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We see dozens of kickstarters for new board games and war games launched each year. Almost exclusively, they are a means to sell miniatures, to try and get some of that sweet GW money.
They usually end up costing well over $100 for a very basic starter kit, and if you want all the bells and whistles, well, $500 is not unheard of.
I have an idea I’d like to share, and see what you experienced gamers think.
I have a very well fleshed out idea for a set of game rules that follows these Principles:
Minimise luck
No one likes to lose a game, or even win one, because of a few lucky roll of the dice.
Yes, in reality, sometimes luck does play a significant factor, the Bismarck famously blew up the Hood with a lucky shot that hit the ammunition store, but do we really want that sort of luck to be in a game?
Imagine you’re the player who just started a grand WW II battel simulator combat with a friend, laid out the ships, planned your strategy, and begin the game. Only for the opposing player to fire, roll a hit, roll for penetration, roll for location, and blow up your battleship. This does not a good game make.
This game will empower strategy over luck.
Simplify
So any rule sets out there are incredibly complicated, with massive tomes for rules that require detailed and careful analysis, with many disagreements and arguments taking place over interpretation of a particular section. Games gets bogged down in minutia, as even experienced players consult the rules to make sure they got that last turn right…
Depth
But you don’t need complexity for a deep, powerful gaming experience, look at chess, a few rules governing the movement of the pieces that anyone can learn in minutes yet the game has a deeply strategy aspect.
Flexibility
Most games these days are designed to sell miniatures, that’s the reason they exist. And a successful business model it can be, IF you get you head above the crowd.
But imagine a rule system that’s not designed to work with proprietary miniatures, one that encourages you to use those minis you already have, sitting there on your shelf! This game will set out a simple method to create rulesets that allow you to quickly create a stat sheet for your favourite miniatures, that is costed to a power curve, and that works with all other minis you or your opponent may field.
What this game will provide is a comprehensive, but easily digestible rule book, a simple tabular system for controlling combat, tiles for creating the playing field, and optional add-ons as we progress.
Cost
Because I am not trying to fund miniatures, the costs can be kept low, so instead of forking over $100’s of dollars, and waiting 12 months for you product, here you pay just $50, and only wait 6 months for production.
In other words, this is a concept for a game with rules, decks, tiles, only, but allows you the player to use your existing minis in an easily approachable system, that encourages fast, but deep gameplay.
Of course the actual wording of these rules can't be written here, however, I'll do a short summary
Power Cards
The way the system works is that there are dozens and dozens (possibly hundreds) of armour, weapon and magic cards, each with a power rating. Each card has a maximum power of 25, so consider that Godlike power, reserved for the toughest mini.
You take your favourite mini, look over the model, and assign cards to it, based on what you want, what the model has for weapons, etc. Each card adds power to your model, so the more cards, and the more powerful cards, the higher the power for that model. You can go nuts, just remember that your game is limited by your total power, so if you just put 20 on one big model, you may well be facing 10 other units on the battle field, as are there are bonuses for rear attacks that might leave your big guy vulnerable.
Or, you could for example, take a cute little bunny rabbit, and assign it a 25 (maximum) power lightning attack, just for giggles. Give him a Leap movement card, and watch the fun unroll.
There is no limit to how many cards you can put on one model, but you will quickly reach a point at which you can’t field a unit with too many cards as its power level will exceed the table limit.
Note that this assignment is not fixed, on battle you can field your dragon with 10 cards, the next you decide that didn’t work, and give it only 5.
Combat Cards
Attacks, ranged, and magic cards constitute your offensive skills for your army.
Attack cards.
Attack cards are the simplest, they determine the weapon type, attack rating for that weapon (max 25), and bonuses for various things, like a flaming sword would have a bonus fire attack, which of course adds more power to that card, and therefore that model.
There are two basic types, Melee, and Ranged.
Melee attack cards
Melee has all the information for swords, clubs, spears (when not thrown), claws, hooves, fists etc.
These are assigned a weapon type: Blade, blunt, or piercing. All attack cards have a penalty to range, so a one-handed axe would quarter range, a sword 1/3, and a spear 1/2. That means if the range of the model is 25 (max) a spear can hit a n enemy 12.5 cm away.
Ranged Attack Cards
Ranged has information regarding the range (max 25), weapon type, and fire rate. Note that fire rate multiplies the power of the card, so a triple fire-rate 25-range arrow is going to be expensive to field.
Magic Cards
Of course there’ll be a huge number of Magic cards, let your imagination run wild.
The great thing is, that because you have the cards you want out for each model, there is no need to consult a rule book to determine how each magic works against each armour type. I’m leaving this section intentionally obscure.
Armour Cards
