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So like, this is just, like..... your opinion man!

What makes a good wargame?

I don't want to lead the question too much, so I will leave it open ended. I am of the opinion that I have no idea what other people want to play, but I know what I like to play. Therefore, this is an attempt to get a better feel for what things "other people" like to play and why.

I am not looking for game recommendations at all. I am looking for the elements of a game that you enjoy.

For me it needs to be dramatic or tell a good story to be fun.

Oh, and it has to look good.

More dice and minis, less cards/counters and other table junk.

For a historical game, it needs to allow for period tactics naturally, not through special rules or exceptions. It also needs to capture the verisimilitude of the period and scale of combat. The events and flow of the game should somewhat match up to historical accounts.

For sci-fi and fantasy, I don't know. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

The bias of determining a winner is heavily on in game decision making and not a foregone conclusion based on army choice nor especially susceptible to massive dice swings.

First and foremost: it's fun. I mean, it is a game, and if it isn't fun, then that's missing the point.

What constitutes "fun" is definitely different for everyone, though. Generally, for me a system which has some intuitive mechanics that model what is happening reasonably well and is internally consistent helps a lot, so that I'm not having to constantly look up rules or remember weird edge cases. (This lets me concentrate more on things happening on the table and making tactical choices, rather than remembering obscurities in how things work.)

It also needs to have cool models on the table, but this doesn't necessarily mean a dedicated line; there are many mini-agnostic games that can still be fun and let me use whatever cool models I have, or some dedicated games that I have a collection for.

Related to several other threads I've participated in and some of the OP's other questions: it needs to allow me to make interesting choices. To a large degree that means it not being a forgone conclusion at the list building stage, but also not so heavily reliant on randomness that it all comes down to a dice roll. If I can play on auto-pilot, then it's not very engaging, and to me not very fun.

Relatively streamlined mechanics that still give some idea of simulation.
Morale is important.
Killing stuff is not the only way to win the game.
List building is not a major part of the game, most lists can do reasonably well against most other lists, edge cases excepted.
Decisions matter more than dice rolls, but dice rolls throw interesting wrinkles in the way of plans forcing creativity. This is important to remove the "chess" element of always doing a certain opening and so on that makes wargames more engaging.
I prefer alternating activation to IGOUGO these days, but IGOUGO is fine for games with limited "alpha strike" capability.

I’m into the GW shonky style. I don’t mind wonky rules provided the models are ace, the games are cinematic and chance plays a decent part.

I’m not so into X-Wing, as that’s so skill based it can be difficult to get into as your opponent literally flies circles round your ships.

Nowt wrong with either, I just have my preference.

It's nearly 4am so I'll try and come back to this but. A good wargame doesn't need a new edition every two years. But can be expanded on near Infinium.

Competitive games need more than just 'kill all the other guy's stuff to win'

And less random, and more reward for players making good tactical decisions.

And lastly a good wargame is playable at multiple levels (i.e. skirmish, intermediate, and massive model count).

Friendly for beginners to get in, as well without having to worry about ye who bought the most rare/expensive model wins syndrome.

Can't say about wargaming in general but about 40k to me the most important thing is to play with miniatures I like. Being forced to bring 4-6 HQs and 6-9 troops just to make my army work was the reason why I didn't like 8th edition and prefer 7th, even if orks were much more competitive in 8th. But I hated 8th editions lists, being competitive has never been important to me as I mostly play friendly pre-arranged games anyway.

Yeah I REALLY wish they'd bring back the force org tree of 1-2 HQ, 0-3 Elites, FA, and HS and 2-6 Troops. And that's IT. And no named characters under 2000 points and not without opponent's permission. That'd really help the spirit of the game and general fun.

Fun factor is most important. The tempo of the game matters alot for that. Things to avoid is if it's too slow to play, if it gets bogged down in rules referencing or dice rolling. I like a rule in warmaster, where combat also included movement, with units being pushed back or forward. This lead to new decisions opening up during the line battles, even if nothing died.

Game has to look good also, not clutter the board with too many markers or play without terrain, no too weird looking unit formations.

