Our own board game

[mapuc]

For weeks I been thinking, I know many of my friends here in our forum has the skill to either make maps or write rules/rules of engagement.

I haven't thought of it in detail.

This "subsim made board game" shall be massive, which mean we control destroyer, battleships, carrier, subs, airplane of different kind.

Let take me as an example.

I'm giving the order to take control over an English destroyer. During the time I'm alive in the game an officer above me give me order.

I'm not immortal if my ship is destroyed two online dice shall decide whether I survived, got caught(no more playing for me) or KIA(Same here no more playing) it will not be me who make this decision-It will be the office above me who shall roll these dices.

So some has to make maps we can download and use. it will be a semi game-half via our forum and half of the board game is made by our self irl.

Maybe it wouldn't be a good idea after all-Nothing but an idea I have had for weeks.

Almost forgot an important thing-None of those who take part in this WWII board game can make decision by them self only in the heat of a battle the commander of a ship/sub/airplane is somehow free to take action-Here cards with rules or what you call them would be handy.

Which mean some had to play the role as general.

Markus

[mapuc]

Making our own online board game seems to be a no-go.

The reason to why I started to think about it was following.

We live to far from each other-so we can't meet 1 Saturday per month or so.
The online board game that exist today(Matrix games) have 1-2 player possibility.
I was thinking on a game where least 15 could take part.

Then it is of course this multiplayer thing-What kind should we use and time of turnover-weekly or daily.

Could be fun-Getting information about your moves in Europe, Northern Africa and Pacific. Thereafter we, the others makes our moves. a.s.o.

Markus

[Skybird]

Its too tricky to realise it this way, I think. And I have done a simplified cosim myself some 25 years ago and remember how much work it was.

I drew (by hand )a huge map with hexfields on 1.80x1.80m of cardboard. Mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, forests, prairie, roads, small and big towns. I had simple units: light and heavy tanks, fighters, bombers, helicopters, ground transports, infantry. I had mines with two forms of ore for fuel and vehicle production scattered around the mountains. I painted the symbols on round adhesive labels of various colours and had these stickied to round metal washers from the building supplies store, approx. 2 cm in diameter, or a bit smaller. Hundreds of them.

The idea was to have one of those back then popular real time strategy games with their fast-paced hectic gameplay in tabletop format and with playing mechanisms so simple that they could be explained and understood by newbies within very short time, with a complexity level above that of Risk but below that of Chess, and simplified combat, with a simple terrain-based mutator system for the combat results. The game thus had only one table, if I recall correctly. I wanted it to allowing almost narrative war story telling on the map: you had to form a force, or better severla ones, defend your supply lines from mines to factories, conquer those of your opponents, own mines, have transports transporting mine chips on the map to factories, raiding the transports of your opponents to win his ores while defending yours, produce enough fuel and new units to live by spending the ore in your factoy hexes, and that was the idea.

It worked. It indeed, in the end, worked marvellously well, I really am a bit proud of it. But it was a very, very, very long trip to getting the details done right, and balancing the game mechanisms well, and doing all the work on counters and the map. Well, the kind of stuff you do when you are a young student. When it was done, my buddies of that time had test-played it so much that it had become uninteresting to continue playing it while it was then ready. So the finalized version of the game has been played just once or twice... That a playing session also lasted for hours and from afternoon deep into the night, also was not helpful.

But I managed the compromise: epic gameplay story telling with simple mechanisms that allowed satisfying gameplay that allowed nice strategy-drawing and tactical ambush. And the kind of mutual mocking and bitching between players that you see - in good moods, hopefully - in matches of Risk.

It was much work to create the components. There were action and event cards as well. Oh, and an outer playing field surrounding the huge hex map (which was 80x80 hexes), like you have in Monopoly, so you had a dice-based randomization affecting map gameplay as well, I got the idea for that from an old board game I liked when I was a school boy, "Öl für uns alle". I had more variation in playing fields on that racetrack, however. The stacks of washers representing multi-unit armies and transports loaded with ore, looked like at a poker table at times. I later implemented a stacking limit, the game mechanisms worked better with smaller unit numbers, also the game was better to handle.

Battle Isle for Amiga also was a computer game that influenced me on the design, the scaling of unit sizes especially. I ended up with a simplification: one counter, one vehicle, mostly. I later foudn that the game worked better with a stacking limit per hexfield, two or three units, ore chips from mining not counted (up to two ores per transport). Aerial units always were singular. Players usually had not the ressources to build super huge armies anyway, and it was plenty of stuff out ther eon the map to to attack and to defend, while keeping an eye on your supply lines as well. Keeping a range limit on aerial units, to have them retuzrnign to their bases, was tricky, and needed fair play and good memory of everybody. The units, dependign on their type, could be in air for one, two or three tzurnsm, before they had to land back at their base again, else they were removed (out of fuel). It was the only fragile game element, but I wanted to avoid having players marking fuel boxes on paper leafs for every aerial sortie. Hardcore cosim palyer sare used to siuch things, but that was not the intended audience. It had to be simplier.

The counters I still have somewhere, I think, the map however got drowned during a massive rain flooding desaster we had here some years ago. It also costed me a bigger part of my "library", with some pretty expensive and rare books gone. A hundred books or so went with the water, half of them about Islam. Well, good for my blood pressure that they are gone, maybe.

[Skybird]

Ach gugge moi! What have I found... Counters even had two force levels, could suffer losses, I had forgotten that...



There were two more colours, and HUNDREDS of such counters.

And indeed the game could have been played in two ways: purely tactical without the randomising outer rim of playfields a la Monopoly, where you would have moved your pin according to the dice and could for example have gained good or bad action cards affecting the hex-focussed tactical game on the infield of the map, or a more laid-back and randomised fun-version incuding that outer playing field.

The rule book unfortunately is no more complete.

The game's title was "Conquest", btw.

Today I would learn coding and then do such a thing as computer version. But before I would do that, after having learned coding, I would code a 1:1 conversion of this old board game by Avalon Hill, "Flight Leader". I would kill for such a conversion, and with a competent AI. I loved it.

Other cosims I played were the Third World War series by GDW, the Assault series by GDW, 2nd and 6th Fleet by VG, and a few others. Ah, Gulf Strike and Aegean Strike, Ambush!, Tokyo Express. My review of Tokyo Express, a solitaire game, is (was?) somewhere in the Subsim reviews section.

[mapuc]

Skybird Thank you so much for your interesting input.

The board game I had in mind would be very complex. Guessing 4-6 players controlling German forces. Land, sea, air force and air defence, incl. Coastal Defences.

Same number of USA-players.

My idea was the time is March/April 1940 and it will be up to the player to decide which way he will go with his troops-E.g. The 2-3 players who are controlling Japan-decide to attack Russia instead, so Russia is fighting a two front war.
Only exact number of troops, material a.s.o. will be there.

As you understand, there will be battles all over the world. The AAR threads will be some, not only one.

Markus

[Skybird]

https://www.matrixgames.com/game/world-in-flames




Sounds like kind of an interface that you may find attractive. The board cosim it is a conversion, is a classic, and available still, even at Amazon. I think it will never get an AI, I am occasionally checking this project since over a decade.

This title does not include an AI player in the initial release. It is designed as a computerized, automated and online multiplayer-capable...