Home Forums General Game Design Get the minis out and improvise a game

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  • #147858
    Avatar photoNathaniel Weber
    Participant

    I’ve had some various ideas percolating for a few different games—larger-scale Japanese age of war, colonials, division-sized WWII games—and have considered just getting the minis on the table and trying ideas out as my early playtesting/design, taking notes along the way.  Has anyone else tried designing a new game in that way?

    #147860
    Avatar photoJohn D Salt
    Participant

    Sort of. In this particular case, it wasn’t miniatures, but home-made cardboard counters sized to fit snugly into a cigarette packet. I made up a set of these, representing team-sized combat elements or individual officers and SNCOs, initially for my collection of poncho-model battle-bits. Officer cadets in the university OTC would carry bits and bobs and lengths of coloured string to help them give orders using a model of the tactical situation, laid out on a model of the terrain typically made by scrumpling up a 58-pattern poncho; I simply wanted to have more Gucci bits than anyone else, and with the appropriate tactical symbols. The Americans call this activity “rock drills”. These are also called ROC drills, this being claimed to stand for Rehearsal Of Concept, but I reckon it’s because people who don’t have neat counters to represent the force elements use rocks. I used my battlebox to play through a few platoon attacks just for fun, and then decided that it would be more fun still to have a simple set of wargame rules to determine things like how far away you could spot the other side, and how effective fire was. Taking doctrinal effective ranges from the Sandhurst Precis, and ruthlessly thieving ideas from various WRG rules, I mucked about with platoon attacks in various terrains and conditions of visibility, and devised new rules as the need for them became apparent. Unlike any other set of rules I’ve ever written, the assumption was that the “book” way of doing it would work, and work pretty reliably. The game (which I christened “Foxhounds”, at the time the fixed callsign for infantry) was compact enough to carry around and simple enough to explain quite quickly, so it lasted years longer than I would have expected. Upstairs I think I still have a Rothmans stick with ten ciggy packets in it containing the counters for 6/7th Battalion, the Eton Rifles, and a company group of their Fantasian opponents.

    All the best,

    John.

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