Game Design Theory: Benchmarks for Other Skirmish Games?

Posted on April 24, 2016 by Quirkworthy

Having proposed the Collateral nightclub shootout as a benchmark for modern skirmishes, I’ve started to think about what might be an equivalent for ancient/medieval/fantasy games.

I’ve got a few ideas kicking about, but before I prejudice your thinking too much, I was wondering if you guys had any ideas.

Battle at Lanka Ramayana UdaipurThinking back through the films I’ve seen and books I’ve read, there’s a number of strange fights that would make good games. However, I’ve not yet dug out one that is so wonderfully convoluted as Collateral. Also, given the top-down view we have of most of history, it’s unusual to have the detail we’d need to reconstruct an ancient skirmish as opposed to an ancient battle. Unusual, but not impossible.

Ajax defends the shipsFantasy is obviously easier as they are made up, and can contrive whatever they like. I could obviously make up one of my own, and I may do that anyway. I just thought the mirror of the Collateral idea might be a worthwhile mental exercise.

So I’ve got my ideas.

Can you think of one?

Extra points if it’s not fantasy or a Norse saga 🙂

Posted in Game Design Theory, Skirmish games | Tagged , | 27 Comments

Game Design Theory: A New Benchmark For Modern Skirmish Games

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Quirkworthy

 

Way of the GunThanks for all the film suggestions folks.

As you might expect, I’ve already got a number of them, though that doesn’t mean I’ve watched them recently. Even those I’ve seen are well worth re-watching.

One comment that I thought was worth discussing more was about Collateral. This Michael Mann directed Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx movie has a number of scenes containing firefights and is well worth watching for action/thriller movie fans. Tom Cruise with very blond hair always looks a bit odd, but that’s possibly just me.

Warning: the rest of this post contains spoilers. 

Continue reading →

Posted in Eternal Battle, Game Design Theory | Tagged , | 32 Comments

Research is Weird: SF Worlds

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Quirkworthy

This post is really to make you think about the way AI may work (or not), and to give you something to consider when you’re working on the imagined future of your game. However, I have to get there by way of the internet’s omnipresent shadow: porn.

Everyone who’s tried to dig out information about a specific topic will be familiar with the dangers. You start off with good intentions, then something catches your eye, then another thing, and soon you’ve no idea how you got so far down the rabbit hole or so far from your original topic. At least, it does with me.

This happens when you’re digging in libraries as much as it does online – it’s just that online makes it all much faster, and that much easier to get lost.

However, sometimes the internet just chucks the weirdness at you before you’ve even had a chance to stray. Sometimes the most innocent search digs out the porn.

Like everyone else, I often use Google to hunt out interesting articles, comparisons of figures, reviews of new games, and so on. So yesterday when I did an image search for science fiction tanks, I thought that would be fairly straightforward. Not much potential for confusion there, right? Well here’s a bit of the screen grab…

Gay tank.pngWait. Gay Tank? What?

Is this more of DARPA’s weirdness? They are a strange bunch. Nope, not this time. And oddly, it makes sense too. At least it makes sense when you apply a literal and unimaginative interpretation of the search requirements.

Gay Tank turns out to be a “military science fiction adventure” book by the wonderfully (pseudo)named Randy Dangle. That one’s still making me chuckle.

And yes, it looks like gay porn. Well, everything in its place (that’s anywhere but Utah if you’ve been watching the news). I just thought that this was an interesting illustration of all sorts of things: how search algorithms are fallible (as, presumably, will be our AI overlords), how things that look random often aren’t, how literal often means at least partly wrong, and how amusement can turn up out of the blue, however routine a task you’re doing.

To take the first of these, and to get round to my point, I’ve read all manner of doom mongering articles about the tech singularity and all things robotically disastrous. The robot uprising is imminent, apparently, and we’re all about to lose our lives as well as our jobs – except for those lucky enough to live on as an underclass of human slaves. Well, having worked with computers on a daily basis for 30 years, the only article of faith I hold about tech is that it goes wrong at random and in unpredictable ways. It’s just a matter of time. And I’m convinced that this will also be true of our AI overlords, when they arrive. Stupid literal decision making? Naturally. Send a legion of robot tanks to crush the human uprising? Here’s some gay porn instead.

And thus were our AI masters thwarted 🙂

Now that sounds to me like a far more interesting basis for a background, story or game setting than the improbably infallible and invincible robot foe we see so often. Of course, I get the value of the alienness of the implacable and perfect enemy, I just don’t buy the credibility. And credibility sells backgrounds, both emotionally and literally.

