Würfelglück trifft auf Drafting-Taktik und vereint sich bei Nerdlab Games zu einem einzigartigen Spielerlebnis von konfrontativ über kooperativ bis solo. Schlicht weil jeder der zu rekrutierenden Champions sich in Fähigkeiten, Werten und Kräften sowie der Illustration unterscheidet und kein Geringer als der Erfinder von Magic The Gathering an der Entwicklung beteiligt war. Das weckt Erwartungen. Alle weiteren Details erfahrt Ihr im Audio-Interview von der Neuheitenschau der SPIEL 2026 in Essen.

Verlag: Nerdlab Games
Titel: Final Titan
Autor: Christian Kudahl und Richard Garfield
Messestand: Halle 5B700

Große Namen verpflichten und wecken Erwartungen, die erstmal auch erfüllt werden wollen. Während Ihr im Champion-Drafting noch die Kontrolle habt, werden die Kämpfe per Würfel entschieden und das im Autobattle-Modus. Kann die Vielfalt an Charakteren trotz oder gerade eben aufgrund des bewusst seichten Spielablaufs überzeugen? Ich bin auf meine Erstpartie vor Ort in Essen gespannt, bevor ich mich in einen voreiligen Blindkauf stürze. Angeblich soll das Spielgefühl mit jeder Partie wachsen und zum regelrechten Sog werden. Ich lasse mich da gerne mitreißen, obwohl ich kritisch bin, ob das Spielkonzept für mich aufgeht.

Der Mann mit den grünen Haaren hat drei Neuheiten aus seinem Eigenverlag 2F-Spiele mitgebracht und erzählt ein wenig von Fischen 2, Flixo und der Reanimated Version von Finstere Flure. Lauscht rein in das von Umgebungsrauschen bereinigte Audio-Interview von der Neuheitenschau der SPIEL 2026 in Essen.

Verlag: 2F-Spiele
Neuheiten: Fischen 2, Flixo und Finstere Flure (Reanimated Version)
Autor: Friedemann Friese
Messestand: Halle 3G215

Wer Finstere Flure noch nicht kennt, für den bietet sich die ideale Gelegenheit, das taktisch-chaotische Spiel mit dem Kartendeck gesteuerten Monster kennenzulernen. Lohnt sich trotz seines Klassiker-Status, weil wirkt mal so gar nicht verstaubt bei aller zu erlebenden Schadenfreude. Bei Fischen 2 empfehle ich die Anspielpartie, ob das eigenständige Spiel ausreichend anders und damit neu wirkt im Vergleich zum Vorgänger. Reichen dazu ein paar neue Karten aus? Die Eigenwerbung greift genau diese Frage auf „Das ist ja wie Fischen, aber ganz anders“. Ich bin gespannt wie unentschlossen. Wobei Flixo typisch nach einem 2F-Spiel mit seinem kooperativen Team vs. Spiel Kniff wirkt, das ebenso ausprobiert werden will. Im Genre von Skyjo & Co ist die Konkurrenz allerdings groß und die Zielgruppe zudem recht eigen.

Meine noch ein wenig von Krankheit beeinträchtigte Stimme bitte ich derweil zu entschuldigen. Genau deshalb fasse ich mich eher kurz, weil im Mittelpunkt soll stets der Interviewte stehen. Zudem habe ich wie immer kein Konzept vor Ort und frage spontan nach dem, was mich als Spieler ebenso interessiert.

Foto: SPIEL EssenRobin de Cleur ist Director Communications beim Merz Verlag und damit für die Außenkommunikation der Spiel verantwortlich. Für unseren YouTube-Kanal Brettspiel-Kollektiv haben meine Kolleg*innen Alexandra Kemmerer, Stephan Zerlik und ich ihn zwei Tage vor der Eröffnung der heiligen Hallen getroffen. Hier findet ihr einen Ausschnitt aus dem Interview. Das Interview in voller Länge…

Quelle

We have played all of the games in the Reivers and Reformers Series designed by Ed Beach, including Here I Stand (multiple times), Virgin Queen (multiple times but not as many as HIS), Tanto Monta (once) and Border Reivers (twice) with our most recent play being a full 5-player game in March while attending Buckeye Game Fest. This series is just special and I very much enjoy our experience with these games each time we play them. The card driven mechanic simply makes the series and it really is a bit of a sandbox as you can win in various and sundry ways. Several months ago, GMT announced the fifth entry in the series called Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli designed by the duo of Paul Wright and Liz Davidson. This one looks to be epic and is set during warring city-states and dominions of Renaissance Italy during the era known as the Italian Wars (specifically, the period from 1494 to 1527). I am very keen on a new addition to the series and look forward to diving in and learning more about the game over the next year or so. My first step was to reach out to the design team to do a designer interview and Paul Wright was more than willing to answer our questions.

*Note: The pictures used in this interview showing the various components and cards, are still in the design and development process and as such rules, event effects and text might still change prior to final development and publication. Also the art and layout of the components are only for playtest purposes at this point and the game will enter the art department as it nears publication.

Grant: Paul welcome to our blog. First off, please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?

