Published Game Design commentary

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**JohnHwangDD**

Recently, Battlefront released a 15mm tank skirmish ruleset for WW2 tanks, aptly named "TANKS!":

http://tanks.gf9games.com/

It's a very streamlined sort of game, and you can see where it has been influenced by modern "move-and-shoot" games such as X-wing, Armada, STAW, Dragons, and Wings of Glory (all completely different games that happen to use similar mechanics). In this case, they use a movement arrow. It's pretty elegant, although the sheer amount of dice to be rolled is more than I'd like.

It's quite a nice little game, very clean, very playable, very easy to teach.

**BrookM**

Given the company in question, it was only a matter of time before they dropped everything else in favour of just tanks.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
The rules: http://tanks.gf9games.com//Portals/0/all_images/TANKS/TANKS-Rulebook-ForDownload.pdf

How it plays: http://tanks.gf9games.com/HowToPlay.aspx

**JohnHwangDD**

Well, yeah. Are the tanks not the secks of WW2 gaming?

**BrookM**

And Germans are obviously the Space Marines of that slice of hobby.

Reading the rules though.. yeah it's like X-Wing and the like, but cheapo? It looks and feels rather rough around the edges. Plus, unlimited range on your tank guns, unless I missed something.

**JohnHwangDD**

Yes, yes they are!

Unlimited range is pretty accurate for that scale. If you play with your garage door open, the table across the street in your neighbor's garage is easily within the 4.0km effective range of the 88mm gun of a Jadgpanther.

**Kilkrazy**

It looks reasonably good fun.

Obviously a good add-on if you already own a lot of tanks for FoW or some other WW2 game.

I doubt I will buy it unless it's fairly cheap.

**BrookM**

Ah, but you need to buy the individual tanks to get their stat cards and whatnot, very clever.

$10 per tank isn't half bad, but will these be the same feth gak piss quality as those of the Open Fire! starter? If so, they ought to pay you $10 to build that atrocious gak.

**JohnHwangDD**

Or, you can wait for people to scan the cards, and simply use the non-copyrightable stats.

As with X-wing, it's only $10 here, $15 there. How bad could it get?

Really, it's a good game design, leveraging the market-leading skirmish mechanics and paid add-on model.

**JohnHwangDD**

I was reading Ars today, and they reviewed Star Wars Rebellion

I particularly liked the explanation of combat:

The bulk of Rebellion is spent with missions and fleet movement, but combat matters, too, especially in the later game. Unfortunately, combat is fiddly enough that you'll look forward to it being over.

When one side moves units into a system where the other side has units, combat begins if those units occupy the same theater (space or ground). The defender can add a leader to the system, and then each side draws the number of space and ground tactic cards indicated on their leader. Inelegant fighting then proceeds this way:

The attacking player adds up all the red and black attack values of his ships and rolls those numbers of red and black dice.
The attacker can play space tactic cards, which do things like assign extra damage or prevent retreat, or draw new tactic cards, depending on dice rolls. (Some dice rolls also allow a red die to make a black hit and vice versa.)
The attacker assigns dice damage rolls to opposing ships, paying attention to which ships take red and which take black damage.
The defender can block damage using space tactic cards.
Destroy all units with no remaining health—but don't remove them completely from the board yet, because they will get to fire a parting shot before their actual destruction.
Repeat entire process for the defender's ships, then remove destroyed ships completely from the game board.
Switch to ground theater. Repeat entire process for attacker's ground units.
Repeat entire process for defender's ground units.

Congratulations—you have completed a single combat round.

These rounds will repeat until one side has no units left (or they have all retreated from the system). There are few interesting choices to be made during a fight, but there are a lot of dice to be chucked and assigned and blocked and chucked again. Quick battles in a single theater (space or ground) are fine, but—unless you are a dice-loving masochist—you will come to dread multi-round, multi-theater combat.

It's a very interesting counterpoint to the streamlined games like X-Wing which led to things like Tanks! In many ways, SWR looks like a throwback to 1980s gaming. And modern 40k. Quite frankly, the bloat of the thing makes me not want to play it. I need things that finish in 90-100 minutes, not 4 hours.

