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I'm designing a wargame that is cheaper to play, faster to build, and more streamlined to play than others on the market. I figured I'd like to bring it to dakkadakka to get some feedback.

I've been playing Warhammer 40k since 2010. Fairly recently, I realized I hadn't played a single game since my son was born. I kept up on all the rumors and rules and releases, but I hadn't had time to play, let alone paint anything. So I signed up for a Kill Team tournament, and life got in the way of painting just five minis. At that point, I figured I should make my own game.

The primary goal was to reduce assembly time to nearly zero. Punch out card stock minis mounted on a base should give an attractive and professional look, all at the time it would take to punch them out of their card and put them in a base.

The second major goal is to keep gameplay at about an hour and a half for a full sized game. Since a major factor in most wargames is movement, I am using a hex board to get rid of measuring tapes. By keeping minis in formation, so a single base would contain about a platoon's worth of warriors, would also reduce the time of moving.

A pleasant side effect of that was that costs will be reduced significantly. I'm continuing to work on best to package everything to get the game on a table without the high cost of entry of a miniatures game.

I guess what I'm asking is, would a game that uses printed card minis be attractive?

SanfordGames wrote:
I'm designing a wargame that is cheaper to play, faster to build, and more streamlined to play than others on the market.

The primary goal was to reduce assembly time to nearly zero. Punch out card stock minis mounted on a base should give an attractive and professional look, all at the time it would take to punch them out of their card and put them in a base.

The second major goal is to keep gameplay at about an hour and a half for a full sized game. Since a major factor in most wargames is movement, I am using a hex board to get rid of measuring tapes. By keeping minis in formation, so a single base would contain about a platoon's worth of warriors, would also reduce the time of moving.

I guess what I'm asking is, would a game that uses printed card minis be attractive?

Sounds like original Battletech - card stand ups, hex movement, whole shebang. That sort of hybrid war/board game is only attractive if it's strategically interesting enough to warrant the loss of spectacle that proper minis and terrain give you. Trying to cram it into a short time frame might be counter to that, though. Battletech had a lot going for it - facings, armor locations, heat management, ammo tracking - to keep it strategic with just a few units and that's what kept it relatively short (12 on 12 games lasted a lot longer).

Probably need to know more about the kind of wargame you're going for - infantry skirmish, battlefield armor engagements, mecha duels - all of which will inform what you can do with cardstock terrain and stand-ups to make the game visually interesting.

 SanfordGames wrote:
I'm designing a wargame that is cheaper to play, faster to build, and more streamlined to play than others on the market. I figured I'd like to bring it to dakkadakka to get some feedback.

I've been playing Warhammer 40k since 2010. Fairly recently, I realized I hadn't played a single game since my son was born. I kept up on all the rumors and rules and releases, but I hadn't had time to play, let alone paint anything. So I signed up for a Kill Team tournament, and life got in the way of painting just five minis. At that point, I figured I should make my own game.

The primary goal was to reduce assembly time to nearly zero. Punch out card stock minis mounted on a base should give an attractive and professional look, all at the time it would take to punch them out of their card and put them in a base.

The second major goal is to keep gameplay at about an hour and a half for a full sized game. Since a major factor in most wargames is movement, I am using a hex board to get rid of measuring tapes. By keeping minis in formation, so a single base would contain about a platoon's worth of warriors, would also reduce the time of moving.

A pleasant side effect of that was that costs will be reduced significantly. I'm continuing to work on best to package everything to get the game on a table without the high cost of entry of a miniatures game.

I guess what I'm asking is, would a game that uses printed card minis be attractive?

I recommend you look at Acalon Hill products for some inspiration. It sounds like you want a Hex and Chit style game.

I think I've got a solid theme and a few mechanics to try and make up for what is lost with plastic minis. The game is not nearly as detail oriented as Battletech, but what games are? Also, I've got something a bit more attractive in mind than the old chit systems. I'll talk a little about theme today, and I'll talk mechanics another day.

Imagine being a German barbarian walking through the woods, when you come across a gigantic stone bridge. It's taller than the trees, and stretches from one horizon to another. No man could ever build such a thing, it must have been built by giants or gods. Many aqueducts outlasted the Roman Empire that built it. After the fall, the greatest achievements of Rome appeared impossible to many, not even recognizable as human in origin.

The game is set in the far future, long after a major civilizational collapse. Society slid all the way back to the stone age and has moved through history again. During this time, all real cultural memory of the old world has been lost. Merchant caravans shelter from the rain under portions of freeways that are still standing, all the while assuming they were made by giants. Twisted I beams of toppled skyscrapers lay across the desert like the bones of great serpents. Knights look upon rusted hulls of mechs, half burried by the centuries.

Explorers have just discovered that these things were made by men, and in the ruins, powerful technology awaits rediscovery. Lords raise armies to capture territory and find glory among the bones of their ancestors.

Sounds like you have a theme.

This (and the series in general) maybe of interest to you:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2018/09/wargame-design-getting-started-on.html

You may also find value in this:
http://deltavector.blogspot.com/search/label/Game%20Design%20Index

I just read the Blood and Spectacles article and was pleased to find that I loosely followed the his suggestions when I was designing. Then I clicked on the Delta Vector blog and just saw the one link. I figured it was going to be a quick read. With 70+ articles, it's going to take me a long while to get through, but it looks promising.