Paul: From Chicago originally, I’m a cultural historian by training, having taken my doctorate in Comparative Literature at Princeton and worked with the masterful historian Anthony Grafton. I’m happy if even a tiny percentage of his vast knowledge has lodged itself in me. My focus in my doctoral research was Renaissance humanism in Italy and England, including work on Leonardo Bruni, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Gabriel Harvey, and John Milton. I have been dialoguing with Machiavelli ever since my undergraduate days at Northwestern, when one of my mentors (the wonderful Albert Ascoli) tasked me with translating long sections of The Prince into English. I’m certain those early efforts were awful and too literal-minded, but what an instructive exercise that has only made me more admiring of great translators. Alongside Machiavelli remaining a key part of my research, I have also been working on the political and social impact of Savonarola.

I taught for three decades in higher education, including my graduate T.A. days at Princeton, as well as teaching posts at Osaka University, Villanova University, and Cabrini University. That last school, sadly, closed in the wake of all the pressures on higher ed in the last fifteen years or so. I then turned to teaching in the independent school world, which brought me to Main Line Classical Academy in Bryn Mawr, PA, where I teach English and History, as well as a games-based learning history elective funded by a grant I recently received from the Renaissance Society of America.

In my games-based learning exercises in my classrooms over the years, I have used analog board games as well as the occasional computer game (Europa Universalis in particular), but I also use role-immersion pedagogies like Reacting to the Past; I serve on the national consortium board for RTTP (for more info, see https://reactingconsortium.org/). I’m currently developing a RTTP game on Florence in the period 1494-1512, the era of the republic with the Medici in exile. In that game students may take on one of over thirty historical roles, including Piero Soderini, Da Vinci, Da Vinci’s portrait subject Ginevra de Benci, followers of Savonarola, condottiere Fabrizio Colonna, or even Machiavelli himself. Think of this as a role-playing game that zooms in even further than does Foxes and Lions. The game has been tested by professors at over a dozen institutions so far; it will be used in a high school setting for the first time this year.

My hobbies include film and media studies. I have taught film and media courses (on everything from the Coen Brothers to Kurosawa to The Sopranos) at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute for some twenty years now. I also have a screenplay (in painfully drafted form) on Machiavelli’s time spent with Cesare Borgia, which certainly informed Machiaveli’s thinking and later writing.

I also treasure any chance to travel abroad, and it was a big part of my higher ed career in international affairs. I hate how expenses have curtailed that experience for so many of us, as well as how the U.S. has become less welcoming to international students. Not surprisingly perhaps, Italy is my favorite destination, with Albania (home country of my wife) and China (home country of my daughter) tied for a close second. I also lived and taught in Japan for four years from 1996-2000, and it was one of the most formative times of my life; I treat any chance to return as a treat.

Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed most about the experience thus far?

Paul: I waded into game design after decades of intensive play of wargames, euros, RPGs, and so many other types of games that I’m clearly an omni-gamer—certainly on the heavier side of the complexity scale with a focus on historical games. I’ve always been happy to solo (even multi-handed) because playing more games teaches you so much about how games are put together and how they try to model complex realities, including the past. I’m an admirer of David Lowenthal’s classic book, The Past Is a Foreign Country, which certainly evokes how games draw me into historical eras and crises.

I’ve also been blessed in Philadelphia, my home of 26 years now, with the best gaming group anyone could ask for—a group of people who are kind, seriously competitive yet never obnoxious, while also being sharp and funny as hell. Between my own solo forays and playing with them, it has been an education that led to this first ever design for me. My Philadelphia group are truly shadow co-designers in their way.

What I’ve most enjoyed about design is the sense of something evolving before your eyes that captures the history as I understand it, but I also love designs that challenge or revise my understanding. Collaborating with an amazing co-designer in Liz Davidson and developer extraordinaire Joe Dewhurst has been an absolute treat. I’m spoiled by having these two on my team.

Grant: What have you learned about design over the years?

Paul: Like many designers, I have many designs that never saw the light of day; some of these will come to fruition, I think, once Foxes and Lions is released. What I do know is that I’m a designer by theme and subject who looks far and wide for mechanics that will capture the historical complexities that fascinate me. I know many work in the opposite direction starting with mechanics, but that’s not how I’m wired. I start with a theme or problem that haunts me, then see if a game (mine or someone else’s) can help to illuminate it—or at minimum, reframe my questions more powerfully.

I also see historical game design as a way of testing and modifying (not merely reinforcing) my own interpretive and historiographical assumptions. One of the reasons I began the journey with Foxes and Lions over a decade ago now is that I had deep questions about Machiavelli, his theories, his playful will to narrative, and the era through which he lived, an era that we all too facilely collapse under the rubric of the “Italian Wars” or “The Renaissance.” Game design can be a heuristic tool that can bear fruit eventually in a new interpretation or synthesis that we hadn’t anticipated. At minimum, it clarifies my own tortured thinking and reading of the sources.

Grant: What is your upcoming game Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli about?

Paul: Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli is the next game in the GMT series that includes Here I Stand, Virgin Queen, and Tanto Monta. Focused on the warring city-states and dominions of Renaissance Italy during the era known as the “Italian Wars” (specifically, the period from 1494 to 1527), this game zooms in on the Italian peninsula. Unlike many other games on the Italian Wars, Foxes and Lions puts the focus on Italian experiences of this era of enormous upheaval, which also saw some of the greatest cultural splendors that we now associate with the period known, not without controversy, as the Renaissance. The game depicts the political, military, economic, religious, and cultural affairs of five key Italian powers brought to life by players (Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, and the Papacy).