**Kilkrazy**

Some people like big, involved, long-playing games. I don't think it's necessarily a fault in itself that such games often have quite detailed areas of rules.

Some of the things sound a bit fiddly (rolling to see if some black cards become red, or whatever.)

FFG have already done three fast-playing tactical games. They could have done Risk in Space for a Star Wars game, but presumably they were aiming more at the Twilight Imperium III market.

That said, as I already own TWIII, and I"m not a hyper-fan of Star Wars, I don't feel a compulsion to buy this strategic game.

**JohnHwangDD**

While I don't mind an involved game, I now find that super-fiddly games are often fiddly for not particularly good reasons.

Also, Risk already has a Star Wars edition.

I'm passing on it as well, but I thought it interesting that such mechanics are still going on. It's kind of like playing games of 40k to resolve Epic Assaults.

**PsychoticStorm**

Well the word "Risk" may be a bit misleading as it has no relation with risk, its "Starwars queens gambit" re-themed.

**Lanrak**

I think if the level of detail in the rules reflects the level of detailed complexity in the game play is it acceptable.

But in general the rules should focus on clarity, brevity and elegance, IMO.

So the game that use clearly defined straightforward rules to deliver a moderate amount of game play complexity.(EG X-wing etc.)
Are popular for a good reason.

And games that obsess over minutia, for super accuracy.(Eg Firefly II.)Appeal more to history buffs , that play war games .Than to 'average Joe war gamers'.

Most gamers are happy with a moderate amount of complication, if it delivers a significant increase in game play complexity.

But as others have pointed out increasing complication in the rules has diminishing returns in the complexity of the game play after a certain point.

And some rule sets add pointless complication to the rules as short term sales pitch.(40k)

**JohnHwangDD**

Lanrak wrote:
Most gamers are happy with a moderate amount of complication, if it delivers a significant increase in game play complexity.

But as others have pointed out increasing complication in the rules has diminishing returns in the complexity of the game play after a certain point.

The problem is that most rule sets tend to add significant amounts of unnecessary complication for marginal increases in game play complexity.

Increasing rules complication has rapidly diminishing returns in any game that needs to be played and managed by people. Especially in a game without a dedicated referee who can adjudicate by fiat.

**sebster**

It's true in the general that increasing rules complexity has a diminishing level of return on tactical complexity, and in fact taken past a certain point it reduces tactical complexity as basic principles get overwhelmed by special cases and rules exploits.

But that's only in the general, in the specific a set of rules can potentially carry a lot of complexity if the rules are designed well enough to be intuitive and consistent. Elsewhere a ruleset might be slender, but if the rules are inconsistent and lack an internal logic they can detract from the basic tactical structure.

It isn't just about the quantity of the rules, but their quality as well.

**JohnHwangDD**

Someone referenced the Picnic Panic "wargame" KS:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1508069849/picnic-panic-the-game-of-ant-warfare-and-candy-pil

From what I see, it's not a wargame. No Shooting, No Morale, No unit differentiation. No Terrain. While I believe that a game can get away with removing some of these items to streamline and simplify the experience, it's not right to get rid of all of them and still call it a wargame.

It looks like a simple strategy game, with random resolution. I'm not sure there are any real tactics to it.

Also, the physical design completely fails to leverage the fact that the game is ants. I'd have expected a mix of (smaller, 20mm) Worker and Soldier Ants, mass-produced in plastic of different colors. Not 2 sizes of sculpted, cast metal.

It's not a game that I would play. My KOG light draft is far more wargame than this.

**jmurph**

I agree. Looks like a strategy game, but I don't get miniature wargame out of it. Wargames can be other than miniature, though, and use cardboard chits, counters, etc. Just not miniature wargaming, then.

Lots of plastic ants would have fit the theme much better, but I think they are going for larger pieces that are better for younger audiences. Maybe?

