Wargame Design is a branch of Game Design

There are five different types of games

• word games
• card games
• board games (which can either be linear, track-type games or geometric, map-type games)
• singing and rhythm games, and
• sports

Every game in existence falls into one (or more) of these five categories

Wargames are a species of the geometric-board variety, but they often employ cards, so they mix types. In fact, they also mix the geometric and the linear track game, as the familiar Game Turn record track and the other types of record keeping employ the one-dimensional track in addition to the two-dimensional geometric map.

They're trying to impress us with their warehouse of knowledge and they want to put all that information into the game.

Common Problems with Wargame Design

You often see games published without sufficient testing, or published with rules that are unclear or incomplete, or with glaring historical errors, or games where implausible outcomes are achievable or even likely, while the historical result is unlikely or impossible.

These are the things that a wargame designer has to watch out for. He has to make sure that the historical outcome is in fact possible, that his game has been welltested, and that the rules are intelligible to someone other than himself and/or the developer.

That is a pretty simple agenda. Where game designers tend to fall down is when they are too ambitious, and attempt things that are beyond their ability or even beyond anybody's ability. They're trying to impress us with their warehouse of knowledge and they want to put all that information into the game. What you end up with is an accumulation of a lot of chrome that tends to get in the way of the game design.

What is a Game Design?

A game design is a conceptual framework of play. A game's "design" cannot be seen by merely examining all the components. The rules represent the design, but they are something totally different from the game in play. The rules present the ideas in the game separately, but how they come together can only be experienced in play. The game in play is distinct from the collection of components in the box, even though both are called "game."

The structure of a design takes many forms. The structure of the rules may suggest, roughly, the structure of the design. Probably the closest representation of it in the game components is the Sequence of Play. The Sequence of Play is a representation of the flow of play, if it's well-written. A game design is a pathway for the players to manipulate the components toward a victory. If you try to layer-on too much detail then that gets in the way of the game design and gets in the way of the flow of play.

You have to set out for yourself at the beginning of the project what you are trying to do, what you are trying to show, what point you are trying to make, what is your point of view! Why do you think the side that won, won. And the other side- why did they lose, or why did they do as well as they did in a hopeless situation? You've got to do a lot of reading to come up with a point of view.

It is of less consequence whether your point of view is right or wrong, than that you've got one. Some people will quibble with your point of view, but the bottom line is whether you have got a playable game that's enjoyable and makes a dear statement of that view.

A game design is a pathway for the players to manipulate the components toward a victory.

How to Insure the Historicity of a Design

How do you make sure that the historical results are possible? You have to go to the basic unit, to the basic playing piece of your game, and make sure that the capabilities of the individual playing piece in an individual turn are historical. All other things being equal, if your map is accurate, your movement costs are appropriate, and your turn scale is in proportion to the map scale and the unit scale, then historical results should be achieveable.

Of course, the CRT is very important-probably the most important of all the Charts & Tables. It has to be able to produce historical outcomes. If it cannot, then your game will never be able to reproduce the overall outcome.

You have to look at the time scale, and ask, 'what could happen to a unit in that amount of time?' Could it be destroyed? The answer is 'yes'-though perhaps only in very extreme situations. You have to decide whether raw numbers were the primary ingredient of victory. Most of the time, we say it is, but you have to decide what role was played by organization and training, tactics, troop quality, leaders and geography-you have to weigh all those things.

You have to build into your combat results the historical outcomes. The best way to do that is to look at the historical outcomes of battles, and build your table from that data. For instance, you might analyse ten battles in a campaign. You might see one with 3,000 against 2,000, one side losing 500 and the winning side losing 350 men. So you'd go ahead and build a table with a 3:2 column, and you'd put one result somewhere in the middle that would show that level of losses.

Sometimes designers legislate moves. They say, 'You can't cross this line before turn ten.' They've got a problem in their basic parameters.

Similarly, if your map is incorrectly drawn, or if your road Movement Point costs are too great; if your troops are unable to move as fast as they should, you won't be able to reproduce the historical flow of the campaign.

Outputs are dependent upon inputs. If you have good inputs, good data, good evaluations of the units, then you should be able to have a historical outcome. That doesn't mean that an historical outcome is necessarily desirable, or that an historical outcome is the only worthwhile goal of a game design.

Some think a really good game design should be one in which the historical campaign just plays itself over and over again. But that's too easy. Sometimes designers legislate moves. They say, 'You can't cross this line before turn ten.'Well, that's easy. They've got a problem in their basic parameters when they find themselves making a rule like that. They've got to determine whether their Movement Allowances are too high, their movement costs are too low, their maps are inaccurate, or whether there are other fundamental issues that haven't been analysed.

Design Symposium

The Evaluation of Units
What is Wargame Design?
The Subsystem