Players struggle to create political legitimacy for themselves while contending with both Italian rivals and non-player great powers intent on conquest of their own objectives in Italy; namely, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. For those who have played other series games, much will be familiar mechanically, but there are many new concepts and mechanics to enjoy, including experimenting with different government types, managing local sentiment, and gathering precious florins to pay for mercenaries and their fickle condottieri captains.

Furthermore, players will be faced with the possibility of collective defeat to the non-player great powers. Players will individually pursue Virtù Points, drawing on Machiavelli’s famously pliable conception of political ability and military strength, while at the same time striving to avoid collective defeat by loss of Italian Virtù Points. Dwindling Italian Virtù embodies Machiavelli’s abiding fear of great power domination of Italy. Players will each attempt to win without Italy falling into the subjection that was historically its fate, and should they fail to prevent that, the game ascribes blame to the specific players viewed as the scourge of Italy and the new lapdog of the great powers. Can you thread the needle between your Italian rivals’ ambitions and the threat posed by the great powers of Europe?

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest in making a game?

Paul: This subject got under my skin as an undergrad as I mentioned above. I first fell in love with Dante in multiple courses with terrific and yet very different teachers. They graciously invited me to join their graduate courses as an undergrad. Milton, Spenser, and a host of political poets in the epic tradition caught my eye there too, but I fell hardest for Dante and his era. As I went on to graduate school, that love of Dante abided, but Machiavelli re-entered the chat, as it were.

After my graduate experience with Machiavelli (thanks especially to one of my teachers, Victoria Kahn), I was never quite the same. Machiavelli embodied someone both deeply troubled and somehow deeply amused by a world that was falling down around him. His political career began in the wake of the 1494 Medici exile, the rise of Savonarola, and the restoration of a republic that had long been under the Medici yoke. His career ended the first time in 1512 with the Medici restoration. It ended again with another Medici exile in 1527, with yet another republic that didn’t really trust Machiavelli anymore given his courting of Medici patronage in the intervening years. Above all, the traumatic Sack of Rome in 1527 really shook Machiavelli. He died just over a month after the Sack, witnessing exactly the kind of Italian nightmare that he had warned about for years. Someone who had lived that much life and turmoil became endlessly fascinating to me. I know Machiavelli will be a part of my scholarship and design life for the duration.

Grant: How did you come to team up with Liz Davidson on this project?

Paul: Liz has become a dear friend as well as collaborator and sounding board on everything from our shared gaming interests to our broader professional and personal lives. We met because I invited her to be a keynote speaker at a Reacting to the Past game design conference at my former institution. She was not only awesome in that role, but we immediately hit it off as people. It wasn’t long till we were talking regularly cross-country and at conventions, then talking about collaborations. 

Grant: What strengths did each of you bring to the design process?

Paul: In the case of Foxes and Lions, I obviously brought the historical background and scholarly passion to the project, which I had first formulated about six or seven years before Liz and I met. But in all candor, I was spinning my wheels. I was swamped with the faculty and administration politics of a dying institution, and I was smack dab in the middle of all that drama in a leadership role for our faculty. It took Liz to help me see the real comfort of game design and of throwing myself back into my true passions, especially for Foxes and Lions.

It also helps enormously that Liz is a doctorate-holding historian of religion herself with a focus on the ancient world. And as anyone passionate about the period knows, the Renaissance was defined in many ways by its relationship to the classical world, so while Liz wasn’t an early modernist or medievalist, she understood intuitively and on a deep level why a classicist would enjoy and contribute to a game about the Renaissance. Simply put, without Liz, there is no Foxes and Lions for the world, just the game in my head. Liz also has a sharp sense of end-user needs in game design. How something will play to a more general audience and not just specialists or heavy gamers. To be clear, our game is a heavy game situated within a heavy (yet beloved) series, but Liz is working hard on materials to onboard people as only she can, including training guides, videos, and more. She is doing an amazing service with this in relation not only to our game, but also the series at large. Stay tuned for more of these things in the months to come.

I’d also be remiss not to mention the support and encouragement of Volko Ruhnke. After he visited my former university as keynote panelist for a games-as-scholarship workshop, we talked about Foxes and Lions possibly joining the COIN series in the vein of other pre-modern titles like Falling Sky and Pendragon. Liz and I even prototyped a first COIN version of our game. It was fun and quirky; it could have possibly thrived in COIN world, but at the end of the day GMT’s Jason Carr wisely suggested a retooling to the Here I Stand line. That was preaching to the choir for me given my admiration for Ed Beach and for the series. Ed became yet another guiding light as we got to know him. One of my proudest moments was having Ed participate in a play of the game at WBC this past summer. They say don’t meet your heroes; both Volko and Ed prove that dictum wrong.

Grant: What has been the division of labor between you?

Paul: Liz and I both have day jobs that are very consuming. She as creative director at Leder Games, myself as an educator (a role Liz had also previously played in independent schools). Yet we both get up incredibly early, whether we are meeting or not. We are always busy with our games at every spare moment. Liz has so many games on her plate, including with other collaborators like David Thompson, another designer for whom I’m an unabashed fanboy. I’ve got Foxes and Lions of course as my primary focus, but also a book project on Machiavelli and the Reacting to the Past role-immersion game on Machiavelli’s Florence that I mentioned earlier.