Armour cards are the most complex cards, they consist of a cross reference table, showing how effective each attack type, magic type, and range type are for that armour. So Steel plate armour takes less damage from blade, more from blunt, more from lightning, less from poison.
Movement cards
You then determine the movement type for that model. A model may have more than one movement type.
Movement types include Stride, Fly, Leap, glide (like a snail), and each movement type has associated bonuses and penalties for the various terrain types. These movement types also have an allocation for maximum distance per turn, or movement points. Each movement point adds to the power of the model to a maximum of 25, so if you want your demon model to be super-fast, add up enough Stride cards to equal 25. The movement cards are broken up into smaller movement points for reasons explained below. There will be cards of 1, 3, 5, and 10 movement points for all movement types.
Size cards
The final type of card are the size cards, which you use to simply determine how big your guy is. There is one for Mass, and one for Melee Range. A giant skeleton may have a long reach with its scythe, but not weigh that much.
Maximum size is 25, and maximum reach is 25. Mass determines the health of the unit, and its weight, reach of course determines how far it can hit with its melee weapons.
Terrain
Terrain is a flexible system of tiles of all types of terrain, which are built up as you like…into a large square or rectangular battle field. Terrain types would include road, light scrub, forest, jungle, desert, cave, swamp, etc.
Tiles are 100mm square, and they represent 10m squares in game. They are simply aligned up edge to edge to create whatever gaming field you want.
Each one has a marking on it for distance circle that touches the centre of each edge, with smaller concentric circles every 1cm. Distance measurement is now automatic, no more tape measures, laser pointers, etc.
Movement rates for all terrain cards are written on the cards themselves, along with the vision distance, and cover (for aerial combat).
So a road tile has 0 vision, 0 movement penalty, and 0 cover. A dense jungle would be 4 vision, 4 movement, and 4 cover, whilst swamp might be: 5 movement, 0 vision, and 0 cover.
These are easily determined directly from the playing field, simple add up the number written on the corner of each card you intend to travel along, or sight through.
Setting up
Your battle force is selected by determining the power you wish to play at, and gathering troops that total up to that amount. The highest power mini is automatically the commander.
Each player arranges there forces along one edge of the playing area, opposite to the opponent.
The Play Style
There are various win conditions that you choose:
One rule option is that the Commander’s death is the objective of the game. Right away you see the strategic possibilities, as your most powerful weapon is also your most vulnerable.
Other rule options are kill all (obvious), and territory capture.
Territory capture is quite different as your goal is to send troops to each tile, and possess it (with a counter), if an opponent is present, you fight for control of that tile. If a tile has an enemy counter on it, and you place your mini on it, you take that tile at the end of the turn. You win when you control 60% of the tiles, so huge strategic play options here as you rush to decide which tiles to capture, which troops to risk how to control territory.
Initiative
The play starts with one player, who it is doesn’t matter, roll for it, or choose by agreement.
Matches are broken up Rounds and Turns. A round is one model using one card, a turn is when all models have exhausted all available cards. This will be kept track of using the cards again, turning them over as they are used.
For Example Player 1 starts, takes one miniature, and takes one of that model’s allocated cards. For example, he may pick up a 5 movement point card, and therefore move 5 movement points, adjusted for terrain, or he may use an attack card, if any enemy is in range. Play swaps each card, so there is no huge benefit to going first, and play is quick and simple.
Combat
Combat is also quite different, based on extensive tables, rather that endless rules and addenda.
A single d100 roll determines your “Quality of Hit”
Now Quality of It needs explaining. In a lot of games systems we have a “to hit” roll, then possibly an “avoid hit” roll, then a damage roll, then maybe an armour roll or hit location…its simply too many.
The point of combat is to do as much damage to your opponent as possible whilst preserving your defence. The better the hit, the more accurate, better hit location, and thus more damage. It all ties in together. One roll to unite them all!
From the QoH roll, we add the attack skill of the attacker, and subtract the defence skill of the defender. This gives your Attack Number.
Note that attack skill and defence skill are capped at 25, as we don’t want situations where almost every attack does no damage in low attack, high defence situations.
With this we consult the appropriate Armour vs Weapon Type table.
Each Armour Type has a table with various weaponr types listed, simply cross reference the weapon type to the armour, find you QoH roll in the column, and there’s your damage.
And attacker may choose to be “reckless” and add up to 25 to his attack roll, but loses that many points from his defence on retaliation, so again tactics as to whether you think that will kill your opponent, or risk retaliation. Just remember to keep track of that.
So here is a simplified example: Real tables are delineated to the exact attack number.
Steel Armour
Attack# -25 – 0 1-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-80 81-90 91-100 101-120 121-125
Blade 0 1/4 1/2 1/3 3/4 51-60 61-70 71-80 81-90 1 1/4 1 2/3 2X
Blunt 0 ~1/3 ~3/4 31-40 41-50 1 1/4 1 1/2 1 2/3 1 3/4 2X 2X 3X
Piercing 0 0 0 1/4 1/3 1/2 61-70 71-80 81-90 1 1/4 3X 4X

