a tiny space. There is also a physical limit imposed upon our playing area, because players must be able to reach into the middle to move their armies (putting aside such unsettling innovations as ‘pop holes’, whereby players emerge unexpectedly from the depths of hollow volcanoes like some gigantic Bond villain).

The Battle

Real battles may inspire our games or suggest a scenario, but in essence, wargaming is basically a game played between opposing model armies. Because it is a game, the sides should usually be broadly comparable in terms of their size and fighting abilities. In other words, we expect the sides to be fairly balanced as we would in any other game. For this reason most wargames rules either specify the troops included in an army or offer the player a choice of troops based upon a list of alternatives with each choice ascribed a points value – an army list in fact! Battles may then be fought between widely varied armies, but of similar points values.

Rather than representing any specific historical battlefield, the tabletop is usually arranged to present something of a typical scene of encounter between the two forces involved. So we might place a few model trees to represent a wood here, a building or two to stand for a village there, and so on. When considering wargame rules these are all elements to get clear in our minds from the outset – what are the size of armies, how big is the battlefield and what forms might the battlefield take? These things might not be rigidly fixed in all cases but in every case they do define the boundaries or scope of our rules. Are we creating a game for huge battles and hundreds of models or skirmishes between just a handful of individuals? Are we aiming for the battle of Leipzig or Gunfight at the OK Corral?

Seven Years War French – these venerable models first saw light of day as part of the now defunct Pax Britannica range. From the collection of Rick Priestley

American Civil War Confederate commanders – an attractive group painted by Andy Singleton.

The other factor that will undoubtedly play a big part in our rules is the subject matter itself. We might be sufficiently ambitious to imagine we can create a single set of rules to represent every period of historical warfare since the days of Ugg the Caveman to the present day – and good luck with that! In reality, anyone interested in historical wargames will want to play a game that has something of the feel and character of warfare in their chosen period. Historical wargamers who are perfectly happy to abandon actual battlefield settings and armies based on real military formations still demand that their battles are American Civil War battles, Seven Years War battles or World War II battles and so on.

The games we aspire to create must be in that sense ‘realistic’ or representative of warfare of a specific era. When contemplating our wargames rules we rarely do so in abstract – it will be a rule set for a specific period whether broadly or narrowly defined and this will obviously dictate much about the design itself.

When it comes to fantasy subjects, we might imagine that anything goes – and in some respects it does! The opportunity to invent a world that defines our games is a tempting one and there is much fun to be had once the shackles of reality are cast aside. However, generally speaking, a traditional fantasy game with medieval-style troops is still an ancient or medieval rule set for all its magical elements, monsters and other strangeness. Even fantasy has to have some grounding in reality for it to have appeal. The internal logic of weaponry and tactics has to make sense and the abilities of troops have to conform to what is credible or explicable.

In the same way, science fiction games tend to be based on archetypical modern combat tactics from World War II onwards. Even spacecraft combat games are generally variants of current aircraft combat or naval warfare.

The Gaming Environment

Once again we might reasonably assume the reader to be familiar with the different styles of gaming – pick-up or club games, campaigns, tournaments, multi-player games and social games to note but a few. Depending upon circumstances, most players belong to a wargames club or a circle of friends and play the majority of their games against the same group of opponents. Many also enjoy taking part in competitions of one kind or other, where games are organised and run in the formal manner of a tournament. These different gaming environments lend themselves to different kinds of games and different approaches to rules writing.

If what we intend is a set of rules for a group of gaming friends where author or authors are likely to be on hand during play, then we can cheerfully leave much unsaid in the rules themselves. Inconsistencies and balancing issues can be addressed ad hoc during the game if players are happy to take a participatory role. On the other hand if we intend our rules to be for tournaments then the very opposite is the case! If our design is to be played in competitions by strangers, the rules need to be both comprehensive and tightly written as well as internally balanced and functional.

Most published wargames aim to provide enough by way of rules and additional material to facilitate a competitive style of play even if that is not their main focus. For example, they will typically have army lists or some way of choosing and balancing armies as well as a basic scenario that describes setting up the game, deploying forces and establishing victory conditions. All of these are fundamental to the pick-up or club game, where players turn up with ‘1000 points of World War II Germans’ hoping to find an opponent with an equivalently-sized opposing army.

Less formal styles of gaming tend to suit players who are close friends or whose enjoyment of gaming is primarily social. Players may or may not use army lists and sometimes the sides are chosen by the player running the game rather than from a formal army list. Social games are commonly multi-player games. Often the players will resort to old and familiar rule sets, having long since reinterpreted and redefined details such that the actual author would be challenged to recognise the game at all (these modifications are known as ‘house rules’). Few game designers set out to write rules specifically for this social kind of game, although Warlord Games’ Black Powder and its various sub-sets were created with this aim in mind.

British Infantry stand ready to advance during a Black Powder game. Models from The Perry Collection

Campaigns – which is to say meta-games or serial games that aim to recreate a series of encounters – tend to be covered by supplementary material rather than included in with the rules themselves. There are exceptions – the original Warhammer Ancient Battles springs to mind – but even here they tend to be ancillary to the rules rather than an essential component of play. We rather enjoy these kinds of games ourselves and will have more to say on the merits and trepidations of the campaign trail later in the book.

The point to remember here is that different types of games place different demands upon the rules. To begin with we must get a clear idea in our head of who we are writing for. Who is the audience? Are we aiming to write comprehensive and closely defined tournament rules or a looser style of game that might be easier to get into and more fun to play? Are our imagined players intrigued by the intellectual tussle of gameplay or inspired and excited by the high drama of action? The answers to these and other similar questions are not necessarily binary of course, and we might reasonably answer ‘somewhere in between’ or even ‘both’ if we are sufficiently confident of carrying things off. However, a clear idea of the audience from the start will help to keep the design on track.

Publishing Wargames Rules

Today there are more wargames published every year than ever before, with every prospect of many more to come. Much of this book is about writing rules for the general wargaming audience with publication in mind. However, rule writing doesn’t start with publication or even the desire to publish – it stems from a passion for wargames and a desire to create and nurture games of our own. Sometimes those games may be the work of a single person but more often they are collaborative efforts, even if the burden of writing up the rules falls to individuals within a group.

In any field of endeavour the secret to success is invariably the same – just do it! We should add ‘and start young’, but when it comes to wargames that is usually not a consideration. Pretty much all gamers start young and the creative impulse – the desire to create our own games – will tempt us into tinkering with existing rule sets and eventually to formulating our own. Most published games designers don’t just create games for publication – for every published game there’s probably a stack of others that are half finished, games played and put aside, or even completed projects that just never found a home.

Creating and inventing games, playing new games, talking about and swapping ideas with collaborators are all great fun and in many ways the most exciting part of designing games. If a project never progresses beyond that stage then nothing has been lost, and the next project can progress at the same rollercoaster pace in a similar fashion. All game design is good experience and will help to develop a designer’s sense of gameplay as well as authorial skills of exposition.

An Abyssal Dwarf army for Mantic Game’s Kings of War range. Mantic Games

Writing up games specifically for publication is a slower and more considered affair. It requires different skills to games design, and this is something well worth remembering. The size and scope of the project will dictate the effort required and the more ambitious the game, the longer the job is going to take. Don’t underestimate the work involved. A rulebook with background the size of the futuristic Beyond the Gates of Antares is