I have no urge to design a Eurogame or to write roleplaying game rules no matter how much I enjoy both of those kinds of gaming. When it comes to wargames, though, I feel this itch to try and craft my own take on historical events that I am fascinated by. I think it’s because at their core so many wargames are historical models and, in my other guise, I’m a public military history. I cannot help but think about how I might be able to use game mechanics to communicate an idea about one of my favourite subjects. I suppose it’s no great leap from being prepared to commit several years of my life to writing a book for public consumption to spending a similar amount of time designing a game to achieve something similar. At least in terms of the impetus in my part that is. In terms of execution, the two are quite different!
My most advanced design is a little card game about the Battle of Benevento in 1266, trying to focus more on the archers than the cavalry.
Over the past year I have dabbled in a couple of design projects but only one has advanced as far as having a physical prototype and I’ve only played it a handful of times. That was a big part of what made the Consim Game Jam (http://consimgamejam.com/) so appealing. The challenge to design a game in 72 hours could help me focus and get a game further along the design process in three days than I have with any of the projects I’ve had in the tank for months. I needed to rip the bandage off and prepare myself for failing often and failing fast. It also helped that this promised to be a team event. Having a few comrades in arms to brainstorm solutions for the problems we all caused helps take the sting out of making those mistakes in the first place. We’re all in this together, it’s nobody’s fault!
I sought out my teammates in advance on the Discord server of supports of the YouTube channel Homo Ludens (shameless plug, you can see me play Pax Viking on the channel by clicking here or listen to a podcast where I chat a bit about the game Warriors of God here) and together Russ, Pierre, and myself formed Team Crossboys. Of the three of us only Pierre had any real game design experience, Russ and myself both being of the blogging persuasion (you can, and should, read Russ’s work at https://cardboardconflicts.com/). What we lacked in experience we made up for in enthusiasm and in the week leading up to the Jam all three of us were brainstorming ideas about what we would like to work on for our design. The organisers had dropped some hints about the theme (which would only be revealed at the start of the Jam) and we know it would probably involve some form of card driven element. With that to work on we decided to pick a few topics we thought were interesting that would make interesting Card Driven Games (CDGs). We knew that when the final theme was announced some of them might not be suitable, but we deliberately picked very flexible topics and were reasonably confident at least one would work. The three topics we eventually settled on were:
The invasion of the Songhai Empire by the Saadian Dynasty of Morocco in 1591
The Jacquerie of 1358
The last stand of the Swiss Guard during the Sack of Rome in 1527
As the Jam approached, I think we were mostly leaning towards the first topic. It was a conflict that would be unfamiliar to a lot of gamers and that had a lot of potential in terms of ways we could approach its design.
I’ll probably still attempt to design a game on the Jacquerie at some point, though. It’s too interesting a topic to leave alone!
The Jam’s theme was to design a CDG (no surprise) but you couldn’t use any map and were limited to 54 card and 54 other components total. This somewhat scuppered some early work we had done planning out a rough point to point map of West Africa but in the end, I think it was probably for the best – the game is much more interesting without a map.
The announcement was made on Thursday night European time and Pierre and I both went to sleep after only a few hours of brainstorming. Meanwhile Russ, who is in Eastern US Time, basically solved how to do the geography with only cards. Instead of a map players would have cards representing somewhat abstracted locations placed in a tableau in front of them. Players would then be able to move armies, represented by counters, between cards but to move onto your opponents cards you would first have to use cards from your hand that would represent traversing the often-difficult terrain of the Niger River and its surrounding environs. If you successfully made it to one of your opponent’s cards and could take control of it, you would lift it from their tableau and add it to your own. It needed a little refining, but the core idea was there, and we were off to the races.
Russ also did up basic graphics to explain his idea. The final product changed from this but it did a lot to convince us of how this might work with a tableau rather than a map!
Friday and Saturday were spent in intense brainstorming and in playtests that were very fast and loose – changing rules mid-playtest, either because we didn’t like a rule or, more frequently, because we realised the rule didn’t make any damn sense. This was a really fun process and the fact that we were a team really helped - realising you don’t know how a rule works when you’re showing your game to a friend is embarrassing but collectively realising that none of you know how it works is funny.
