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As suggested in the title, I'm interest to know if there are any tabletop wargames that don't include random factors such as dices, cards, etc...

I've been working for sometime now on a skirmish fantasy game that removes the randomness and luck factor. It is however veeeery flexible as the characters that form your warband are highly customizable, close to RPG type of games:
- Different generic classes (warrior, priest, wizard, etc...) with weapon choices.
- A set of skills (more than 50 per class) of which they choose 6 to be their "build". Skills are the characters actions, besides standardized movement.
- Heavy amount of interactions between characters, favoring synergies, but limitations to usage of skills to favor strategic thinking.
- Alternate activation (one character per player at the time) and terrain being very important (LOS, distances, etc...).

I'm not very knowledgeable on the different games out there, hence the topic, but if something similar exists it would be nice to check it out for comparisons or pick ideas, though the game is already quite fixed and ready for testing.

In tabletop gaming? Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Not to disparage your course of action, but luck, however minimal is a pretty large part of most games, and is a key generator of excitement.

Unless very well thought out, you risk building a "winning combination" if you remove any and all chance. I'm not saying you can't do it, but it will require even more work. You have to avoid the risks of "You 100% cannot do this." which can lead to feel-bads or remove some of the fun of a game.

Sometimes, players want that chance...even if it means rolling double sixes on 2D6 (a 2.7% chance)...it's the thrill of trying for it that can add enjoyment to a game. Much as the inverse can "On anything but double ones you kill this guy...", etc.

You'll need to do a hell of a lot of playtesting to make sure you don't simply design the best combination which trumps everything else. There's a big mental difference between "You have almost zero chance of hurting this guy..." to "You cannot hurt this guy.". In some instances it makes sense of course. Can a child throwing a pebble stop a tank? No, of course not. You just need to maneuver extremely carefully around this idea.

If you're going with heavy synergies that's a decent way around some of these pitfalls. My guy is Strength 5, the target is Toughness 6...so I can't wound him, unless this ally lends me +1 Strength, etc. There's plenty of room for clever game-play without luck, it's just a good bit harder to do.

Tabletop gaming tends to feature luck because it is an actual factor in a lot of combat. My grandfather was running across a road in WW2 when a German shot at him, and shot the heel off of his boot, mid-stride. An inch higher and he could have lost a foot, or fallen and been subsequently killed. Technically in a wargame did he "strike" my grandfather with his shot? Eh, kinda. There are so many bizarre occurrences in wartime that luck/chance is often a healthy factor, so it shows up in a lot of games.

I'd like to see where you go with this, and if it attracts a different kind of player (perhaps more Chess-like?).

Deterministic wargames tend to skew more towards simulation than game, they are more common in historical gaming than fantasy/scifi

You can still get some interesting resolution results if you use things from boardgames with non-random resolution.

Stuff like non-random card hands with power levels and abilities on them that you play for things. These cards aren't drawn from a deck and are simply held in hand and you have to make choices about when and what to play them for, and they don't go back into hand until some criteria is met.

This way your opponent knows what you can do, and it's not a random roll, but the complexity comes from the many potential interactions between your units, your hand, the battlefield, and the other player's actions.

 Vertrucio wrote:
You can still get some interesting resolution results if you use things from boardgames with non-random resolution.

Stuff like non-random card hands with power levels and abilities on them that you play for things. These cards aren't drawn from a deck and are simply held in hand and you have to make choices about when and what to play them for, and they don't go back into hand until some criteria is met.

This way your opponent knows what you can do, and it's not a random roll, but the complexity comes from the many potential interactions between your units, your hand, the battlefield, and the other player's actions.

The cards (ie. character skills to perform actions) would indeed be close to this idea.

I totally get the issues non-luck might imply, as you say Elbows, but I try to avoid this through different layers. There is a still a big amount of unpredictability due to how the warbands are built, and how each players performs actions. I think the biggest challenge is having every class/skill to be balanced, so intense testing will be required.

To give a few info on how I envision this balance and unpredictability without rolling:

A) Characters have a profile with Movement (inches they may move) / Health (damage they can sustain) / Power (points available to use skills).
B) Characters then choose a Class (warrior, necromancer, etc). This gives access to a set of skills (about 45-50 per class). This set of skills is divided in 4 "specialties" (so 10-13 per spec).
C) Character choose 6 skills out of 2 specialties, which will often imply a certain type of play-style for that character (example: wizards with fire lore mostly do heavy damage but if using earth lore, it will give more support to allies and sustain more damage).

There are a few extra bits that tweak how specialties work for each class, or how classes influence profiles, but you get the idea.

To this, you add that each Turn is divided in a Movement phase and a Skill phase, where for each one respectively, players move alternatively each of their characters.
So before using skills, you have to think in which position your characters will end the Movement phase (as does your opponent), considering LOS and range are really relevant.