I would call our division of labor something like triage; think ER or The Pitt. We are each picking up the slack when needed, prioritizing one thing or another. If there is a functional division right now, I’m heavy into the rules and component revisions, as well as early TTS testing, about to go wider as of November 2026. Liz is contributing to the InsideGMT articles we are posting on the game; her favorite subject, not surprisingly if you know her, being espionage for an upcoming piece. Liz is also there anytime we need to vet some unusual change or some stubborn holdover of mine from earlier iterations of the game. Liz will give you her most honest take on how something plays and how it will feel in the game experience. Liz has an reliable, sure sense of that. As I mentioned, she is also developing onboarding materials for newbies that I think will be awesome.

The few times we have not seen eye to eye (and I can count them on one hand), we have always had principled discussions of where each of us is coming from, and that has always lit the way to a solution. Like myself, Liz is an omni-gamer with an historian and educator’s perspective on things. That fundamental commonality has always carried us through. Having Joe Dewhurst as our developer has been equally essential as he too is an educator and scholar, and his sharp eye for what will make a game its best is invaluable. As with Liz, no Foxes and Lions in its current exciting form without Joe.

Grant: What is your design goal with the game?

Paul: If I have an historian’s axe to grind with many games on the Italian Wars and Renaissance, they have never quite to my satisfaction captured the cultural dynamism, complexity, and sheer messiness of the period. There are success stories among Renaissance games to be sure. Many games attempt to capture the military picture and do so well; on the tactical front, Rich Berg’s Arquebus comes to mind here as well as the lesser known and under-appreciated Brien Miller game, Fornovo 1495.

Other games attempt to integrate military concerns with politics and economics on a grand scale, and of course Eivind Vetlesen’s Europa Universalis: The Price of Power comes to mind here as a masterful and inspiring example, although the cultural and political front in that game is more driven by events than player agency compared to Foxes and Lions. Pascal Ribrault’s Virtù is also an interesting euro that tackles some of these concerns in an accessible way.

And of course, we have the crowded field of games tapping into Renaissance commercialism. Brasini, Gigli, and Luciani’s Lorenzo il Magnifco and Fabiano Lopiano’s Calimala come to mind here. An underappreciated and roughhewn gem is Mario Papini’s Siena; his better-known De Vulgari Eloquentia is terrific. On the art front, Stefano Groppi’s Florenza looms large in my mind for its attention to both Florentine art and the material and political considerations behind that art; it’s also just a beautiful game to look at.

Yet for all those examples above, Ed Beach’s Here I Stand and Virgin Queen were the guiding lights to Foxes and Lions—alongside the interest in political asymmetry that transcends the traditional wargame fixation on “control,” a paradigm shift displayed so beautifully in Volko’s COIN series. What Morgane Gouyon-Rety attempted so ambitiously in Pendragon also figures in my original thinking about the game. Morgane and I have chatted of late about how the character-driven conceptualization of ever-shifting rulers has serendipitously shaped both her Hubris game and Foxes and Lions.

Yet for my design purposes, what Ed’s work on Here I Stand proved was that a wargame could tackle vitally important and culturally adjacent aspects of the period that impact things happening on the strategic battlefield—in Ed’s case the religious strife of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. COIN demonstrates to us that the sentiment and shifting support of an administered population is just as important as the intentions of those controlling a space—or trying to convince themselves that they do. This was very much on Machiavelli’s mind too.

In addition to wanting to make a game that captures the overdetermined messiness and intricacy of the Italian Renaissance, especially during the Italian Wars per se, we also wanted a game that “consciously uncoupled” (to riff on Gwyneth Paltrow’s marital breakup language) from reliance on “great power” narratives. Those narratives and the assumptions implicit in them are a recurring feature of most games on the Italian Wars and even of the Here I Stand series to date. We wanted ultimately to put the focus on Italian experiences of those conflicts—in the process creating a HIS series game about underdogs.

This was more than about zooming in on the map of Italy as depicted in earlier series games, something Carlos’s Tanto Monta did to a degree that left me hungry to do far more given my own scholarly interests in Italy. Yet it was above all about letting players personify powers that were otherwise total underdogs (or minor powers at best) in the context of the rest of the series and most other games on the period.

In this way, Avalon Hill’s out-of-print classic Machiavelli comes to mind for its attention to Italian powers alongside the greater powers of Europe and the Ottoman world. Our elevator pitch for Foxes and Lions remains a good formula—the old Machiavelli game brought to life in the mechanical exoskeleton of the Here I Stand system. Finally, as I get into in more detail below, we wanted a game that honored the messy contradictions and true interests of Machiavelli and didn’t simply replicate the many misleading stereotypes about him.

Grant: How have you modified the Here I Stand System to recount the story of the rise and fall of Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli between 1494-1527?

Paul: In addition to the non-player great powers mentioned earlier, the game features other significant additions or changes to series conventions.