Size and mass come into play in the form of knockback. Large models on the battlefield need to fell…large.

So when you use the knockback option, a hit from a massive model applied to a smaller model (like that lightning bunny mentioned above) the rabbit ios knocked back an amount determined by:
The mass of the attacker
The mass of the defender
The type of weapon hit.

Other factors, for example, Charge is a ranged attack, (think Rhino) this gets a bonus to knockback distance as the whole mass of the attacker is used on the target, whereas with a weapon swing, it’s only the mass of the weapon.

There are more rules for ranged weapons, but follow the same process of single roll, then attack minus defence, than lookup magic type vs defence type.
And of course there are magic cards!

That’s enough to whet your appetite…

Do you guys think that is interesting enough to spend $40 -$50 bucks on?

I think your most viable idea was selling sets of tiles. There are a lot of people who love well-made tiles.

The game design, I don't know so much. You're talking the talk, but there is an enormous number of cheap or free minis-agnostic rule sets out there. $50 is a lot to ask a year in advance for another one.

Perhaps you could lay out your rules ideas in a YouTube series and gather funds through Patreon to determine whether or not there's a market for your rules?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I think your most viable idea was selling sets of tiles. There are a lot of people who love well-made tiles.

The game design, I don't know so much. You're talking the talk, but there is an enormous number of cheap or free minis-agnostic rule sets out there. $50 is a lot to ask a year in advance for another one.

Perhaps you could lay out your rules ideas in a YouTube series and gather funds through Patreon to determine whether or not there's a market for your rules?

Thanks for feedback....
Can you point me to some of these "cheap or free" rulesets...I'm quite interested...!

Wargames Vault is awash with hundreds of rule sets which are often $5-7 PDFs. Now, some are good, some are trash, just depends.

 Elbows wrote:
Wargames Vault is awash with hundreds of rule sets which are often $5-7 PDFs. Now, some are good, some are trash, just depends.