 Da Boss wrote:
Relatively streamlined mechanics that still give some idea of simulation.
Morale is important.
Killing stuff is not the only way to win the game.
List building is not a major part of the game, most lists can do reasonably well against most other lists, edge cases excepted.
Decisions matter more than dice rolls, but dice rolls throw interesting wrinkles in the way of plans forcing creativity. This is important to remove the "chess" element of always doing a certain opening and so on that makes wargames more engaging.
I prefer alternating activation to IGOUGO these days, but IGOUGO is fine for games with limited "alpha strike" capability.

I guess you must love playing A Song Of Ice And Fire, then

 Azreal13 wrote:
The bias of determining a winner is heavily on in game decision making and not a foregone conclusion based on army choice nor especially susceptible to massive dice swings.

Pretty much this, also actually having rules and mini's having reasonable availability (looking at you PP)

@ Doc. X-Wing movement is at bit simpler than you're making out its mostly eyeballing where the templates will take you, and the whole order of movement of different pilot skills (although to be fair for the tail end of 1.0 I played Hera on The Ghost, 360 fire arc and dial tweaking hi-jinx)

Not in any particular order

Good, stable, consistent rules mechanics.
That movement and placement matters, not just target selection.
Miniatures I like.
A reasonably varied selection in list building.
Some functional concistency in how randomization works in the game (I do love those bell curves).
Games that don't blob the miniatures up (see movement and placement)

I want:

1) some simulationist versimilitude. The units on the table should move, fight, and act in ways that in some way recall the thing that they are attmpting to represent.

The clearest example of a wargame doing this wrong that I've played was a Roman battle game that was very much one of those Beardfests of "We playtested these rules by having REAL ACTUAL PEOPLE do all the stuff out on a field!"

-Infantry moved 12"
-Cavalry/Elephants moved 18"
-Archers/Slingers fired 4"
-combat resolution was based entirely on number of models. there were 10 infantrymen on a legionaire base, 5 cavalry on a cavalry base, and 2 elephants on an elephant base

^I think you can immediately see the core problem with these mechanics.

2) the ability to create an army that is distinctively "Mine" through the rules, and an interesting decision making matrix in the realm of strategy prior to the game. I like list building, so sue me. Wargames where i basically have no way to vary my force or think about what I'm bringing really don't appeal to me.

3) mechanics that encourage interesting decision making and incentivize tactics that are more complex than simply destroying the opposing army.

Nothing in a wargame is more dull to me than line infantry wargames where you have ridiculously complicated turning and wheeling and maneuvering rules, so 99% of the time the best way to tackle a given scenario is line up your troops, walk into range, and start firing and rolling dice until one side wins.

1. Cool dynamic models. I'm playing with cool toys. I want them to be cool toys.

2. Dynamic table state. Models need to be moving around the board. That's the whole reason we track the position with said cool toys.

3. Mechanics that force models to choose which abilities to prioritize each turn and vary actions taken each round.

4. Scenario elements that alter the goals of each game and keep them varied.

5. Pieces that have an outsized impact on the state of the game to focus the sense of story.

6. Developers that show an interest in fixing problem and making the game as fair as possible while pushing new ideas.

I look for a faction I like, and that the rules for the game have some bite, I'm not a huge fan of the simple rules trend.

Define what "bite" is please? I am not sure I understand.

 Easy E wrote:
Define what "bite" is please? I am not sure I understand.

Rules i can spend a while examining, i like rules that there are tons of layers of.

For me it's:

1. In-game decisions are more important than list building. I want list building to play some part in the game but decisions on the table should be the most important part of the game.

2. Relatively quick. 60-90 minutes is probably the sweet spot for me. Games that take longer can be fine but I find the longer a game takes the more the balance matters. If we have a blowout of a game and it takes 45 minutes that's fine, let's reset and try again. If the same blowout lasts 2+ hours that's just a waste of time.

3. Verisimilitude. The combat you're trying to represent and the various unit types should work close to how I imagine they should in real life. Ideally this ties into point 1 by allowing real-world tactics too.

4. It looks good. I like the visual spectacle of a wargame. It's what differentiates them from board games, IMO.

I could write a whole essay on this given my profession, so... I will!

Firstly, the real answer is "depends on the purpose of the game." There are many types of wargames - analytical (to generate data/insights about warfare), training (to educate about warfighting), hobby/entertainment (self-explanatory), and COA development (building theoretical courses of action as part of a theory of victory in a warfight).

Of these four types, I'm going to talk about the Hobby aspect, given the context of the forum - though I can go into more detail if you want.