Posted in Game Design Theory, Random Thoughts | Tagged | 2 Comments

A Bit Of Help From Movie Buffs Please

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Quirkworthy

Heat-FNCThose of you who have been wandering through these virtual pages for a few years now, may remember a game I mentioned back at the end of 2012: Eternal Battle. Still in the works, and now even more grand and complex in its remit.

One of the periods I’ve been trialling it in is modern, or ultramodern conflicts, such as the war in Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare is always a good testbed for rules.

My question is this: what movies can you think of which portray modern combat well? EB isn’t based on movies (mostly I use discussions with veterans, first-hand accounts, training manuals, and suchlike), but watching them is a fun way to get in the right frame of mind. And it’s a good excuse too… I’m watching war films for work, dear 🙂

There are lots of military movies about, but most are way too Hollywood for what I’m after. Fun sometimes (I watched World War Z last night), but not right. Interestingly, the film that servicemen most often tell me accurately captures modern small unit tactics (and which I found cited on an official Armed Services page the other day) is Heat, which isn’t a military film at all.

So what would you recommend? Something from Hollywood after all? Non-English language offerings? I miss most of those, I’m sure. Must be some great stuff I know nothing about.

Yet.

Posted in Eternal Battle, Random Thoughts | Tagged | 49 Comments

How Scales Used To Be

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Quirkworthy

I was rummaging through some old scribblings this morning when I came across the following. Written to a friend as part of a discussion on how figure gaming has changed since I was a lad, it is a tongue-in-cheek view from a grizzled old grognard that I thought you might find amusing.

28mm* is the scale that gentlemen game in. In the (good) old days you’d make an exception for modern games (WWII on) because of the availability of 20mm models and little else. When 6mm WWII came in you could excuse it on the grounds of mass tank battles. Occasionally people would do skirmish games in 54mm, but they were weird. Everything else was cause to check someone’s levels of medication.

15mm gaming turned up later as an aberration caused by lack of funds, bought only when people couldn’t afford proper (28mm*) armies. The models and games have never looked as good to my eye. The only exception is WWII+ where the small size allows vehicles and long-ranged weapons to be used more comfortably. Smaller scales follow the old Soviet principle that quantity has a quality all its own.

Since then the market has ballooned and you can get models in a huge array of scales, which is nice, confusing, and frustrating in equal measure.

I have gamed in most scales over the years, and can see more merit in non-28mm scales than the above may suggest. Even so, if I listen to my emotions rather than my head then this heritage still strongly influences how I think about scale. Initial experiences are formative ones. Even now I’d still plump for a table full of beautifully painted and ranked 28mm Ancients if I had to pick a single image to define wargaming. For me, that is. I suspect that there are a handful of different archetypes that people could name, and for many people I bet that there would be a correlation between the archetype you choose and your age.

So which image of figure gaming is your archetype?

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*Of course, when I say 28mm I really mean 25mm, but that was before they ate all the pies.

Posted in Random Thoughts | 20 Comments

Oh Balls!

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Quirkworthy

The Farce is strong in this one. As is the innuendo. I’ve been trying to resist mentioning it, but I can’t. It’s just too silly.

I’ve mentioned Macrocosm Miniatures a few times, and shown off some of their retro-SF style sculpts, like these ones:

DiggersMy own retro-SF skirmish game got put to one side while I moved, and hasn’t resurfaced yet. It’s that sort of thing I’d be using them for though, along with the Colony 87 figures, and a number of other, carefully chosen models in that nostalgic style. Can’t beat a little bit of nostalgia 🙂

For their latest trick, Macrocosm have gone for something completely different: floating balls.

Because… um…

Well, just because.

Macrocosm balls.jpgI have a strong feeling that this began as a joke in a pub. However, let’s be fair to the guys: they’ve run (or floated) with it all the way. Now on Kickstarter at 30 times their initial target, it’s still got legs (and wings, arms… ) with a variety of different shapes and sizes and embellishments to pick from, including large, small, swarm, horny, and, of course, great balls of fire. I suspect we’ll see a lot more groanable jokes before the curtain falls on this one.

So what on Earth are they for, I hear you ask? Whatever your fevered imagination can contrive, is (I think) the best answer. Certainly they’re not a specific army for a specific game, and that I think is where their real interest lies. They are about imagination. With the various different add-ons you could easily make them into ersatz Squigs, Beholders or just weird Chaos things.