They seem mostly like modern war simulators...

yxalitis wrote:

No one likes to lose a game, or even win one, because of a few lucky roll of the dice.
Yes, in reality, sometimes luck does play a significant factor, the Bismarck famously blew up the Hood with a lucky shot that hit the ammunition store, but do we really want that sort of luck to be in a game?
Imagine you’re the player who just started a grand WW II battel simulator combat with a friend, laid out the ships, planned your strategy, and begin the game. Only for the opposing player to fire, roll a hit, roll for penetration, roll for location, and blow up your battleship. This does not a good game make.
This game will empower strategy over luck.

No one? I like randomness in games. I enjoy a lucky win and don't mind an unlucky loss. It feels better to me than getting stomped in chess over and over again.

Imagine you like the idea of uneven scenarios but everyone you know wants to play tournament or "matched play" games. When a really lucky thing happens right at the beginning, you get a spontaneous uneven game anyway! It's great! Many of my favorite games to remember started out with a really unlucky draw at the beginning.

Sure, a game that minimizes luck, that's simplified, that's deep, that's inexpensive, and that has tons of tiles and cards could work. I couldn't bear to read the whole thing so I am not sure if your game will be simple or deep or minimize luck.

I see you still have dice. You should know, games like Warhammer that have you roll an enormous pile of dice end up with a nice tall bell curve that makes extreme results extremely rare. If you try to have fewer rolls, you'll add more randomness, as each roll becomes relatively more important.

A game with tons of cards fot designing each individual model doesn't sound simple. Tons of terrain options do not sound simple. Tons of tables for different armor vs. different weapons does not sound simple. This is the minutiae you said you would avoid. More choices means more complexity.

Tape measures are pretty simple. Squares or hexes are pretty simple. Tiles with concentric circles... I don't know.

But good news: a complex, random, shallow game could also work. It's all in the execution and the advertising either way.

Problem with "luck free" wargames is that if you're trying to simulate warfare in any even remotely realistic way, well, luck plays a huge part in it. Napoleon famously lost the Waterloo in part to a stomach ache, the Bismarck one shot the hood, the US carrier borne aircraft at Midway that sank three Japanese carriers found them on a whim, George Washington narrowly avoided death at the hands of a sniper because he just felt wrong about shooting the general, you can go on and on. Some of history's most influential battles were partly decided by luck, sheer dumb circumstances that not even the greatest tactical geniuses could predict. It was how the commanders reacted to these flukes of circumstance that often decided history.

In addition, "luck" with dice is about the only way to simulate the fog of war, the inherent chaos and unpredictability that even state of the art modern militaries deal with. War is inherently chaos, things going wrong all the time, and when we can decide where a model moves to the exact inch, have perfect knowledge of enemy deployment and strength, and have near perfect knowledge of ranges with all the time in the world to make decisions, random dice rolls is about the only thing that helps reel the wargame back in to reality. Does it go too far sometimes? Absolutely. But it's inherent to the nature of wargaming to it's very core. It's part of why many games don't allow premeasuring either. Yes a skilled player can usually eyeball distances anyways, but you always have that chance of calling it wrong.

Not to say that people can't be allowed to like dice free systems that attempt to tone down randomness, I just think that if it's done well it really helps the game. The key is that players should have ways to mitigate the odds and have redundancies, but never truly be able to get rid of the odds 100%>

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Problem with "luck free" wargames is that if you're trying to simulate warfare in any even remotely realistic way, well, luck plays a huge part in it.

There's Diplomacy, though. And of course chess, checkers, go, RPS, etc.

All of which are highly stylised representations of conflict. Detailed/realistic and non-random it will be very hard to make it work in a way that's both appealing and not predictable after the 2nd game.

In the case of those boardgames (apart from Diplomacy, as I'm not sufficiently familiar with that to comment), I think it's better to say they were inspired, in part, a very long time ago, by conflict. None of them are attempting to simulate anything about war, just provide an abstract game.

Innovation in Wargames is HIGHLY over-rated.

