This article is primarily about the "monster" games of SPI, with occasional references to other companies. There are two reasons for this: First, I'm most familiar with their products, and second, they have been more explicitly rational about wargame design than the other companies. Although some of their latest games have been failures because of problems - in philosophy, production and design - that other companies still have not discovered, the openness of SPI's game design process makes it easier to find and analyze those problems.

It is first necessary to clarify the basis of the discussion. For example, does "playable game" include time spent sorting out the pieces (all of SPI's monsters could use at least one more compartmented box), setting up, making sure markers are in the right boxes, and settling arguments. (Wargamers tend to be aggressive, argumentative people. If the fate of the Eastern Front depends on a rule interpretation at 2:00 A.M., that interpretation isn't going to be settled until 4:00 A.M. I've come to the conclusion that the only way to play one of the monsters is to have the most experienced player stay out of the game and serve as referee.)

Second, it is necessary to answer a question of philosophy - "What is a wargame?"

The essence of a wargame is not the maps and counters, but a set of temporarily sequenced processes. The map, counters, etc. are only the physical artifacts of these mental processes. They are a means, capable of shifting with time, changing external situations, and the actions of the players, of storing and displaying information about what is actually happening-the mental interaction between the players.

This means of storing information necessitates, and is capable of, displaying a deliberately chosen, consistent, and specific quality of information - i.e., units of specified strength, located on a particular hexagon.

If this is hard to grasp, consider a game of chess between two blindfolded chess players. The board and pieces, in this situation, are only serving to record information about the changing situation - and in case of a dispute, they would probably be less efficient than a move-by-move paper and pencil record - while the actual game is occurring in and between the minds of the players.

Third, it is also necessary to distinguish between production problems - which can be solved by more diligence in the business office or printing plant, and which are annoying but not fatal - and design problems, which require hard thought and harder work by the designer and developer to solve.

Maps

The largest of the production problems is the maps for the monsters, which should be mounted. When I make a $40.00 investment, I want it to be durable, convenient, and not over-influenced by the slot in the center of my buddy's Ping Pong table. Also, if I am plunking down $40.00, an additional $10.00 won't faze me. (When my ship comes in and I buy a Cadillac, I intend to get it with automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, AM, FM, CB, 8-track, etc., etc.)

Maps for the monsters, if not mounted, should be produced in 22" x 28" sizes. These dimensions will fit conveniently on the standard 44"x 28" size of showcard board, which is the material I use for mounting my maps. To mount a standard SPI 34" x 22" map, it is necessary to buy an entire sheet of showcard-board, mount the map, and trim the wide and wasteful margins away.

In producing monster game rules, the companies need to use larger type, wider margins, and two instead of three columns to a page of the rulebook, as a matter of sheer mercy on the eyes of their customers. Additional copies of the rules - so gainers can purchase one for each player - should be available at reasonable price. Most monstergamers make several copies anyway, and SPI can certainly use the money more than Xerox.

Counters for a top-of-the-line game should be durable and ready for use. Currently, to get counters without the ragged corners, it's necessary to get a utility knife and cut every BLEEPING counter out separately.

Design Problems

Design problems of monster games begin with the definition of strategy, as "the dialectic, of two opposing wills, resolved by force." It follows from this that the design of a strategic game is necessarily a collective enterprise. (Although it may be possible to design a historical simulation as a solo effort.)

The size of the monster games means that all the variables in the design cannot be unearthed during an economically practical design and playtesting process. This means, first, that the designer and developer should view the publishing of a 'monster' game as a birth, not a completion - the start of interaction between the game, wargamers in the outside world, and the designer and developer, demanding from the latter a continuing commitment of resources sufficient to continue perfecting the game and to communicate the necessary changes to the game's owners.

Second, it means that the designer and developer must establish priorities so that what can be perfected before publication will not be left to the errata.

The first priority of the designer should be the counter sheets, inasmuch as it is impossible for the amateur to create corrected counters comparable to professionally printed ones without spending around $50.00 for Prestype and drafting supplies.

If corrected counters are necessary, mountable final art should be supplied for the game's purchaser, as in the centerfold of the General or the Moves article on the naval game for Constantinople.

Maps should be accurate. Beyond that, though, there is the necessity of avoiding both too much naturalism at the expense of playability - the superfluous continental outlines in Global War, and the forests in Firefight (the entire hex is blocking terrain, but only part is covered by the terrain symbol) - as well as the total disregard for naturalism, visual appeal, and the possibility of eyestrain evident in Wacht am Rhein and Fulda Gap.

Charts and other components should: First, be designed to reduce player fatigue - the CRT and Terrain Effects Chart for Stonewall, for example, induce eyestrain from the dark background, and face the wrong direction -requiring that the player either read them upside-down from the edge of the table or bend over the gameboard and twist his neck, while the Union Demoralization Table can be conveniently read only by an observer atop Pritchard's Hill.