Thanks for the notes.

I look forward to see what you come up with!

So a high level view of the mechanics: Each major release (as planned now) will represent a battle for a specific region, and will include with it three to five factions local to the area, with all of the characters involved in that fight. Some battles will expand previous factions, representing their heroes in other parts of the world, and some will include brand new forces.

You are the general of one of the armies. You select your officers (specific, named, with their own special rules and all that) , and those officers fill out their formations with troops (each army has their own list of units).

Rather than I Go U Go activation, or one unit at a time, or various unit by unit trackers of speed and exhaustion, there is an activation deck. Currently, each officer has 3 activation cards, each army has 1 whole army card, and these get shuffled into the same deck for both players. You draw a card and activate that officer's unit. This means a single player can go multiple times in a row, and even a single officer may have a streak of two or three activations in a row. Considering that each player should have about three to six officers on the table, this should not be a major issue. This keeps player turns short, players engaged and excited.

Play is on a hex board to be rid of measuring tapes and speed up play. Terrain would be hex cards that can move game to game, representing all the common types of terrain.

Combat currently is a d10 system. In Warhammer, a single attack is a lengthy process including rolls to hit, wound, save, test morale, and often there are rerolls in at least one of those. I implemented the d10 with two rolls, to hit and to wound, and there are no rerolls. Instead, a D&D style advantage system is used, where you roll one additional dice and discard the lowest. It's functionally identical to a reroll, but faster. The only issue with this system is that, while it is perfectly functional, it's not terribly fun. The excitement of rolling a giant bucket of dice, the tension of save rolls, rolling two d10s just doesn't quite capture it.

I'm currently trying to work out a combat mechanic that's more satisfying and how best to implement it. The leader in the club house is a dice pool mechanic. A unit would roll a specified number of generic attack dice and special dice that grant special rules. So rolling a critical hit on a heavy attack dice may indicate that it cannot be blocked. Rolling a critical hit on an exploding attack dice may mean that it causes a wound and also can be rerolled. Defenders roll a specified number of defense dice, each success negating a single attack. Shields may be a special dice that, when a critical is rolled, negates a special dice. Units could have special rules to interact with this, so a light, roguish unit may have the rule "parry and thrust", where critical shield dice cause a free counter attack as well. I think this system sounds fun, and it's much more granular than the d10 system, but I need to test it to see if it's clunky.

Of your two roll system, does your opponent get to roll at all?

If not, I recommend thinking about it. As the target, I like to roll dice to try and not get killed as much as you like rolling to try and hurt me.

Just a thought.

 Easy E wrote:
Of your two roll system, does your opponent get to roll at all?

No, it didn't include that. The original idea was to speed up combat while still allowing granularity, but it absolutely fails in the fun department. The deeper I get into game design the more I realize that 40k succeeds despite its combat mechanics, not because of them.

I've decided I'm scrapping the d10 system, but I'm still working on the dice pool business. The basic shape of it at the moment is that attack dice always hit on a 4+, defense dice always block on a 5+. Then most units will get a single special attack dice. The special dice will cause a wound on 4+ as normal, but also have a rule when they roll a 6.

So for example, all red dice represent a heavy attack, and if they critical hit, the wound they cause cannot be blocked by armor. This can represent a musket ball tearing through chain mail, or a barbarous warrior swinging a mighty nuclear glass axe. So a unit with something like this would roll 4 white attack dice and 1 red. Something like a cannon shell can be all red dice, showing the likelihood of it penetrating armor, even if the enemy rolls good saves, or it may have a special rule saying a critical hit causes 2 unblockable wounds instead. The cool thing with this is that players are, more or less, trying to stack as many special dice on a single unit, so including an officer might add another blue dice to show her superior swordsmanship. Capturing a piece of ancient technology may give them a laser blaster granting a yellow dice for the chance of plasma explosions.

I'm not opposed to the use of custom dice for this sort of thing, the prices are fairly low, but custom dice remove the ability to modify values. For example, if three faces are blank, two are normal hits swords, and one is a skull and crossbones critical, then it cannot be modified. There can never be a rule that says, "5 and 6 critical", or "rather than 4+, this attack succeeds on 3+". Being able to quickly read the dice is a good thing rather than pip counting, but does it take 5oo much flexibility away?

I heartily approve of dice pools!

The different colors reminds me a bit of the Spartan Games ground combat game for their space universe. Dang, the name escapes me at the moment.

I agree that custom dice are sucky!

So here is a sketch of the base. The red cut outs are your units. That's six stands of warriors, three warriors to a stand. The rectangle on the front will have a matching one on the rear. This will have the unit's name on it to help make it easier to identify from across the table. Decent prototypes will help determine if that's even necessary. The yellow one up front is an officer. Not every unit will have an officer, of course. Then the square on back will end up being a flag. This is used for activation.

Each officer can have three other units under their command. Those units will have the flag of their officer flying above their base. Units are activated from the activation deck, which is three cards per officer (from both sides) and one whole army card per side
Each turn, you reveal the top card of the activation deck. That officer and all units under their command, showed by the flag above their base, get to activate.

Whenever a unit takes a wound, a stand is removed from its base, which reduces is combat ability, its morale, and wounds remaining.