By Saturday evening our game, then titled Al-Mansur’s Gambit after the Moroccan Sultan who ordered the start of the invasion, had begun to really take shape. We had built a basic but fast combat system and incorporated systems for representing support (or lack thereof) for the Askia, the leaders of the Songhai, and the Sultan’s approval of the progress of his generals. We refined it a little more over the Sunday morning but most of that day was devoted to polishing. Things like proofreading rules, updating the TTs Module (all Russ’s work), adding art (all Pierre), and making sure we had all the elements we needed for our submission to meet the requirements of the Jam.
The submitted product. I can take no credit for the Tabletop Simulator mod or the graphics as I contributed nothing to them!
Overall, it was a great experience and I’m happy with the game we managed to design in just 72 hours. I came out of the experience with a reasonably long list of fixes that I wanted to make now that we would have more time but given the time constraints, I think we did a good job. The restrictions definitely limited our design decisions but we never felt so constrained that we couldn’t execute our broader vision. In some ways the restrictions helped to focus our design and spurred some ideas we would not have come up without the restrictions. Left to my own devices I definitely would have used a point-to-point map for this game, and there probably is a great game on this subject that could be made using one, but I’m very happy with the tableau system we ended up using instead. I’m looking forward to continuing to work on it and expanding the design while keeping some of the restraints from the Jam if they fit the design!
I can’t exactly claim to be any kind of expert in game design after this experience, but I do think that it gave me a much better understanding of the processes involved and it will serve me well going forward as I attempt future designs. For the sake of posterity, and as a source of future shame when I inevitably forget one of them, I thought I’d share the main game design takeaways I have after the Game Jam.
Get a prototype together as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t solved every design question you have or if parts of it don’t work. Take the systems you already have and just start playing around with them. This will help you identify if they work and if they are giving the kind of experience that you want from the game.
Following on from above: try to have a high level vision for what you want the game to be and generally how you want it to function. This shouldn’t be specific mechanics but instead a set of broader principles. For example, in our game we didn’t want to emphasise combat and instead focused more on political support and the physical geography of the conflict. This meant that we wanted a system for resolving combats quickly to get the game back to its main focus. We didn’t want a six step multi-layered combat system, no matter how clever it might be, as that would go against what we wanted the game to emphasise.
Few things are more valuable than people who are willing to play your broken ass game. We were lucky because there were three of us but if you have a friend who is also interested in design (or just very patient) you should rope them in to playing your prototype with you. Having someone to bounce ideas off of while you try and tweak mechanics on the fly is a huge advantage.
Don’t be afraid to change mechanics mid-game! You don’t need to go away for a week to come up with an amazing alternative, if something doesn’t work change it immediately and see if it works better (or worse)! It took at least a day of testing before any of us actually played our game to completion and that’s fine! If you have a clever idea later you can always try it then, but if you have someone willing to test with you now you should make the most of it!
A little art goes a long way. I am not blessed with artistic talent, but there are plenty of images freely available on Wikimedia or in museum collections (the Met in NYC and the National Gallery in Washington, DC have pretty generous copyright rules) and you should feel free to liberally steal them. A prototype with no art is easier to change, but once you start adding even some basic images it will make the whole thing feel more real. Don’t go too far, though, and obsess over how the game looks early in the process. Just slap some pictures and borders on things and move on - functional not final!
Made a shitty prototype? Hey guess what, you’re a designer now! There’s no membership rules to being a game designer, you don’t need to be published, if you’ve made something then that counts! Go out and make something terrible and then, slowly, make it better! Try to resist the creep of imposter syndrome or the feeling that you could never make an interesting game. If you want to design something then do it, and if you’re too busy then maybe sign up for the next Game Jam and get yourself the full experience in just a few days!
If you’re interested in trying Al-Mansur’s Gambit for yourself, you can access the Tabletop Simulator Module via this link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2851542614. It includes a copy of the rules and play aids in the module so everything you need to play is there. If you do try it, I’d love to know what you think!
Lest you think that our game was the only one designed, there were many fascinating submissions during the Game Jam that I still have yet to play. However, once the results are announced many of them should be available to play via the Consim Game Jam website. You can find the games from the previous Game Jam here: http://consimgamejam.com/edition-1-submissions/.