Our regular guy looks at recent trends in wargame design and wonders if too much of a good thing stifles innovation, or are you tired of shuffling cards yet?
There are formulas and there are formulas. How do you know when a formula has run its course? In the long-ago heyday of boardgaming, say the period from roughly 1978 through 1983, "formulaic" meant something different than I think it does today. At that time the premium was on innovation. Gamers turned to new designs eager to see where and how the new product approached the pinnacle of simulation. The Holy Grail was achieving the acme of verisimilitude. When a designer inaugurated a fresh simulation system that was successful in this way, he could go to town with new games that applied that system to different situations. The formula today is different and, I would argue, has more to do with production concerns than game content.
Consider the wargame universe today. An Old Line designer lamented to me recently that he almost doesn't see games that have hexagons anymore. His nightmare is to open up such a simulation for a demo and have some gamer point to the hex and ask, "What's that?" This is overdone to be sure, but it contains a kernel of truth.
The European-produced boardgames that today provide much of the dynamism in the market, and are even making inroads at wargaming citadels like the World Boardgaming Championship, are far from the simulation ideal. The argument that simple, fast, pretty games are best for the fans has predominated now for several years. No doubt it had resonance at the beginning. The simple games were getting the most play on the open gaming tables at conventions, and they were doing a lot of the retail business in the hobby. Pretty faces, as it were, had the longest legs. This has had a definite influence on game design.
Among the most popular styles of simulation design today is the card-driven, pointto-point system pioneered by Mark Herman with his We The People, published by Avalon Hill during its last years. That was a treatment of the American Revolution, horribly unbalanced in its initial incarnation but saved by an update kit the company put out later. Mark followed with Hannibal, playing to his considerable interest in ancients (and among the best of these games in my opinion). GMT Games took up the mantle when Avalon Hill was sold to Hasbro Corporation, even republishing Herman's Civil War version of the card-driven system, For The People, which had been swept away by the demise of Avalon Hill just as it was coming out of the printers. Since then GMT has been a stalwart of the system, as a run-down of its titles indicates. Ted Raicer designed the very successful Paths of Glory (1999) on World War I, and his current title is World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin. David Fox and GMT published The Thirty Years War (2001) on the religious-political conflict that enflamed Europe from 1618 to 1648, and GMT also produced that year Volko Ruhnke's French and Indian War (1756-1763) design Wilderness War. Mark McLaughlin, who stands like Herman among the Old Guard designers, published The Napoleonic Wars with GMT in 2002.
A formula so good invites imitation, so it is hardly surprising that other game companies jumped upon the card-driven bandwagon also. More are in the works, such as Operational Studies Group's anticipated Napoleon's Game. And there are also related game systems that might be termed "card-moderated," such as Robert Markham's War in the Age of Frederick the Great: The Seven Years War Worldwide: 1756-1763, published by Avalanche Games in 2002 (also an intriguing design in my view).
In the card-driven games that constitute the great majority of the genre there are costs along with the benefits. Of course the cards inject an exciting element, and there is the randomness of card fall, as well as a new strategy element, card play. But there are distinctive compromises with simulation verisimilitude that come along with the cards as well. In most of the card-driven games the decks consist of multiple-function cards.
For example, in Paths to Glory a card can be used to dictate simple movement and combat (grouped together as actions), strategic redeployment, it can be played as an event or a battle effect, or it can dictate replacement levels. All these are alternative choices, which also means they rule out the other possibilities. Chat rooms and GMT's magazines are chock full of players' commentaries on the desirability of this or that event versus playing the same card for some of its other effects. Because these card effects replace standard movement and combat, simulation quality is inevitably sacrificed. There is no real world in which the actor nations would not have the capability (moderated by supply, of course, as well as command control and transport considerations) to move all their forces on any occasion the opportunity was available to them. This is a structural problem with simulation quality that follows directly from introduction of the card deck to drive the game; card-moderated games, in which cards function only at the margin as events or combat effects do not have so much of a problem).
In terms of events (that is, historicity), the card-driven games also have a (somewhat less serious) difficulty. You want to do World War II, or the French and Indian war, or whatever. Certain events characterize the age. The German "Barbarossa" operation to invade Russia in World War II, or the "Guns of August" in Paths of Glory, or the attack on Fort Sumter in the Civil War are obvious examples. The way the cards are conventionally designed, huge important events tend to be grouped on cards that are also desirable for their other values. To take Paths of Glory again, the "Bolshevik Revolution" card also corresponds to a 5-level (the highest) action capability, a 5-point redeployment capacity, or a very high replacement rate. A German player pressed for any of these other capabilities may want to or be forced to play the card for the other purposes. Obviously this constraint was designed into the card decks with the intent of forcing players to choose. But the net effect is often that many events central to the history being simulated never take place in the games. In other boardgame designs, the same system is structured so as, for example, to lead a German player quite naturally into creating such a quandary for Russia in World War I that the Bolshevik Revolution automatically follows, but in the card-driven game that event is subject both to the randomness of card draw and to the other aspects of the situation the player may be in when the card falls.
The event problem is less serious because there is a relatively simple fix that may help in many, if not all, in stances. That is, the designer may change the structure of incentives built into the cards. If "Bolshevik Revolution" is useless for most functions other than as an event, the chances are it will be played as an event. The random factor still obtains but that is unavoidable once the choice is made to use a card-driven system.
Another problem has arisen from the evolution of this style of game. In the early designs there were separate hands, if you will, of battle cards versus the strategic cards that govern events, actions, and replacements. Over time this practice has disappeared and the recent designs have cards with battle effects built directly into the larger game deck. This works against simulation at a minute level. In the Napoleonic era a certain tactic for massing artillery (the "Grand Battery") had an important tactical effect, while Napoleon's use of his elite Imperial Guard also had a vital impact. These were tactics available in every battle. In the most prominent Napoleonic card-driven game, The Napoleonic Wars, the effects are not built into pieces in the game but are a function of battle cards in the deck. Thus the random effect completely trumps any pretense at simulation of the historical period. In addition, where the battle effect cards are submerged within a larger game deck the tactical impact of battle cards is further diluted. My advice would be to separate battle cards from the main deck and to have them contribute to combat. Build a real combat system, and then put the cards at the margin of the action.
The battle question leads back to the issue of overall historicity. We have here a genre of game that has been applied without much difference from about 218 BC to 1945 and Vietnam (Editor's Note: Green Beret, published 2002 by Simulations Workshop, covers 1964-65). With generic "flavors" of troop strengths, minor distinctions of leader rules from one game to another, and only the (inherently limited) cards to supply the historical touch, this is too much vanilla. Too often, because designing the cards is easy, designers have skimped on real historicity in the rest of the game's subsystems. The result is more than one-dimensional; it is a set of games that more and more seem the same. And that is not good for gaming.
All of which brings us back to our starting point. Designers innovated systems. When they were good, they were very, very good, and more games followed. Sometimes too many. Fresh out of the starting gate the card-driven game seemed to fit the mold. It had these dynamic cards, there was strategy involved, the games were fast and relatively simple, working for today's gamer with less time and a shorter attention span. All that was good. But have we had too much? Rather than providing us cookie-cutter games that run the gamut of thousands of years of history, designers need to get back to doing some real innovating.
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