Hobby/entertainment wargaming is a sticky wicket, given that the primary reason for executing such a wargame is "fun" and it is constrained by factors that the other games aren't really as constrained by (the need to declare a victor at the end and the absence of a GM). The first of these means that it naturally lends itself to competitive play - though that by no means is the goal, it's merely a consequence of a game in which there is decidedly a victor and a loser. The second of these is the most constraining, and that's because that means all the adjudication methodology must be contained on a piece of paper.

This constraint - tying the players to that game's specific adjudication methods and mechanics - is a challenge few designers can overcome. The rules must be simple enough that the average person can follow them, but complex enough to make the game more engaging than, say, rock paper scissors or a coinflip (e.g. ruled purely by randomness or pre-gameplay factors). This generally precludes complex mechanics such as ISR (or other methods of detecting the enemy). Sometimes, a good designer can capture an abstraction of ISR and good intelligence gathering on the tabletop without a flexible, complex adjudicator, but there are typically artifacts of the abstraction that are unrealistic. Perhaps the simplest of these is the "deployment blinds" common in some historical games.

There are also two philosophies about game design that you can see competing across multiple different games in the modern era - though this is a more recent phenomenon. "Back in the day" as it were (see the rules for Prussian Kriegspiel for example from the 1800s), wargames were process focused. This is contrasted with outcome focused. This is similar to the distinction between Discrete Event Simulation and Continuous simulation within computer science, though it is not identical. To elaborate and define:

Process games tend to focus on the process of the warfight in discrete time-steps. At any given moment, a player can walk up and say "what is happening?" and the players can point to exactly where they are in the process and in time. For example, Chain of Command is a fantastic historical World War 2 game that is process-oriented. When you shoot at a tank, you find out if you've hit the tank (applying several situational modifiers), then you see if you penetrate or perforate the armor (using a unique mechanic that distills complex physics into a stochastic combat-power comparison, essentially), then you find out what you've hit inside the tank/what beyond-armor-effect the weapon has (if you penetrated or perforated). At any point in this process, the step can be paused and examined. For example, if a 17pdr hits the armor of a Tiger, one could pause the flow of the game, go look up the "chance to perforate" on average of a 17pdr vs a Tiger's relevant armor facing at the relevant range (tables are 240 yards along their long axis for a 6x4), and then roll the dice and compare outcomes. This, in essence, can be used to "verify-and-validate" the game, as well as helping to tell the game's story.
The strengths of the process method are that it can be adjusted on the fly mid-stride (you could adjust the probability of success of the 17pdr penetrating a Tiger in-stream without affecting the game overmuch), verification and validation (the results can be compared to reality at any given step of the way), and narrative storytelling (the low level of abstraction aids the players in understanding what happened. Will the 17pdr hit the ammo, fuel, or compel the crew to bail out? Or will a second hit from another weapon be required? If so, what does that weapon do? etc.).
The weaknesses of the process method is that it can sometimes be laborious to execute and badly-abstracted phenomena stand out like a sore thumb. Badly-written rules can also hinder the execution process to the point where it becomes a chore to play, rather than a joy.

