I thought I might update readers on the micro-format man-to-man combat game system that Greg Poehlein, Gary Williams and I are developing. Things have moved a bit slower than we'd have liked, largely because Greg and I have been buried under extra work in our day-to-day jobs, and Gary and his family were in the middle of a move from Tennessee to join Greg and I in Evansville.

We've settled on the name COMPACT COMBAT as the overall system moniker, with COMPACT WARRIOR to be the first release and core systems book. Right now, it's looking to be a 32 page micro-format rulebook which will include the boardgame rules to cover basic man-to-man combat with medieval-style weapons. 20 weapon cards (business-card size) are also to come with the package. Also planned is a 8.5 X 14 mapboard (square grid) and counters for the combatants.

The good news is that artist Gary Williams persuaded us to give up the idea of flat Melee-style counters and substitute full-fledged Card-board-Heroes-like standups. I just saw the artwork for the first set of these, and I'm very pleased! (Gary did a similar set of superheroes and villains for our IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE! minigame, available free on our website. These are just as nice if not better.) There will be about 24 of these (black-and-white) in the game.

Greg gave me a rough of the rules some time back and I handed him back Draft 1.2. Once he has finished editing those (a week or so at this rate -- sorry, we're part-time designers) I expect I'll be contacting some of you who volunteered as playtesters to look over the rough rules and try them out. The system is based on (and totally compatible with) the Plain-Label RPG system as used in POCKET WARRIOR, but is reworked for a boardgame, supertactical feel with facing, tactical maneuver, and some interesting twists that we think make this more than just "MELEE done square grid" or "POCKET WARRIOR with a board".

Final pricing isn't set in stone, but we're hoping to make this a VERY attractive buy. After much consideration, we've decided to keep at least the "first edition" black and white, including the cover. That will cut the price almost in half, by our estimates. Frankly, most of the industry says this is a mistake -- that we should make you pay more and put a full co-lor cover on it. Considering the state the industry is in, though, I'm going with my gut on this one. Your orders will tell the tale.

The game will be marketed under a new "company umbrella" called MicroTactix Games, and we'll be concentrating on mail order sales (supported by a website) at first. Dealers and distributors -- the game series WILL be available to you from day one.

Before anything goes to print, however, we plan to have COMPACT SORCERER also completed, along with at least two adventure packs. We want to have plenty of products ready to go so we can have a continuous string of releases. The plan right now is to release these first four products all at the same time, which means we'll actually want several more in the hopper at release date. (After this gets going, we'll be in the market for solitaire programmed adventures, especially... Potential designers, sharpen your pencils.)

All expansions will build on the basic COMPACT WARRIOR set, and my list of possibilities already goes to two pages. It's not going to be boring. But you can have plenty of fun with just the core game (and COMPACT SORCERER, if you want magic). But I plan for the game to be "dynamic" rather than static. Toward that end, we'll be posting a lot of material for expansion of the game to the website. Some will be stuff that will probably get cut from COMPACT WARRIOR and COMPACT SORCERER for length, some will be things designed for future expansion sets -- including new weapon and spell cards, special rules, animals and monsters, and lots more.

We will be offering the product to distributors, but considering the state of the distribution chain, I expect we will be relying on mail and web orders to get rolling for awhile.

Compact Warrior 1.3.1 (our internal designation for this draft) has gone to playtest. If you didn't get a playtest invitation, it's not because we don't love you. They were only sent to select people who specifically requested one. There may (or may not) be a second playtest round, depending on how this one goes.

Meanwhile Compact Sorcerer is at the 1.1 stage, with Greg reading and revising the basic spellcasting rules. I'll take a last short crack at them when he's done, then those will go to playtesters (probably the same group with CW, since they'll need the basic rules to play the CS expansion.

We're currently haranguing about some of the form-factor decisions for the game, and any feedback you'd wish to send would be welcome. Currently, weapons, spells, etc. are slated to appear on business-card size cards. The game will contain uncut micro-size sheets of these. Unfortunately, we have discovered that the layout we had planned (four cards to a sheet) won't fl. The micro-size sheets are printed four-up to legal size card stock, then cut in fourths to be included in the game. Because of printer creep, a bit of slop in the cutting process, and similar things, we must maintain some useful margin around the cards.There are a couple of possible remedies:

1) We could go to a slightly smaller card. This grates on me like sandpaper because it will make us use a smaller typefont on the cards (and it's too small now), affecting readability. It also means the cards will be an unusual size, fouling up some ideas I had for some nifty production, promotion and presentation plans that require the cards be standard business card size. But it's an option.