• Political traditions—These are the governments (current and past) that define the political character of any given space in the game (featuring merchant republics, feudal aristocracies, princedoms, theocracies, tribute states, and vassals). In keeping with Machiavelli’s respect for founders of institutions, lawgiving will be an available action that permits you to attempt to alter governments in your dominion. Each space under your control may have a very different political arrangement, which affects its prosperity, unit construction capability, and many other things. Your central government (that of your capital) may also change over time.
• Sentiment—This captures the current attitude of the local population to the government overseeing it. The scale of sentiment reflects Machiavelli’s own terminology, ranging from “Hated” to “Feared,” to “Feared and Loved” (the latter an ideal Machiavelli thought hard to achieve, opting instead for being “Feared” whenever a choice between fear and love was unavoidable).
• New unit types—Regulars are split into citizen militia and feudal levies, alongside a more detailed look at mercenaries (with elite variants including the Swiss reisläufer and the Imperial landsknechte).
• Condottieri captains—Twenty of the colorful, talented, and sometimes treacherous mercenary captains of the era will be available to players in competitive blind bidding for their services, with each captain reflecting unique battlefield abilities, vulnerabilities, and other surprising game impacts. Captains are essential to success in the game, and if not properly paid and retained, will go up for auction again; they may even be suborned and taken from you by nefarious rival actions. Among the captains are the infamous Cesare Borgia, Fabrizio Colonna, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and “El Gran Capitán” himself, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Yet the captains also include those who are captains for our game, but not condottieri narrowly defined; these include militaristic cardinals like Francesco Alidosi as well as the famously defiant Caterina Sforza.
• Money economy—Alongside the high-level political capital of command points (CP) already familiar to CDG players, Foxes and Lions features the cold, hard cash that mercenaries and dominions crave. Florins are collected by a trade action connected to the prosperity of the various governments in one’s dominion. The florin economy will be necessary not only to pay or bribe mercenaries and captains, but also for espionage, government maintenance, and more. Player treasuries are hidden behind a screen, so no one is ever quite sure of a rival’s wealth. Should you run out of florins for a required or desired expenditure, the banks will be available to lend to you at exorbitant interest rates, and failure to repay may cost you dearly.
• Espionage available from turn one—Nefarious measures are available to players from the outset of the game, including familiar operations from Virgin Queen like Gain Intel and Assassination, now supplemented with Appeasement, Foment Rebellion, Sabotage Fortifications, and Suborning others’ employed condottieri to your cause.
• New patronage systems and figures—For those familiar with Virgin Queen, patronage now features three tracks (artists, scientists, and humanists) with 10 figures of each type. Each patronage target affords unique game effects. Among the 30 patronage subjects are figures such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Copernicus, Pacioli, Paracelsus, Machiavelli, Manutius, and even a prying poet-courtesan, Tullia d’Aragona.
• New ruler dynamics—Each player will have an often-volatile lineup of rulers who will transition based on circumstances in the game (26 rulers in total across five player powers). In the case of the Papal States, a conclave procedure involving all five players will determine the next pope whenever the current pope dies, however mysteriously.
• Variable impulse order—Players may bid their florins to change the impulse order for a given turn, creating dynamic opportunities for surprising your enemies—or lying in deadly wait for them.
• More opportunities to declare war mid-action phase—No game about Machiavelli’s era would be complete without the temptations and risks of back-stabbing rivals, even erstwhile allies, including in the middle of a turn. Great coalitions (like the historical “Holy League”) may form, but no alliance is ever truly safe.

Grant: What elements do you feel are most important to model from the period?

Paul: If there was one thing that consumed me more than anything else in formulating this game years ago, it was the desire to make the best possible game on the richness, diversity, and contradictions in Machiavelli’s whole body of work—a game that would capture Machiavelli the writer and, above all, the human being as I’ve come to know him.

I didn’t want a game that just brought The Prince to life, or that just reveled in the skullduggery so often associated with Machiavelli, even in games that somehow invoke him. I wanted a game that also featured the other Machiavelli(s). The celebrator of republics in the Discourses on Livy who also knew just how fragile republics really are, a lesson for today if ever there was one. Machiavelli the historian in his state-sponsored Florentine Histories, an example of urban history compromised by political pressures to dance around certain uncomfortable truths. Machiavelli the military theorist of The Art of War, who appreciated the potentially dangerous impact of militarism on civic life in addition to the positive virtues of citizen soldiers (there is something of both James Madison and Stephen Ambrose in Machiavelli here). And finally, even the Machiavelli of La Mandragola (“The Mandrake Root”), a viciously funny sex comedy about cuckolding with a sly political subtext commenting on the differences between classical virtues and Renaissance realities. Further down in this interview, you can see three event cards that were inspired by Machiavelli’s diverse array of writings.

In all that effort, we also want to be sure that Foxes and Lions never simply takes Machiavelli at his word or at face value. Given his own internal contradictions, that would be unwise. We instead see the game as interrogating Machiavelli’s assumptions and claims. His critique of mercenaries versus citizen militia is explored both in design and in actual play, never simply rehearsed uncritically. His appreciation for the libertà of republics is tempered by his continued recognition of their fragility and their vulnerability to other powers with more direct mechanisms of control and decision-making; think here of today’s debates about democracy and autocracy.

