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Greetings Designers,

I was thinking about what made an action scene in a film compelling, what made a combat scene in an RPG exciting, and therefore what made a wargame interesting to play. Through this thinking, reading, researching, and analysis I came to one conclusion; Stakes.

I have some random thoughts here:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/04/wargame-design-all-sizzle-and-no-stakes.html

Is winning/dying the only stakes that matter in a tabletop wargame or is there something more to it? Is that enough to keep them compelling?

I come to the conclusion that ultimately, they are not. Avoiding dying/losing is just not compelling after a few battles. That becomes a baseline or expectation for game play. the question becomes, how do you make more compelling stakes for wargames?

I think the idea behind wargaming is that the highest stakes are everyone having fun, especially since there's a winner and a loser.

I think of course fun….


But accessibility + tactical depth.

And immersion for me!

But what are the things that deliver fun?

That's the rub now isn't it.....

In a competitive game, by which I mean there's a winner and a loser, I'm supposing winning is potentially more fun than losing. I always preferred a close loss to a win myself, because the excitement of almost winning is more fun for me than a turkey shoot.

 Easy E wrote:
But what are the things that deliver fun?

That's the rub now isn't it.....

One game I keep going back to over and over (and my 14 year old son loves) is Battlegroup (Kursk primarily).

Between the scaling battle sizes and the "org charts", you add the random orders, and the battle draw chits (morale hit, random event, etc.), and then the in-game decisions about which type of round to fire from AT, whether to suppress or direct fire, whether to take casualties or duck back into cover and be pinned, the decision to unpin units (which result in chit draws), and the target morale number (which you know, but your opponent doesn't), make for a tense and interesting battle every time, where at least in my experience, I have yet to have a steamroll or game where it didn't come down to forcing a draw or two to win (or lose). And even as a one-off battle, the results end up mattering to us.

Games like 40k/WHFB don't have that same kind of stakes and are more exercises in stats and list building. The games play out pretty much how you'd expect them to. Again, in my opinion/experience.

The other games that GW put out that do have greater stakes are the campaign style games - Mordheim, old Necromunda, etc. Character advancement, interesting/skew results during a game that are memorable, some tactical "depth" (using the term loosely, we don't just put everyone on overwatch, for example), the potential to lose warband members. We had one game where one of my minor heroes suffered a wound that caused him to hate the enemy leader, who happened to be a Vampire (lucky him). In the next two games, I had that hero make a beeline for the Vampire, attack him in close combat with a mace, land a critical hit, and take him out in one blow. Not "stakes" per se, but added drama that we interjected based on the way the game had developed/played out.

Stakes covers an awful lot of ground. It seems like I'm more describing game elements I like or that draw me in and keep me invested, rather than stakes in terms of 'does the outcome matter to me'.

In a sense the stakes might be what you want out of a game, like the kind of experience you want vs what the game can provide. I have a hard time mapping how I imagine battles to be onto the Warhammer rules. It's not that Warhammer is unrealistic, it's that it makes a full head-movie. BattleTech as well, with all the weird kludginess.