Outcome games tend to focus on making sure the events in the battle turn out roughly as they should "in real life" (or whatever the game setting is) but are less concerned with any individual details. The most famous modern game that uses this sort of mechanic is Warhammer 40k. Compare the tank resolution above to the following situation: Rather than hitting, determining penetration, and determining beyond-armor effects, 40k simply abstracts the internal components of the tank and the morale of the crew into a "wounds" stat, and the armored durability of the tank into a combination of a "toughness" and "save" stats. When a given weapon hits a tank, it doesn't "penetrate the armor" - rather, it succeeds a series of pass-fail checks against the toughness and save stats before doing some amount of damage to the vehicle's abstract "wounds". What weapon destroys a tank isn't determined as much by whether it can penetrate or its beyond-armor effects, but rather the order in which the weapons are fired. Take a Leman Russ for example - a trio of Lascannons may strip 11 wounds, but the Russ's last wound was lost to a boltgun. Did the boltgun "destroy" the tank? Or did the combination of anti-tank weapons and suppressive infantry fire force the crew to bail out? We will never know - and the system doesn't care. It's written so that the outcome of this engagement with the Leman Russ turns out roughly as it should, not so that we can find out exactly what happened to said Leman Russ narratively.
The strengths of the outcome-oriented method is that it is fairly simple to execute and very easy to balance. Badly written rules do not grind the process to the halt, because the abstractions are such that "good enough" is sufficient, since clarity is not a requirement. Furthermore, outcome-oriented games are easier to design, because it isn't important how any given mechanic works so long as it's sufficiently simple and the outcomes are sufficiently "good enough" relative to reality (or whatever the game setting is.).
The weaknesses of the outcome-oriented method is that it is very difficult to actually use it to tell a story. In vague terms, the lascannons and infantry fire above killed the Russ, but when it comes down to "who killed the Russ" the answer is "a marine with his handheld rifle" which is, of course, not realistic. This means that systems that try to track the performance of individual units in the army (like 40k's Crusade rules) are victimized, because they DO care about the specific, procedural interaction between units on the board, but the rules procedures themselves are more concerned with getting the engagement "generally correct". Additionally, such systems are harder to verify and validate. How effective is a Lascannon against a Leman Russ? Hard to say - one cannot kill a Russ at all, but Three are likely to kill it. That seems "roughly correct" in outcome, but the connection to the actual background setting is tenuous.


In conclusion, this means "what makes a good wargame" depends on what the players want out of it. If you want a narrative storytelling game where the individual actions of units and models are important, a process-oriented wargame like Lord of the Rings or Chain of Command or Prohammer is preferable. If you want an easy-to-play game that doesn't have much complexity but can provide fun and competition, use an outcome-oriented wargame like Bolt Action, Warhammer 40k or Age of Sigmar.

TLDR:
It depends on what you want out of the game, but it is possible to link game-type and design-philosophy to the desired outcome.

@Unit1126PLL That was excellent, thank you!

But Unit1126PLL- You never answered. What makes a game good to you?



As a Pro-Am designer myself, the question when designing is always:

"What am I trying to do with this design, and is this the right tool to do it with?"

Surprisingly, I almost never ask myself if a game is "good" because as this thread shows there is no clear definition of what that even means. Since I do not know what other people like to play (only what I like to play) I started this thread to help me get a better understanding of broad range of the "Voice of the Customer" for games.

For me, a process-oriented design is better.

For all types of wargames, I love doing informal postgame analyses on to find out what went wrong and how to improve. For process games, this is easy because I have a step by step picture of how success and failure is determined (even if the process is stochastic, I can determine that "more often than not, the armor on my tanks is being penetrated by enemy guns. I have to shift tactics to change this by x" f.e.).

I also like specific battle narratives (Strelky Illya blew up the pillbox with a satchel charge!) rather than just determining outcomes (blue won because the pillbox was destroyed, doesn't matter how).

Process-oriented for me.

I view wargames rules as a chance to play with my painted miniatures and terrain. It's not an exaggeration to say that for me the toys and fun with friends is the point, with a good story being a close second. I'm not looking for granular complexity, nor am I looking to buy into a Bradford-Exchange-like buying program that will have me continually purchasing more rulebooks and supplements. I am however, willing to buy game expansions occasionally if they add alot of useful units or scenarios and are affordably priced.

I look for a ruleset that creates a good feel for the era/setting/etc with the least number of rules as possible. Speed of gameplay is very important. If -after a couple games- gameplay isn't under 2 hours that's too long. Preferrence given to rules that do without (or with as few as possible) tokens, chips and markers on the gaming table. That stuff just clutters up the beauty of painted figures and great terrain.

I want it to include either a unit builder or enough unit profiles that I can use what minis I've got without having to buy another book. Rules that are miniature-agnostic or cover a wide swath of miniatures are preferred. Balanced gameplay and factions is more important than special rules and individual unit "flavor". However, I don't game often enough to work into the minutiae of rules blalance so whether or not a game is tournament-tight is irrelevant to me.

It should include interesting scenarios. In fact, scenario play is far more attractive to me than extremely-equalized generic missions.

To that end, I lean toward games like Mech Attack, Song of Blades and Heroes, Dragon Rampant, Kings of War, Necromunda (NCE edition please).

All of these games do a great job bringing a great overall flavor to the game without getting bogged down by special rules or expansions and do so in a relatively quick amount of time. They are all affordable as are their supplements which generally add useful armies or scenarios to the game rather than just over-complex-ifying a specific faction or slowing gameplay. Most of them are not to tightly tied to a specific set of miniatures.