Machiavelli’s sense was that Italy might be doomed by great power intrigue—exacerbated by Italian powers courting the greats to their own ends rather than looking to Italy’s good. This was always balanced with a deep yet tortured belief in the possibility of resuscitating Italian virtù. In addition, we wade in this game into Machiavelli’s discussion of virtù itself, a term almost untranslatable given its variety of uses in his works. The tension between individual and communal greatness was always on Machiavelli’s mind in using that term—with a preference at last for the latter as it was most pursuant to true glory and historical legacy, as well as most compatible with republics. Lawgivers (as opposed to generals and strongmen) were always most admired by Machiavelli, I would say. The serendipity of our victory points in the game easily transmuting into “Virtù Points” was an early discovery, as was realizing that we should also track Italian Virtù Points to gauge the threat of collective defeat.

To say that this is a game of ideas in the crucible of conflict is an understatement, but even more vital to us is that the game’s ideas should be tested in a sandbox of historical conditions that confronted the historical actors, both individual and collective. We want a game that is not on historical rails, but that instead allows for historically plausible surprises and strange developments. So far testing has provided just that. Thankfully, the game allows shockers—the imperial troops of Charles V against Cesare Borgia; Savonarola arranging a cuckolding of the “Warrior Pope” Julius II; Piero de’ Medici lingering on for multiple turns as the hapless ruler of Florence. Testing has seen a lot of these unanticipated “what ifs,” and we imagine even more strange developments over the life of the game. Above all, testers have stressed just how fun and crazy the game can be. Mission accomplished, to my mind.

Grant: What major design challenges did you encounter and how did you overcome them?

Paul: I go into more detail on this below, but one of the challenges I personally faced is the same that confronts any designer—the old “kill your darlings” mantra. This is why I’m especially grateful to Liz and to our amazing Joe Dewhurst on the development end. While there are many things in Foxes and Lions that I deem “thesis-level” in importance and non-negotiable, there are plenty of things I fell in love with early on that it took me time to see were hampering the design and gameplay.

Sometimes you don’t have to kill the “darling” as much as reshape it. One example is sentiment, discussed above. At one point, we really needed to find a way to make sentiment matter more to the game mechanically. We had it as conceptually important, and it truly is, but it wasn’t doing what we needed to make players care about it. Once Liz and Joe encouraged connecting sentiment to espionage, battlefield impacts, and other power-specific concerns, I saw the light. We didn’t jettison sentiment, but we made it matter to players and to the thesis of the game. A similar thing happened with political traditions. Originally, we were tracking up to four governments (current and previous) in each space’s political traditions box. We wisely revised so that now you only trace the current government and any previous dominant political tradition in that space; that simplification kept the interest in government forms without creating a truly unwieldy board state.

In other cases, you do just need to kill the “darling” altogether, as we did with dynamic prosperity management for each space. While each space still has a political traditions box and its current government affords a trade value to that space impacting your power’s florin economy, originally I was foolishly insistent that each space have dynamic prosperity that you could spend CP to raise or lower (subject to caps by government type). That might have worked for a computer version of the game, but it was decidedly awful for a game that already has lots of moving parts and elements new to the series. Dynamic prosperity was not only killing the delicate Command Point economy of the game, but it was also just boring to players. They definitely wanted florins and economics, but they didn’t need that much granularity. Again, so grateful I had Liz and Joe to help me see the light. The game is way better for all these refinements.

Grant: How does designing a game in an established system work? Any constraints on your thoughts for the period?

Paul: One might think designing within an existing series framework is an easier task. There is a template, a style, and a set of mechanics and design assumptions. And to an extent, this is true. It’s nice to “stand on the shoulders of giants” like our predecessors in the series, Ed Beach and Carlos Diaz Narvaez.

The difficulties I encountered, however, were met and overcome thanks to a 2025 game designer retreat hosted on Beaver Island, Michigan by Central Michigan University’s Center for Learning through Games and Simulations, run by my friend and an intrepid scholar of colonial Mexico, Jon Truitt. In that weeklong retreat in a remote, beautiful setting, I spent uninterrupted days studying the entire Here I Stand series and its rulebooks. I wrote the new rules for Foxes and Lions from the ground up there, with an eye toward retaining what was essential to the series while weaving in what was of thesis-level importance to our game and its historical setting.

The real challenge of adapting to an existing series framework is not so much what you will keep, but what you will add or change altogether. If you are standing on that giant’s shoulders, you never want to annoy (let alone topple) the giant carrying you by flailing around thoughtlessly in a shared design space. In this case, the giant isn’t just someone like Ed; it’s a community of dedicated series players who have made HIS games a lifestyle choice. Many of them are making series games of their own, such as the gracious and supportive Luis Rubio, whose game Primus Inter Pares is of great interest to me.

We know this community will put Foxes and Lions through its paces. We know too that GMT is seeking a game about the complexity of Virgin Queen, a design goal we share and think we have met. Things that we don’t fret over in our game (e.g., the religious mechanics of Here I Stand) are replaced by things that we feel we must have (e.g., political traditions).

The way Liz and I have tackled any additions or changes to the sturdy, muscular frame that is this series is always to ask a fundamental question of anything new. Does it support a “thesis-level” contention or historical organizing principle of the game? Does it add something to the series that offers a new, welcome dimension to gameplay that shakes things up for the better? If something didn’t speak to one of those needs, we generally ended up revising it until it did or dumping it.

