Excerpts of Interview conducted at One World Cafe in South Baltimore, 22 September, 1998, 7pm
For the full text, go to Consimworld (www.Consimworld.com).
One strength point equals one thousand men.

When I went to do "Napoleon at Bay," I still had a problem. A traditional wargame of that era could not model the 1814 campaign because you had the French outnumbered two-and-a-half to one over the entire front. Regular wargames arbitrarily assign huge strength factors to the French. Well, there were good designers of the era who were not above doing that stuff. But I said, "I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to make every strength point worth a thousand men." You can quibble with me about that. Maybe the guard should be worth more, maybe you think I should build the guards excellence into their combat strength. Maybe so, but I'm going to use other methods to show why the French were able to do as well as they were rather than just simply arbitrarily assigning them whatever number combat strength they need to win the game; which is too easy. And that sometimes was the modus operandi ... "we seem to be having a balance problem with the game. Well, try taking a strength point off the Prussian units and try it again." What is that telling you? You're not learning anything. So I said, "I'm using one strength point for every thousand guys for all the armies, for all the troops."

Mass x velocity = impact

Napoleon understood how to use that space in-between the nutcracker. He liked to be in between the pincers. Because he could take a weaker army and get twice as much mileage out of it. He had a formula: mass times velocity equals impact. Its taken from Newtonian physics, but he applied it in using the strength of his forces. So, if his army could move twice as fast as the other guys, and be in twice as many fights over a given period of time, then they could do twice as much damage.

If you know nothing about how to retreat, you cannot win.

My kind of creativity is to take ideas from different sources and put them together and see what happens. The other thing about my designs that turn off some people, besides the fact that you can't move all your pieces every turn, is the fact that if you play very aggressively, as a normal wargame player might play, you lose. In the traditional wargame, both sides are trying to attack, whoever attacks better wins. My games you have to be able to retreat. If you know nothing about how to retreat, you cannot win in my games. Aggressive play will be defeated by the game system.

Screening and information-gathering by Napoleonic cavalry.

In "1806" it took me years to evolve a system to show one of the functions of cavalry. One of the problems I had with wargames up to that point was there was no differentiation between the use of your units except that cavalry moved faster. Basically they were just faster infantry maybe a little bit weaker. So I wanted to find some rules to show the screening and information gathering ability of cavalry in the Napoleonic era, that's what light cavalry were used for. To go out and find out who was out there, where they were, what their strength was, and then at the same time deny information to the enemy about what you have. It took years to develop that system of vedette rules.

Living on Air

One thing I thought would be nice was to bring some new people into the hobby. I saw this as a hobby that has no connection to the mainstream society. So what we needed to do was to have something that would branch over to pull some nourishing new blood out into the little branch tips that we are existing in out here. We're like living on air. The only new people coming into the hobby are Europeans. The European market is growing, the American market is shrinking, and it's the same group of guys. The only new gamers we get in America are lapsed gamers that are coming back into the hobby. So I wanted to do a game that would have a potential sales of something on another order of magnitude than Napoleon at Bay and 1806.

What is Accuracy

Accuracy means different things to different people. For some people, accuracy means you play the game and you get the same damn result that came out historically. So that it becomes like clockwork, and you get a perfect cake every time. To me, accuracy is, "what were the strictures, what were the limitations on the players, and within those, what were the choices that they had that they didn't realize?" Some people didn't like the "Emperor Returns," the only Waterloo game to allow the French the possibility of driving on Ghent instead of Brussels. Some people didn't like that because it's not historical; yet it is perfectly historical. The French could have attacked Ghent; there was no reason why not. They had a good reason to do that, to interpose themselves between the British army and its line of communication towards the coast. Different people mean different things when they say a game is inaccurate. You have to be careful about that! To some people, accuracy means the units are labeled with their correct historical designations.

When somebody asks me a question I haven't thought about before

The way I design games, I don't want to ever start making arbitrary decisions in order to "make the game work." I want to have my basic parameters, time and distance, and geographical features correct, so that I don't have to monkey with rules to make the game work. That way, when somebody asks me a question about a rule and I haven't thought about that before, I can explore that question by looking for historical precedent for that situation and I can say, 'It should work that way.' So when I answer a game question as well as when I'm designing a game, I base it on my understanding of how things would have turned out.

La Guerre de l'Empereur

The game has tremendous depth. If you read the rules, you don't necessarily see what depth there is. You have to play the game many times to plumb the depths that are indicated and sketched out in those rules. I have a lot of faith in the product, and after answering game questions ... I've published ALL the game questions that I've gotten (except for really obvious ones that are clearly answered in the rules). I've published them all, and there were only three changes that I wanted to make. For the rest of them, the answers were pretty much indicated, if not directly stated, so that you could infer from the rules what the correct answer was.

I wanted it to be about the Napoleonic Wars

The idea was, we knew we wanted it to be a one-evening game, something that novices would play and also something that grognards would find admirable content, that it actually had something to say. I don't want to do a game that's just so abstract that it could be anything. I wanted it to be about the Napoleonic wars. And I think it is. This game does show, especially for people who have been spending all their time doing Napoleonic battles or operations, it does show something about the over-arching conflict that everybody was involved in.