Secondly, paper and pencil work should be minimized, and thirdly, although this goal perhaps conflicts with the two previous ones, the charts should use as little table space as possible. If the German Production Spiral for War in Europe must go on a table just a little too small, will everyone be careful walking past it at 4:00 A.M.?

Rules

As for the rules to a 'monster' game, the publisher must have a commitment to correcting errors, omissions, and glitches. Probably the most convenient way to do this is to issue the rules in looseleaf, a la DNO/UNT.

It would improve games greatly if all game designers went over their rules and tried to list every command and direction to the player in as simple and unambiguous a statement as possible.

It might be even more helpful if we first ask the question: "Why do wargames have rules?" or paraphrase that question with "What are the purposes of the rules for a wargame?"

Many of the problems with current wargame rules - especially for the monsters - is that there are four distinct purposes for wargame rules, and, probably four separate formats for the game rules are necessary to fulfill these four purposes.

The first purpose is to outline the game system, both for the complete novice and for those of us who are expert in the system that underlies everything from Tactics II to War in Europe, but are lost when drafted for Wellington's Victory, Wooden Ships and Iron Men, or Air Force.

The second purpose is to show how the game is played - how the different processes fit together within the Sequence of Play. Probably the best way to do this is to run through a sample Game-Turn, with diagrams of the action. In other words, this would be the explanation you would give to a friend playing the game, face to face, for the first time.

The virtue of the "narrative" style of rule writing is that it takes you through the game as it is played, and lists technicalities in the order in which they come up in the play of the game. The corresponding vice is that you must, while playing, find the technicalities in the middle of blocks of prose.

The third purpose is to give the historical rationale for the design, the system, and the rules. This set of rules, ideally, would be somewhere between SPI's present monstergame rulebooks and the hundred-and-fifty page "rulebooks" of Taurus. It would include the designers' and players' notes, an outline of the historical battle, bibliography, etc. - what you need to know to understand the game,

The fourth purpose is to list the technicalities of the rules in the order in which they will be used in the processes of the game. This set of rules would assume the player is familiar with the game-system, and would state, in simple statements, the rules that he needs to have available to play quickly and accurately. This set would be process-oriented, so that the player would be able to find all the rules relating to a particular operation of the game in the same place. This format is what the average monstergamer needs most to keep from getting bogged down.

Rules "System"

The designers at SPI, at this point, are probably muttering "we already have a system (the "logical" style) for writing rules - why change?" However, the "logical" style has little to do with the play of the game.

The vice of the "logical" style is that you must find the applicable technicality at either Case 8.22 or Case 13.51 - and in the Second Edition rules for Highway to the Reich these two cases are mutually contradictory. This is not a mistake caused by faulty proofreading - this is a mistake caused by a faulty system, which can list a specific technicality on the same subject twice, four pages apart.

On the other hand, Section 10 - "Terrain" - should be split up and distributed among sections devoted to the processes of Movement, Fire Combat, Close Assault Combat, and Entrenchment Construction and Removal. While "Terrain" may be a logical heading for certain technicalities, it is not a process in the play of the game.

The "logical" format for the rules forces a 'disruption' of the flow of play as you search for what you need to know to play the game.

There is an indexing system now, but unless SPI expands the Table of Contents, and lists each case and technicality, all they have is a series of "hints" on where a technicality might be found. I have never seen anyone refer to the Table of Contents of a set of SPI rules during play.

Let us be reasonable. If the same rule is required at hand for two or three different processes of play, repeat it. But don't repeat it merely on account of a dissociated logical system. A game system ought to be proved before it is used for a monster. War in Europe is reasonably playable only because its basic system has had the bugs worked out since Tactics II, but Stonewall should have preceded Terrible Swift Sword, and Highway to the Reich, Wacht am Rhein, and Wellington's Victory should each have been preceded by a one-map, 200-counter game to prove their systems.

It seems to me that the major cause of this is a flaw in SPI's accounting system, which fails to make a distinction between R & D costs for an individual game, which will be depreciated over the sales-life of the game, and R & D costs for a game system, which should be amortized over several games using that system. As a result, innovative game-systems have tended to be first developed for and applied to the 'monster' games, because only the monsters have R & D budgets large enough to support the development of new gamesystems.

However, the monsters are probably the worst vehicle for proving a new game-system, as there are too many other variables - unit strengths and time of appearance, battle fatigue, the events of 20 turns before - to enable an economically feasible playtest to determine whether this game-system accurately simulates history.

It is now evident that game-systems cannot be successfully created without an historical background - witness Lost Battles and Combined Arms. The Renaissance of Infantry -Armageddon and the Prestags series were somewhat successful at creating a system to show historical change over a period of several centuries.

However, new game-systems, to be worth buying and playing, in today's crowded market, must meet the acid test. Will they successfully simulate a specific piece of history? The best way to find this out is to try it on a small chunk of history, in which all the variables are test-outable by the designer, before applying it to a monster.