**JohnHwangDD**

I suppose, but I think this is for kids who stopped trying to eat models. So the ants can be in the 3/4" range, to fit nicely in the hex. And plastic means there can be a lot more of them.

More likely, it's because the companies behind it only cast metal, and don't know how to do anything else. So the design is flawed due to inherent constraints.

Ant Fight!
- many Worker, some Soldiers
- stat card is the measurement ruler, like Pirates
- Move, Fight, Collect, Breed mechanics
- NO Shoot, NO Morale
- MOBA-style corner deployments
- expansion to wandering Beetle monsters.
- Food Objectives
- Nest marker and (slowing / impassible) Terrain

Mechanically, it plays like a large-scale battle, where the Nest is the Factory Capital City.

**Kilkrazy**

There must be dirt cheap ant models on the market, like you would see at the Natural History Museum shop.

Metagaming did a board war game of insect wars, called Chitin

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2194/chitin-i

I never had it, and I bet it's been OOP for decades, but it might be possible to track down a PDF of the rules.

**JohnHwangDD**

If you hit eBay / Amazon, there are boatloads of options for piles of plastic ants, dirt cheap. It's mind boggling that they needed to chrome up Ants with CCWs and armor, when the concept can be done cleanly and cheaply.

From what I see, Chitin I is about right as a classic hex-and-chit wargame for the scale of the combatants and ground. Not sure it needs multi-flavored Warrior differentiation, but that's OK.

**jmurph**

I would probably have differentiated between larger, more powerful ants (IE army ants) and more numerous smaller ants (IE crazy ants). Players set up a base mound where their queen is. Each turn, they generate more ants if sufficient food available (spend it to make more ants, but they have to spend time as vulnerable eggs/larvae), move ants, secure food to return to base, and attempt to invade enemy bases. Random events can move new food or dangerous predators (or sometimes both- like a spider who eats ants but becomes food if defeated) into play. Since queens and eggs are unable to defend themselves or leave the base, losing the base (IE no defenders left at base) is game over.

**Nomeny**

I would have made rules based on ant position and so on, so that individual ants would have simple behaviour, with interesting and elegant behaviour in groups. If I'm playing with ants, I want either straight up cartoons, or realistic ants.

**JohnHwangDD**

And GW finally gets serious about streamlining 40k in Battle for Vedros:

2 pages of rules:

and 1 page of unit stats:

Spoiler:

Really, it's hard to distill 40k's core gameplay (or unit definitions) tighter than this.

If this is where 40k is going, I'm pretty excited

**Kilkrazy**

It's the AoSification of 40K, at least in a small way.

GW are trying to keep this set completely separate from the main game. It won't be sold in GW shops and the retailers carrying it won't be specialist game shops.

However it at least shows that 40K can be distilled down into a more compact format.

**jmurph**

So, it streamlines existing clunky rules and speeds gameplay. I fail to see how that is a bad thing....

**Nomeny**

It's a pity the new Tactical box didn't include a copy of the cool new helmet.

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Speaking of small games, I bet Regicide could be put on two sheets of paper.

**JohnHwangDD**

I think it is fantastic that GW shows they can do make a nice clean version of 40k. If 8th is only a hair more complex, it will be great!

**Lanrak**

The problem with those overly simplified rules for a 40k starter game.Is the very limited ranges available.

In fact it is only slightly more limited than the current rules , and look how complicated that got because it needed special rules and additional systems to add the variety back in to the game play!

I am the only one that sees this ?

The current range of units in the 40k battle game is far to vast to be covered by these direct representation resolution methods.

**JohnHwangDD**

The current range of 40k is bloated and should be radically streamlined more line with what might be easily and comfortably covered by AoS / BfV direct resolution mechanics.

**Lanrak**

I agree with streamlining.
NOT with over simplification that got the 40k rules into its current bloated mess in the first place.

EG removing movement rates 'simplified' the core rules, but did not streamline the rules for movement.(In fact it made then 6 times more complicated.

)

Direct resolution methods used in those games simply can not support the wide range of variety in the units found in the current 40k game.

Unless you want to cull/homogenize huge amounts if units/model types?