Deleted - double posting

I think there's definitely things that make a wargame objectively good. One might think that 'good' is subjective, but it cannot be purely subjective because we can share things and recommend them to others on the basis of their quality. The trick, it seems, is understanding how differences in perception translate into differences in evaluation.

Unit1126PLL lays out what a wargame is, or rather what wargames are as a collection of related activities. It's a similar question to what tool is good, that we must ask what tool is good for what task. So in asking what makes a good wargame, we must understand the question to be asking what makes a good wargame for entertainment purposes (or analytical, or educational, or etc).

I think that what makes a good wargame for entertainment purposes are the following characteristics:

(1) Agency - players want to be able to bring what they want to a game, and so a player that wants to bring the Ultramarines 2nd Company circa the 38th millennium will think a game good when it allows them to do so, and likewise if they want to bring their own custom Chapter, or say replay a western gunfight or whatever.

Likewise players will want a game to allow them to do the things they want to do, and for those actions to matter. The game needs to meet their expectations, so if they see a sniper in a war movie, they're probably going to want to see snipers in a wargame behaving in the same way depending on whether they prefer the process or outcome side of things. It's also where you get all the complaints about Warhammer 40,000 in that the media around the game sets up one's expectations and the game does its own thing. Me, I used to rationalize that the protagonists in novels used to roll all 6s, and the mooks would only roll 1s, whereas in a game the players agreed to roll honest dice. Ideally the process and outcome should meet the expectations that the game and its surrounding media set up - that's the crux of the 'realism' debate.

A game is good when it facilitates this sense of agency, facilitating the process and outcome to match the expectation it initially set forth.

(2) Usability - Something of a counter-balance to agency is usability, because while a game may allow players to do everything and anything, the work required to do so may subvert the game's ability to satisfy the expectations of the players. There's a specific cognitive load that players can have or they'll essentially become stressed by a game instead of it reducing their stress-level, and likewise time constraints. That'll be different for everyone, but again the variation doesn't mean there aren't broad swathes of audience that share most of those constraints. And that's not including things like clear rules, table space, and so on.

Games involve effort, and the better ratio of effort to reward the better the game.

(3) Engagement - Wargames as entertainment need to engage the players, which is to say that they need to either facilitate engagement between the players, so that the players are playing with each other rather than simply trying to operate the game, or playing with the game rather than trying to operate it in the case of solo play. A player is engaged when they're exploring the space of agency in the game; it's not enough for a game to give a player agency, and to make it easy enough to play out that agency, but the procedures making up the game need to reward the players for enacting them. A good game encourages you to think about it, and to enjoy thinking about it. It's also ethically interesting because this is where game design can turn into a Skinner Box design...

(4) Pop-cultural franchising. This is the secret sauce of GW games. People like games. They also like buying stuff, painting stuff, photographing stuff, talking about stuff, reading and writing stories about stuff, watching movies, and so on. A good wargame sits at the intersection of a bunch of different things, and it's arguably why Warhammer is so successful when games fulfilling the other three better exist. Wargames aren't abstract things floating around in a Platonic space, but activities that intersect with a variety of other hobbies and activities. A good wargame takes those other interests and ties them together so that players can play out conflicts together in a shared space (or play them out solo like a weirdo, I don't judge, much). I think people making wargames, and particularly sci-fi or fantasy wargames, tend to miss this; Warhammer got lucky because it collected a ton of pop-cultural tropes at a time when stuff was less tightly exploited as vertically-integrated franchises (and has a great variety because it wasn't limited to one franchise). It's evolved into its own thing, and demonstrated a space for wargames and games with miniatures on a tabletop, and how a pop culture franchise can also be a Hobby. WWII games do this to a degree, because of the historical impact of WWII sustains a fascination with it. People want wargames to be about stuff they're interested in, is what I'm saying.

being enjoyable "out of the box", i mean wihtut needing to tweak things yourself

I like how nobody described 40k but probably everybody plays 40k

I like short rules with lots of tactical depth and everything that's not about making tactically meaningful decisions filed off.

My holy trinity are X-wing, Monsterpocalypse, Deadzone (all first editions)

Warhammer Underworlds is pretty close for a GW game.