Building a Solo Wargame - Part Two A (The Valley Campaign)

Solo war gaming has been a bit of an interest of late for me and I have had a concept for my own game bouncing around just as long.

For the theme and setting I've settled pretty firmly on two possibilities.  The first is pretty narrow and focused which is probably ideal for keeping the project scoped appropriately.  The second is less well defined but has more interest to me and potential for a less more varied play experiences.

By Map by Hal Jespersen, www.cwmaps.com, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17667254

Stonewall Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign as it hits a number of key factors for me.  The scope of the game is easy to define and understand both in terms of the forces involved and the area the campaign occurred.  The American Civil War is a period I am quite familiar with and have a good store of resources to lean on for reference.

I expect the game to have two primary phases for the player divided along strategic and tactical.  In this case the strategic phase would handle the movement of troops and supply if needed in the valley.  The tactical phase would contain battlefield encounters that occur.

Each phase needs a level of abstraction for the game to function simply and I do consider simplicity a goal of the project.  However not both phases need to be dealt with as heavily in how they are abstracted. I've found many games try to make the battles interesting and give the player tactical options but ultimate they don't feel like battles, they feel too abstract. I want to approach the battles with more flexibility towards making them a highlight to the game so they are engrossing for the player and when the opponents are brought to battle, its an exciting opportunity for the player to play out the fight.

Strategically, using a setting with strongly defined historical objectives for the historical participants helps a lot in trying to program initial goals for the forces.  It doesn't allow for easy management of variables introduced by a player. I suspect this is a good thing provided the base system can cope with it.  Some players want to try to reproduce history, others want to change it and both expect a good experience in so doing.

The questions I have in consideration of all this is what is the "ideal" breakdown of time for a player?  50% strategic play and 50% tactical (battle) play? 

How are lopsided battles presented so they are still fin to play without being balanced in a gamey way?

There are a lot more questions to answer but we're still looking at things on a high level.

We also have an alternative campaign to consider coming in Part Two B (Shinano)

Building Scenarios for Solo Wargames - Part One

While I've been reading about and toying with solo wargames for various reasons, one of the primary goals of mine is to build something for myself.  After a bit of fiddling and writing I've tentatively settled on the idea of scenario building for solo games to facilitate play.

What that means is I would craft a basic scenario but make it as open ended as possible for it to be functional for as many time periods as possible.  Then within the limits of my technical skills, find ways to program the opposition for the solo player such that they can try to anticipate how they'll behave and plan appropriately rather than be completely at the whim at the gods of randomness.

So to start things off I sat down to define what the scenario should do for the solo player:

1. Provide a predetermined battlefield.  Building a field for battle that is balanced for play or even favors one player when appropriate is an important element of a wargame.  Taking the building of the battlefield out of the player's hands creates the opportunity for players to survey the field with fresh eyes and keeps some element of bias out of the building process.

For example: The Blue and Red vanguard forces met the previous day, engagements ended at nightfall in stalemate.  Overnight both sides received reinforcements and have begun to settle into their positions in preparation for the day's meeting.

This would be accompanied by a map of the ground showing enough detail to be reproduced easily but not so much that it cannot scale or be modified to fit various rules or even time periods.

2. Provide fog of war for the opponent when desired.  Some people play both sides as if they were commanding each individually.  Others like an opponent that offers some mystery and the challenge of trying to anticipate based on scouting and other clues given in scenario background.

Continuing the example: The Blue force (player driven) learns determines what strategy the Red force will use (randomly) and is given a scouting report.  This may be vague and simple, enough to give suspicion as to the enemy objective without identifying it outright.  In this case "Enemy troops appear to be massing against our left flank."  The Blue leader then deploys.  With this done, the Red force deployment is shown and the player follows that deployment as described.

3. Provide asynchronous objectives that may not be known to the player of the game at game start.  Revealing immediate objectives for forces that set up later reveals of goals for the opposing forces to provide a player a chance to try anticipating and thwarting the goals of the opponent.  If these can be provided in different ways which bear investigation it should be possible to minimize randomness by tailoring the information provided to the scenario and give reasonable objectives without feeling completely unintuitive.

Completing the example:  The Red team is given a "first two turns" goal to set up but ideally not flat out give away the objective.  Its assumed a good player will put together the deployment and first steps to anticipate the enemy goals.  Following the completion of the second turn the actual goals are revealed.

One obvious problem:  This system fails when the objectives are simply to defeat the opposing force.  Fighting for terrain objectives can benefit towards that goal but don't serve it directly.

So it needs work.  What do you think so far?

Building a Solo Wargame. Part One - Where to Start

For a little while I have been looking at various methods of providing a solo wargame experience that I would enjoy.  There are a lot out there if you look for them. There are others that can be multi-player games that you just play both sides out impartially against yourself.  Both offer interesting experiences but so far haven't sufficiently scratched the itch I have.

Even though I am a video game designer, I wanted to keep this experiment in the realm of board or miniature wargames. This has the benefit of removing artistic and programming skills from the equation.

So I will document this endeavor as I go here for my own reference. I don't know how much value you the reader will find in it but if you want to embark on this ride with me, there's room for plenty in the car.

So where do I start?

I needed to decide what the nature of this project would be.  Is it a mod for an existing rule set to handle solo play in that game?  Or is it its own game built from the ground up to handle solo play?  The former is less groundwork to build but places a lot of restrictions on what the game can be and how it can behave as it needs to operate within a well defined framework.  The latter has no restrictions until I place the restrictions on my own as the project becomes more and more defined.

What do I expect from the gameplay experience? Is it the long form chess game that a player would work on from time to time as they recreate a historical battle?  Is it a game that one can sit down and play over an afternoon.

I wanted to focus this idea down and define the goals of this project.  What will this game be? Miniatures or board game?  Time period to represent?  How long will it take to play?  How deep should it be in terms of complexity? Finally and maybe most importantly for getting started, what resources do I need?

Not all of these questions needed to be answered but the more detail I have from the start the better the foundation of the game as I create it.

On The Table or On The Shelf - Napoleonic French and British Infantry

When Warlord Games announced the release of their La Haye Sainte set I felt like the time had finally come to dip my toe into Napoleonics.

I've always been daunted by the sheer number of figures a good Napoleonic battle required. So much so that while interested enough to try out the old Napoleons Battles rules set back in the late 90s, I haven't really revisited the era since.

The La Haye Sainte set changed my mind. It provides a starter kit with terrain to build off of and it provides a good place to begin by offering an iconic piece of terrain to fight in and around.

What went wrong?

As I stated before, a good tabletop Napoleonic battle requires a lot of figures.  At 28mm scale with limited free time and the unfortunate necessity of providing two functional forces (in this case French and British) the mountain or work to get to the table is not insurmountable but too much to take on for me.

But... There are rules sets that don't require that many figures!  True enough.  But to my way of thinking they really don't capture the look of a Napoleonic battle nor the feel of the command as I like them.  Your feelings may be different and just as valid.

I prefer the overall look and feel of Napoleons Battles (1989, Avalon Hill version).  I haven't looked at the more recent version of the game.  I have looked at some other rule sets but I appear to be too fussy for them.

What went right?

The set is awesome.  The terrain and figures are all worthwhile if you are looking for 28mm figs.  I really would like to be able to pursue this further and may do so in the future given a lot more free time and patience to pain 28mm figures in the numbers needed.

For now, the starter set rests on my shelf.