Ultimately, we never felt the series hamstrung our vision of the period, but it enriched it. What we kept our attention on was how you can redeploy series conventions to treat a more focused region that would be a mere few spaces in the larger scale games like Virgin Queen. This change of scale and perspective was a challenge, but the system opened itself to that. To borrow from my side work as a teacher of film, we think of Foxes and Lions as zooming the camera in from the eagle-eye view of the great powers in the other series games. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the Italian Wars (and as I keep stressing, the Italian experience of those conflicts) were ready for their closeup.

Grant: What sources did you consult for the historical details? What one must-read source would you recommend?

Paul: I could be here all day talking about the game’s primary and secondary sources, but I’ll keep it brief. Liz and I recently did a video about precisely this topic of sources or ancillary readings for the game and you can watch that at the following link:

The books we mentioned there are terrific places to begin. Some commentary follows the list here.

The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (translated by Peter Constantine)

Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men by Wayne A. Rebhorn

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt

The Beauty and the Terror by Catherine Fletcher

The Machiavellian Moment by J. G. A. Pocock

Niccolo’s Smile by Maurizio Viroli

Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

Florentine Histories by Machiavelli (translated by Laura Banfield and Harvey Mansfield)

A History of Florence 1200-1575 by John Najemy

Fortune is a Woman by Hanna Pitkin

The Tigress of Forlì by Elizabeth Lev

Fortune is a River by Roger Masters

Mercenaries and their Masters by Michael Mallett

The Italian Wars 1494-1559: War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe by Christine Shaw and Michael Mallett

This is very much a partial list. Of these, the most welcomely irreverent in terms of pieties about the Renaissance is Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance. Great stuff that explodes many preconceptions and has some great sections on Machiavelli. That side, the pieties deserve their day in court too though, and no one was more influential there than Burckhardt. It has become fashionable to pile on Burckhardt for his missteps, which is a shame because there is much he got right to which it is worth returning.

Mallet and Shaw are terrific on the Italian Wars proper, as well as the role of condottieri, whom they treat evenhandedly and with nuance missing elsewhere. Roger Masters in Fortune Is a River illuminates a lesser-known military plan to deploy terraforming of all things; the book explores a collaboration between Da Vinci and Machiavelli to divert the Arno River to strike at Florence’s favorite obsession, Pisa. The book puts into dialogue two of the most unique figures in the Renaissance; it remains a proud moment for me that I introduced my dissertation Tony Grafton to this book, as it is quite rare to find anything on this period that Tony hasn’t already read.

I’d of course recommend reading Machiavelli himself, but please, read widely, not just The Prince. There is as much to learn in his Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories, Art of War, and his sex comedy Mandragola as there is anywhere else. Machiavelli even wrote some historical and political poetry (Decennali) on the dramas of his day.

John Najemy offers what I view as the single best modern history of Florence in English. Pocock’s classic, The Machiavellian Moment, is a most ambitious attempt to trace Machiavelli’s ideas about republics backwards to the ancient writer Polybius, but most compellingly forward to the English Civil War and the American Founding. A truly monumental book that loomed large in the conceptualization of the game.

Grant: What are the playable factions?

Paul: The player factions are the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Florence, the Kingdom of Naples, and the Papacy. These are the “big five” mentioned by Machiavelli in The Prince. They are confronted not only by each other, but also by four non-player “great powers”—France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Some have asked why Genoa is not among the playable powers; Machiavelli’s “big five” aside, this is because Genoa finds itself under the thumb of Milan at game start. It is a minor power held hostage by a player power, but it may break free and find new allies. I do have in mind a prequel expansion in which Genoa is playable though (see below for more on that).

Grant: How did you try to differentiate them in their style of gameplay?

Paul: The asymmetry of the playable powers is deeply baked into the game, both in the event deck featuring events drawing on their histories, but also in the mechanics, victory conditions, and play styles.

Venice begins the game leading the pack by a good margin. An economic powerhouse of merchant republican bent, Venice has wealth coming from its colonies abroad, especially the Balkans in our game. Yet, what was often called Venice’s “Long Decline,” which would not be completed until Napoleon’s era, was already in motion at the start of our game. The Ottomans threatening the colonies, combined with Venice’s own dangerous ambitions on the Italian mainland, would lead to disaster at Agnadello in 1509, with what must have felt like the world arrayed against Venice.

Milan begins as a powerful duchy, wherein the Visconti had been replaced by the condottieri family of the Sforzas long before game start. Milan has its thumb on Lombardy, but also Genoa. Genoa is a source of wealth and prestige, but also a constant headache and a state that might break loose. Milan is a viable threat for autowin and may expand south (as they did in the early 15th century), but it is also surrounded by great powers (notably, France and HRE), as well as neighboring Venice, their closest rival at game start.

Naples has the stability of a feudal kingdom to support its military and political cause, but it is also torn between the dynastic claims of the French and Spanish, which go back centuries. Naples is in a great position to keep what it has, but expanding toward victory is a major challenge unless it chooses to cross swords with the Papacy and others. Naples cannot rely on the status quo, even though the French armies of the time were already threatening that.

The Papacy is vexed by a roster of alternately skilled and disappointing rulers, as well as internal divisions in Roma between the Orsini and Colonna families, whose vendetta threatens both the city and papal stability. The Papacy has considerable spiritual powers with material benefits for its allies and punishments for its enemies. Occasionally it boasts military leadership to boot; think Cesare Borgia and Pope Julius II, the “Warrior Pope.” The Papacy’s advantages are often situational and fleeting though, and it is surrounded by rivals, not to mention great power intrigue (above all, from the Holy Roman Emperors, such as Charles V).