First of all - good luck! Creating any sort of game is extremely difficult and requires a lot of hard work, so I genuinely hope it works out for you.

But (you knew there was one coming, right?) I have a few reservations. Firstly, your game doesn't actually seem all that simple, which is one of its stated goals. Modern wargames tend to avoid the use of cross-referenced tables because it gets quite clunky and annoying referring to them all the time. Ultimately you often don't need the sort of granularity you seem to be aiming for.

Minimising luck is one thing, but you have to be careful. Remove it too much and you end up with a bland spreadsheet of a game. I'm also a little concerned you're going to be using a single D100 roll to determine combat. A single dice roll with a huge range of outcomes is the opposite of what I think of when you talk about minimising luck. Combined with your offence/defence modifier system I think you might find luck plays more of a factor than you want.

Finally, and I'm trying not to be too harsh here, your opening pitch here isn't exactly presented in the most professional light. The layout is hard to read, the spelling and grammar sometimes a little bit off, etc. For a regular forum post that's fine but as a pitch to try to get someone to invest in your game? It's not exactly inspiring confidence.

yxalitis wrote:
Can you point me to some of these "cheap or free" rulesets...I'm quite interested...!

I'm not Bob but you could try this, also made for random miniatures:
https://www.scribd.com/document/237283619/Shield-Breaker-Rules-v0-8 (pdf of the rules)
shieldbreaker.net/ (not working)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160321014336/shieldbreaker.net/ (internet archive backup)
There's even a backup for the pdf of the rules:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160204080730/http://shieldbreaker.net/documents/ShieldBreaker_rules_v0.8.pdf
Simple rules, 18 pages (but a lot of whitespace and illustrations), probably more like 5 to 10 pages of rules and army construction guides.

Also in general this site might be useful:
http://freewargamesrules.wikia.com/wiki/Freewargamesrules_Wiki

Slipspace wrote:
First of all - good luck! Creating any sort of game is extremely difficult and requires a lot of hard work, so I genuinely hope it works out for you.

But (you knew there was one coming, right?) I have a few reservations. Firstly, your game doesn't actually seem all that simple, which is one of its stated goals. Modern wargames tend to avoid the use of cross-referenced tables because it gets quite clunky and annoying referring to them all the time. Ultimately you often don't need the sort of granularity you seem to be aiming for.

Minimising luck is one thing, but you have to be careful. Remove it too much and you end up with a bland spreadsheet of a game. I'm also a little concerned you're going to be using a single D100 roll to determine combat. A single dice roll with a huge range of outcomes is the opposite of what I think of when you talk about minimising luck. Combined with your offence/defence modifier system I think you might find luck plays more of a factor than you want.

Finally, and I'm trying not to be too harsh here, your opening pitch here isn't exactly presented in the most professional light. The layout is hard to read, the spelling and grammar sometimes a little bit off, etc. For a regular forum post that's fine but as a pitch to try to get someone to invest in your game? It's not exactly inspiring confidence.

Thanks for feedback!

#1, yes, this was not intended to be laid out in any professional manner, it was more just a quick dash of notes to illustrate the broad strokes of my idea...which, by the way, is in a constant state of revision, this really early days in my thought process...


As for your points...

The cross reference tables:

These are on the cards associated with the attack, although I am playing around with the idea of moving it ot the armour table.

Anyway, here's the idea.
Let’s say we have a fight between two standard human fighters one wearing steel plate armour and using a longsword, the other wearing leather armour and using a mace.

Right off the bat we see these two combatants aren’t wearing appropriate armour for this situation, this will be a quick, bloody battle tactically neither player was wise to choose this match up, but that doesn’t matter for our example.

Player #1 has the steel plate armour, and goes first. (we’ll assume they are already in melee range).
He plays his Longsword card with attack skill 20. He literally places this card down, and rolls the d100.
Scenarios:
He rolls a 01, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does normal damage with a 21, so the damage is 21.
He rolls a 50, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does extra damage with a 70, so the damage is actually 105.
He rolls a 00, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does massive damage with a 120, so the damage is 240.