Balls with arms.jpgI expect a plague of them to be inflicted on unfortunate role-players across the globe, and I’d imagine someone will do an army or two of them. We’ve seen rock-based HOTT armies, so why not a load of balls?

Army of balls.jpg

 

Posted in Kickstarter, Random Thoughts | Tagged | 6 Comments

Game Design Competition Is On!

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Quirkworthy

Had a long chat with Chris today about what to do with the 30th Anniversary of the Battle of the Halji next year. We’ve decided to run a game design competition, and will announce the rules later this week. Just got to get some bits ready to go with that and type up the rules neatly.

I think it’s going to be a lot of fun 🙂

Posted in Battle of the Halji, Competition, Random Thoughts | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Bit More Lost Patrol

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Quirkworthy

60010699005_LostPatrolENG01So now we have some more photos of the new version, courtesy of GW’s pre-order page.

What I find interesting is that they’ve reused the original tile artwork. Pleased though. I’ve always been really fond of Nuala’s art, which conveyed exactly what I wanted for the deadly, spiky, green hell that is the jungle. When I find my original mock-ups you’ll see how good a job she did of translating my rambling into something really cool.

I remember that this was her first go at board game art and she was a bit nervous, though she’d no reasons to be. This time I’d been a little apprehensive myself about what they might replace it with, so I’m happy that they’ve kept her work in place.

Mildly amused that it’s more recycling. Recycling of a game that was, itself, designed to recycle stuff. Very green of them 🙂

Posted in Lost Patrol, Random Thoughts | Tagged | 15 Comments

Or Do We Make It A Competition?

Posted on April 2, 2016 by Quirkworthy

One of the comments on yesterday’s post was that we could have a game design competition around any 30th anniversary edition of Halji. Thanks to edenchanges for that suggestion. I’ve been looking at competitions to enter myself, as a sort of design equivalent to speed drawing and don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. Great idea.

Will we actually run a competition? Still undecided. Chris is travelling between the UK and Japan at present, so I’ll have a chat with him when he’s settled in one place again.

What do you think? Would anyone be interested?

 

Posted in Battle of the Halji, Board Gaming, Random Thoughts | Tagged | 6 Comments

Battle of the Halji 30th Anniversary Edition

Posted on April 1, 2016 by Quirkworthy

It’s funny how things happen.

The first game I ever had published was the slightly strange Battle of the Halji. This was designed in cahoots with friend of mine called Chris Hunt, way back in 1987.

Halji box cover.jpgLooking back, it was a bit slower than it should have been, and over the years I’ve occasionally pondered what I would do with the idea now. Certainly I could do a better job. However, I wasn’t expecting to ever get the chance…

Then Chris’s dad died.

During the ensuing sorting out, Chris discovered a couple of hundred original copies of Halji, that we’d thought had long-since gone the way of the dodo. Stacked in boxes in the spare room of his parent’s house were a few finished copies (complete with crumbling 29-year old shrink wrap) plus some boxes of components, ready to assemble.

Interesting.

So over the last few weeks we’ve been discussing what we can do with them. Obviously, the simplest thing to do is chuck them all in the recycling. After all, that’s where we thought they were anyway, so no loss. Then I realised that it was the 30th anniversary next year. Maybe we could or even should do something more interesting with them.

After some discussion, the alternative to the recycling bin that we are pondering is this: we take the existing components and add a new rulebook. That’s got the charm of the retro bits, allied to the fun of a modern game. Sure we could do something completely new from scratch, but I don’t think either of us really has the time or the inclination to run the logistics. Too dull. If, on the other hand, we’ve already got the components and all we have to sort out is a new rulebook, then that’s much more manageable. It would be a fun side project to commemorate the game.

We did work out a few parameters for the project. If we did a 30th Anniversary edition it would be limited in number to however many we can make out of what’s left. That’s also got a perverse charm to it. And, because I don’t really want to be faffing about with stock, it would only be available for the 30th year (i.e. 2017), even if we ended up with spares. Again, fits the anniversary bit nicely. Anything left over gets to be recycled after that. Anyone who knows the premise of the game should find that entirely appropriate.

So there it is. Today’s strange thought. Not a definite plan yet, by any means. More a topic for consideration. I thought I’d mention it here to see what you guys thought.

And no, this isn’t an April’s Fool joke.

Honest 🙂

 

 

Posted in Battle of the Halji, Board Gaming, Nostalgia, Random Thoughts | Tagged , , | 18 Comments