2) We could go to 3 cards per sheet. This means more sheets of card stock in the game, and may mean we go above the "magic" $5.00 price point at which we were aiming. COMPACT WARRIOR's almost too big a rulebook to make that price point now. If we increase the number of cards, it will almost certainly go up. We could take some of the cardboard character standups and move them onto the unused part of those sheets to soften the blow some, but it will probably mean some additional sheets nonetheless.

3) We could reduce the number of cards (and hence the number of sheets) in the game. The only way to do that is to reduce the number of character standups (now set for about 36 on three sheets) or not include any duplicate weapons. (We have 20 weapons, and planned to include 36 cards, which would include some duplicates of popular stuff like shields, broadswords, daggers, etc.) You will have permission to photocopy these, but it means you may have to photocopy a little before starting play, or not have any duplicate weapons to play with.

(To make things more difficult, the current list of Compact Sorcerer spell cards means there is virtually no chance that we will have duplicate spell cards in the package. Do we reduce the spell list? Raise the price considerably to give a full duplicate set? Just count on you photocopying them? One problem at a time...)

These are the questions and concerns (along with playtest) that will occupy our time over the Labor Day weekend. Just in case you thought we'd be in Bimini soaking up rays...

A reminder that Your Humble Narrator will be the Guest of Honor at Hamstercon, a really nifty game convention spotlighting innovative game design, in Bloomington, IN Saturday, Sept 19. We'll be running some Pocket Fantasy demos, and probably a Compact Warrior Mass Melee or two. (You heard it here first.) Details at: http://www.io.com/~hamster for those of you in the Midwest. Y'all come!

11/18/98 Compact Warrior is now completing final "road tests" of the version of the rulebook we are calling the "Final Candidate". If our last wave of editing and balance-testing doesn't manage to break it, that's the version that will go to print. Compact Sorcerer is in late "beta" form, also being beaten on by blind testers here and there to make sure the spell costs and rules balance properly. The card size problem was solved rather neatly with some creative layout work, so the cards will now be quite readable and still fit into our format requirements -- without raising the overall price of the game. (Gary believed it could be done when I was skeptical. He was right.)

Compact Bestiary is the third of our initial four packages. The first run of the artwork on this set of animal and monster figures has been completed by Gary Williams, with a mix of fantasy creatures and "real life" animals chosen to give you a lot of different things to fight in your Compact Combat arenas. Stats and rules are being developed and tested for the various beasts by Greg Poehlein.

The final package in our initial offerings will be a unique sort of adventure, playable either solitaire or with a group, with or without a "gamemaster". We decided to move away from the standard "numbered paragraph" sort of programmed adventure for this, opting for a more visual and dynamic approach that we hope you'll like. The final title isn't set and we don't want to reveal too much about the storyline behind the adventure just yet, but we think both board gamers and role players will find this one fun. We still want to do classic "numbered paragraph" solitaires, and we expect to eventually pursue those, as well.

Beyond that, we're still trying to decide how soon to grow into other adventure genres with Compact Combat game expansions. Should we more fully develop the medieval fantasy genre, or jump right into other arenas? What combat genres would YOU most like to see us explore with this man-to-man system?

I'm also trying to finalize the design elements of our web site. Since we plan for the web site to offer free expansion material for the game on a regular basis, the site is very important and we want it to be just right. We've worked out procedures for ordering on the web, so we'll have live, secure, credit-card order capability on the web from Day 1. International shipment is still being worked out, but we promise not to forget all the gamers in Canada, Australia, the UK, Europe, and the Far East who have written for information. In the meantime, Gary has begun preliminary development on a really unique and hilariously funny game that doesn't use the Compact Combat rules, but should lend itself well to the micro-sized environment we're using. More about that one in the next update, perhaps.