So to insert another answer here, this amount of luck is what I consider acceptable, luck is definitely still there in the game.
What I don’t want is compounding luck, or a string of chance that can literally swing a battle.
E.g., I roll 10 attack dice, but I need 5 to hit, I roll all 5’s and 6’s! The opponent rolls to dodge, he needs a 3 to dodge, but roll all 1’s and 2’s.
Attacker now has 10 hits to roll damage for, and rolls very high on everyone.

Unlikely but I’m sure you’ve all seen that happen…a little bit of luck is fine, but this luck string can swing a game too much. You may disagree, of course, but that’s my ideal.

Anyway, I’ll work on the system a bit more, and do some trial combats…

In truth, I ran out of steam.

"It's going to be simple but deep" you said (I paraphrase)

And it started simply, which was good.

And then it got more complex, and I lost track.

Now, I do accept that SHOWING me would work better - and that sometimes lots of words are necessary for accuracy, but in the end I wasn't perceiving simplicity, and stopped. Sorry, but - good luck!

Slipspace wrote:
Firstly, your game doesn't actually seem all that simple, which is one of its stated goals.

This is pretty much my view. What you have outlined sounds incredibly complicated.

Note that I'm not saying it *is* complicated, but the way you are expressing it makes it seem so.
Also I have an aversion to cross reference tables. That feels like a big step backwards, not forwards.

But I'm just one guy and this is just one opinon. Good Luck.

Your luck example is very bad.

Actually rolling dozen of dice is better than one. You get a more average bell curve, making Luck less likely an outcome.

Your above example would be VERY swingy, d100 indeed! Compare the difference between the 01 and 00 result - assuming the opponent had 150 health!

Also, cross-referencing is generally very slow. If they're laying down cards, all the info should be on the card itself (if possible) and quick to read.

I HATE the idea of a d100 referencing a table for every roll. Thats incredibly slow and incredibly swingy.

For wanting to simplify you are adding a lot of auxiliary materials in these cards that modify a table roll. That doesn't sound simple at all.

yxalitis wrote:
Player #1 has the steel plate armour, and goes first. (we’ll assume they are already in melee range).
He plays his Longsword card with attack skill 20. He literally places this card down, and rolls the d100.
Scenarios:
He rolls a 01, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does normal damage with a 21, so the damage is 21.
He rolls a 50, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does extra damage with a 70, so the damage is actually 105.
He rolls a 00, adds 20, and referring to the table, he looks up Leather and see that he does massive damage with a 120, so the damage is 240.

So to insert another answer here, this amount of luck is what I consider acceptable, luck is definitely still there in the game.
What I don’t want is compounding luck, or a string of chance that can literally swing a battle.
E.g., I roll 10 attack dice, but I need 5 to hit, I roll all 5’s and 6’s! The opponent rolls to dodge, he needs a 3 to dodge, but roll all 1’s and 2’s.
Attacker now has 10 hits to roll damage for, and rolls very high on everyone.

Unlikely but I’m sure you’ve all seen that happen…a little bit of luck is fine, but this luck string can swing a game too much. You may disagree, of course, but that’s my ideal.

Anyway, I’ll work on the system a bit more, and do some trial combats…

See, this right here is a worry. I don't think you really grasp the difference in the two systems at all and I would argue you have your examples backwards as far as which one is "acceptable" luck and which one isn't. Your proposed system is quite similar to Frostgrave's, which uses a D20 rather than a D100, and the biggest criticism I've seen of that game (and the one I have myself) is resolving combat using a single opposed D20 roll leads to some absurdly swingy results. Your system is slightly different in its mechanics but very similar in its result. One single decent dice roll has a huge effect. That's bad. It's worse than having a longer string of good rolls having the same effect, because the string of rolls requires a series of lucky results, rather than just one. Also, rolling more dice in general means you achieve a more average result more of the time.