Afterwards (let's say you have 4 characters) your card deck will have 24 skills to use. Except that each card will be tied to a character (who has 6 specifically) and will be conditioned by its position and Power to actually be able to use a skill. Skills also have a very wide range of use: direct damage, healing, buffs, debuffs, effects that span several turns or interact with terrain, or only activate with certain conditions in place.


I think this idea of building a deck of cards based on your character should give room to a lot of outcomes and very strategic thinking. Of course I predict certain situations where a side might be auto-lose, but it should be easy to avoid such outcome.
Indeed, if you just build a total-melee oriented warband and your opponent happens to have a lot of anti-melee, it will look ugly. But that's more a poor choice by the player. Having a balanced warband with a bit of everything should allow you to face reasonably well all situations. One trick warbands will have polarizing results, which is somewhat logical.


Anyway, while thinking about the game I thought it was quite unlike for your average tabletop skirmish game. In a way, it picks ideas from a certain mmorpg or even mtg (though I never played) and mixes it with wargaming.

I'll post about the testing once the full rules are ready, if anyone is interested, and then will eventually make a website with the rules on there for anyone to try. And in a far future printing copies if the game is tight and awesome (I'm sure it is ).

VBS wrote:
As suggested in the title, I'm interest to know if there are any tabletop wargames that don't include random factors such as dices, cards, etc...

Diplomacy relies entirely on negotiation and proper order phasing.

Diplo's heir Machiavelli has a random mechanic in the plague event, but is otherwise non random.

Battle is another classic with no dice in it.

The video games series for The Banner Saga has *near* non-random battle in an essentially board game format.

In terms of basic combat, the only random damage is if your strength is less than someone’s armour, which means you’re severely damaged or making a poor decision (attacking health instead of breaking armour). If your strength is less than armour, you have a percentage chance to inflict 1 damage instead of being unable to damage something. It is almost always a bad idea to do that over attacking armour instead, but that is one random element.

The only other random element I remember is that some “remain in play” effects will generate a number of tiles within a 3x3 area. For example, 5 random squares within a 3x3 area will catch fire and damage people that move through them.

Technically random, but very niche and can usually be mitigated in some way (placing the centre near impassable squares reduces the number of viable squares, sort of idea).

PS if you haven’t played them, fantastic story with Norse Mythology and a very-near-non-random combat system. Absolutely recommend if you’re looking for “how to do it right.”

It's actually pretty common in card games when you think about it. Things like Magic and notably Hearthstone are very driven by static simultaneous damage. I think there's some challenges adapting this to a minis game with less of an evolving army state, but its where I'd look for inspiration.

 LunarSol wrote:
It's actually pretty common in card games when you think about it.

The random mechanic in deck building games is you still don't know exactly what cards you'll be drawing at any given time.

That's why there are such things as long and short combo tactics.

I understand, but in terms of combat mechanics, they're good examples of how combat without random elements plays out.

Random elements can include players, if Ken Binmore's A Very Short Introduction to Game Theory is to be believed.

Chess?
Checkers?
Go?
Pente?

This link to Boardgame Geek lists some other more modern games:
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/11227/non-random-games

 LunarSol wrote:
I understand, but in terms of combat mechanics, they're good examples of how combat without random elements plays out.

It is still technically random as you are drawing from a deck of cards. It's less random because with cards you choose which card in your hand gets played, the randomness is transferred to when you refill your hand, and the randomness of the deck is reduced or altered based on what results have already been achieved. It would be like rolling dice, but any result that had already occurred had to be rerolled.

You still need that randomness for the game to function. Afterall, if Magic effectively made your entire deck your hand and you could play any of your cards whenever you want, the game would very quickly discover a deck that was unbeatable and who won would be determined by who got the first move.

Dice are independently random, IE: Each roll of the dice is not effected by the previous roll. Card mechanics are dependently random, IE: the results of each card draw are dependent on all of the previous results. IE: If you already drew a particular card you can't draw that card again until it is reshuffled back into the deck. This means as the game progresses the cards become less random as the player will have better knowledge of what he might draw next.



The game you are suggesting where there is no actual randomness at the table could have some issues. There would be some amount of skill in picking which skills to combo together, however each particular situation will have an absolute solution that is always going to be better. This means it will just be a more complicated game of rock-paper-scissors where list building is the main factor in who wins, and there would be an obvious "best list" combination that would dominate the meta.

 Grey Templar wrote:

The game you are suggesting where there is no actual randomness at the table could have some issues. There would be some amount of skill in picking which skills to combo together, however each particular situation will have an absolute solution that is always going to be better. This means it will just be a more complicated game of rock-paper-scissors where list building is the main factor in who wins, and there would be an obvious "best list" combination that would dominate the meta.

Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. You take card game combat mechanics and you can see how it resolves itself out. There are often a number of meaningful decisions and interesting choices, but eventually you learn the correct plays and solve for it. As a designer you need to look at that and try to find a way to break that up. Randomness is certainly a major solution, but if the OP is seeing to design without, other means to inject uncertainty have to be injected. Maybe the game lets you summon reinforcements on a queue or something so that you can change up things past list design. Maybe defenders choose reactions or some other means to inject uncertainty (which is not the same as randomness) into the decisions. My point is just that card game combat phases are a good baseline to work from if you want to see how non-random combat plays out. From there you have to decide what you want to do to keep things working once you remove the card draw as a random element.

I imagine non-random combat could be made interesting if the players had a slightly-random hand of abilities.

EG a horde of small models with "combat 3" and a monster with "Combat 18".
You know you need to exceed their combat rating with yours, so you need to get 7 of the gribblies to attack at once to kill the monster - but they might have a card which adds X to their combat, or you might have something to double your own combat, and so on - so you don't really know whether your facing the unmodified numbers. It would remove dice rolling and any randomised resolution, but would keep the uncertainty to prevent it from becoming boring. Simply overpower the enemy models to win.

There's also resource management if you want to go full-Euro. The idea being that while the players have complete information that it's computationally explosive so they need to play by 'feel' or heuristics. Or maybe something simple with a progressive cost for better effects.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

The game you are suggesting where there is no actual randomness at the table could have some issues. There would be some amount of skill in picking which skills to combo together, however each particular situation will have an absolute solution that is always going to be better. This means it will just be a more complicated game of rock-paper-scissors where list building is the main factor in who wins, and there would be an obvious "best list" combination that would dominate the meta.

Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. You take card game combat mechanics and you can see how it resolves itself out. There are often a number of meaningful decisions and interesting choices, but eventually you learn the correct plays and solve for it. As a designer you need to look at that and try to find a way to break that up. Randomness is certainly a major solution, but if the OP is seeing to design without, other means to inject uncertainty have to be injected. Maybe the game lets you summon reinforcements on a queue or something so that you can change up things past list design. Maybe defenders choose reactions or some other means to inject uncertainty (which is not the same as randomness) into the decisions. My point is just that card game combat phases are a good baseline to work from if you want to see how non-random combat plays out. From there you have to decide what you want to do to keep things working once you remove the card draw as a random element.

The way I see it, at least for the game designed till now, is that list-building will be a very important factor as you will have to find efficient skill synergies and combos to take the upper hand. However, finding the correct combination or "best list" will not ensure domination.
As explained in my previous post, using skills/cards will be tied to factors that you will not have control over such as LOS, range or your opponent influencing a skill's effect. Not to mention that each skill is tied to a specific character of your warband that can only access a certain amount (and if dead, no longer access to those skills!).
Thus, you cannot expect to just roll-out a specific combination of skills to wipe out the opponent just because the math said so.

VBS wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

The game you are suggesting where there is no actual randomness at the table could have some issues. There would be some amount of skill in picking which skills to combo together, however each particular situation will have an absolute solution that is always going to be better. This means it will just be a more complicated game of rock-paper-scissors where list building is the main factor in who wins, and there would be an obvious "best list" combination that would dominate the meta.

Exactly. That's what I'm getting at. You take card game combat mechanics and you can see how it resolves itself out. There are often a number of meaningful decisions and interesting choices, but eventually you learn the correct plays and solve for it. As a designer you need to look at that and try to find a way to break that up. Randomness is certainly a major solution, but if the OP is seeing to design without, other means to inject uncertainty have to be injected. Maybe the game lets you summon reinforcements on a queue or something so that you can change up things past list design. Maybe defenders choose reactions or some other means to inject uncertainty (which is not the same as randomness) into the decisions. My point is just that card game combat phases are a good baseline to work from if you want to see how non-random combat plays out. From there you have to decide what you want to do to keep things working once you remove the card draw as a random element.

The way I see it, at least for the game designed till now, is that list-building will be a very important factor as you will have to find efficient skill synergies and combos to take the upper hand. However, finding the correct combination or "best list" will not ensure domination.
As explained in my previous post, using skills/cards will be tied to factors that you will not have control over such as LOS, range or your opponent influencing a skill's effect. Not to mention that each skill is tied to a specific character of your warband that can only access a certain amount (and if dead, no longer access to those skills!).
Thus, you cannot expect to just roll-out a specific combination of skills to wipe out the opponent just because the math said so.

LOS and Range are definitely something the player has control over. The opponent will be the only true wildcard here.

However, since I'm sure the game will have a finite number of abilities that can be chosen and each player will have the same access to all cards and abilities, this leaves us with a situation where you basically have perfect information. Not only can you create a combo, but you also have the opportunity to plan for all potential enemy combos.

Wargames love over-analyzing stuff. I guarantee that a game like will get cracked fairly quickly if there is absolutely no randomness in how stuff plays out. If its a case where X combo beats Y combo 100% of the time you will definitely get to a point where there is an unbeatable list. Or at the very least a list that wins a disproportionate amount of the time.

Indeed, lack of random does tend toward a *more* rock-paper-scissors meta game.

A: The best list, beats most other lists most of the time
B: Beats list A most of the time, specific exploit.
C: Beats list B most of the time, broadly good, struggles with A
D: Alternative to C. Slightly better/worse in certain matchups.

C and D hope for games that dodge A players.
B hopes to meet A players as often as possible.
A players hope to dodge B players.

Luck of the draw (in a tournament) determines how well people do, more-so than skill.

 Grey Templar wrote:

However, since I'm sure the game will have a finite number of abilities that can be chosen and each player will have the same access to all cards and abilities, this leaves us with a situation where you basically have perfect information. Not only can you create a combo, but you also have the opportunity to plan for all potential enemy combos.

Wargames love over-analyzing stuff. I guarantee that a game like will get cracked fairly quickly if there is absolutely no randomness in how stuff plays out. If its a case where X combo beats Y combo 100% of the time you will definitely get to a point where there is an unbeatable list. Or at the very least a list that wins a disproportionate amount of the time.

Skill access is restricted on two different levels, and there are a ton of factors during the game that modify the availability and effects of skills. It's up to the players to see which apply or how they want to influence them with their actions using movement, terrain and skills.
Since there are counters to every type of skill and your cards are split between your warband members, on top of not knowing which selection the opponent is carrying, it is highly unlikely to plan every scenario ahead without taking into account the effects that previously stacked during the game.

Can someone analyze everything and come up with an optimized list? Sure. Happens in every game. Will there be some lists more inclined to win over x or y? Sure. Happens in every game too. I don't think this one pretends to be otherwise.

While combinatorial games are solvable, it's only recently that Go was solved. It's not going to take much more to make a combinatorial game that's going to be unsolvable for its life as a product. Go only has 5 rules, but the space in which those rules iterate makes it interesting.

It think it's a better approach to take something that's fun to do and describe it with rules rather than tout any particular feature as providing a necessary element of fun. Randomness does help with tension, with that uncertainty of what's going to happen next, and to tweak that little compulsive gambling gene, but it's not necessarily about the order of a deck of cards or the values of a random number generator.

In PvP you have uncertainty in what an opponent is going to bring, or what move they might make in response to any of the moves you can make. To my mind game design is about make that response (or initial move) interesting enough that it's worth following through on. Randomness, as mentioned, is an easy way to get some tension because it fuzzies what's going to happen next. Players want to see what happens and what happens next. Maybe A can beat B, but can it beat it fast enough?

I think part of the wargaming impulse starts with historical or fictional battles where you want to know (a) could it have happened otherwise, and (b) could you as a player have done better than one of the leadership teams? So even combinatorial games like Chess and Go are interesting because after playing we still wonder about A & B.

The point of randomness is hidden information, it forces players to take actions without knowing precisely what will result. There are deterministic games without hidden information (Go and Chess have been brought up) but there also exist deterministic games with hidden information; Battleship and Diplomacy are the first examples that come to mind to me.

I'd think if you were going to take the hidden-orders/simultaneous-resolution mechanic from Diplomacy you'd want a small number of game entities with a large number of possible actions so the decision-making can be complex and interesting without requiring you to write down too much stuff each turn; I'm imagining a spaceship-combat game built around a small number of craft.

Sounds like X-Wing but with determistic combat instead of dice rolling.

Not exactly a tabletop game by today's standards, more of a board game...

Kriegspiel managed to pull that off to some extent.

Engagements were dictated by two factors: You'd add up the offensive capability of involved units, then each player would choose one of four cards (one deck for the attacking player, one for the defending player.)

These cards were then compared, and you'd then reference a table that would match the differences in offensive capacity to which cards were pulled. That would dictate the outcome of the engagement.

The game mechanics are actually not terribly complicated, just really hard to describe in words how they work. If you can find a youtube video of it being played that might be better than me trying to explain it.

It's a bit of a shame though. The game's been out of production for a long time.

Re-reading this thread I was reminded of a game I rather quite enjoyed, which was non-random (except your opponents movements).



Field Command

This was a plastic shell board game with two opposing armies, very Stratego-esque. Players deployed blind (setting a large card (provided) in the center of the actual plastic board. Then players wrote down moves on an order sheet using the space identifiers. Then everyone moved, and combats were resolved using a simple chart. You can see on the board there is open ground (beige), and forest (green), and a variety of elevation. You'd then consult the chart between the two types of units - I believe there were skirmishers, infantry, cavalry, and artillery (and a general).

Very simple but fun game, a more enjoyable version of Stratego in a way.