Finally, my beloved Florence. It begins with the single greatest mess of any of the powers. Piero de’ Medici, hapless and unprepared son of the late Lorenzo il Magnifico, is alienating citizens left and right. He is in the pocket of French interests and will controversially cede Pisa to King Charles VIII. In his wake comes someone no less controversial, Friar Savonarola, whose apocalyptic vision of Firenze as the “New Jerusalem” will bring it into direct conflict with the Papacy of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. Their confrontation is an early set-piece in most games. The other rulers who follow the Friar (Piero Soderini and two Medici) offer radically different political visions for Florence. Of all five player powers, Florence must wrestle with the most political instability, particularly in a difficult starting position.

With Venice, Milan, and Naples functioning as the “big dogs” (at least among Italian player powers), both Florence and the Papacy have their work cut out for them, but many avenues to victory. Florence can play the patronage game like few others, and the Papacy will have opportunities for expansion as long as they also maintain their influence over the Christian great powers and keep the Orsini and Colonna in stalemate. Florence and the Papacy also have the game’s only option for a joint victory. Provided a Medici rules both powers (a thing not always easy to coordinate), they can win the game together by one of them achieving an autowin (i.e., military victory) on the map. This assumes of course both players are interested in and capable of this coordination.

Grant: As a CDG, how does the game utilize cards?

Paul: Our game uses the classic CDG framework of multi-use cards pioneered by Mark Herman and used to such great effect in the Here I Stand series. We have added some wrinkles, however. First, there are 26 rulers in the game (4 for Venice, 5 for Florence, 5 for Milan, 6 for Naples, and 6 for the Papacy). There are two home cards for each power, available from game start. Each home card can be used for varying purposes unique to that power, but one of the two home cards benefits more from that player having allies, who will also appreciate that card’s advantages to them. The other home card tends to be best when going it alone with few or no allies, but players are free to use either home card each turn. There are some events that impact this; one (“Well Governed Dominion”) allows a player to use both home cards that turn, while another (“Confused Administration”) allows a rival to force you to pick a home card of the rival’s choosing, while also saddling you with -1 card next turn.

Finally, we introduce an important new type of mandatory event card: Captain auction cards. These 20 figures represent the condottieri and other influential figures (even ostensibly non-military figures who nonetheless have a powerful effect on the battlefield and other arenas). Captains are the subject of aggressive florin bidding wars in secret auctions (or sometimes, assigned to a player with highest influence on a specific great power). As these captains are the most decisive on-map leaders in the game, accumulating them is vitally important, especially given the vagaries of a captain’s fate on the battlefield (a captain is a potential casualty in any battle, even a victory) and off (being subject to assassination attempts or certain events). Being a power without any captain at all is the surest way to be easy prey in a land of many predators.

Grant: Can you share a few examples of individual cards with us and explain how they work?

Paul: Here are some examples of the types of cards in Foxes and Lions, especially those that break with series conventions in one or more ways. Please note that all card images here are prototypes and will undergo further graphics work, refinement, etc. Some commentary follows the images.

First, let’s consider one of our rulers: Venice’s Andrea Gritti, not to be confused with the mind-warping mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers. In addition to typical Admin and Card Bonus ratings familiar to series veterans, each ruler card also includes important additional information. Every ruler in the game has conditions for accession and removal (if a game start ruler, removal only). These conditions are almost always situational in nature, and in Gritti’s case, depends on his predecessor Doge Grimani having been removed. Doges and Popes are most typically removed by failing a survival roll at end of each turn; some, but not all rulers have these rolls. Elderly doges and popes always do. We also see here Gritti’s effects on the game—a helpful boost when paying CP for diplomatic influence. Other leaders may have disadvantages and outright weaknesses (e.g., Piero de’ Medici’s awful Admin rating of 0).

In a sense, you must endure and exploit the ruler you have rather than necessarily embodying that ruler, as is more the role-playing conceit in other HIS series games. For example, in HIS, you feel you are Suleiman the Magnificent, and that’s great for that game with all its high-level great power shenanigans. But in Foxes and Lions, it might be most helpful to think of yourself as a Machiavelli-type advisor behind the scenes, and you certainly won’t relish embodying the weaker and more problematic rulers when navigating their serious tradeoffs. I sometimes think of the role-playing conceit of this game as you portraying no mere ruler or advisor, but perhaps an entire polity, a people weathering the rulers they’ve been dealt. The conceit at last is up to you and your play group.

Alfonso II of Naples is a different ruler example. He is the starting ruler for Naples. Alfonso is awful at Appeasement (formerly “Pacify” as seen here), which is the effort to improve sentiment in your dominion; he is so poor at this that no dominion space may even reach the coveted Feared and Loved status. Note too that while he does have a survival roll, he may also be removed if Napoli (the capital space proper) is enemy-controlled. This is a situational timer on this ruler, and other situational timers apply to many rulers (in Milan, Florence, and Naples especially).

The captain examples here include one conventional condottiere, Paolo Vitelli. You bid on captains when they are played as mandatory events. Some turns there will be few or no captains on which to bid; on other turns, they will appear in great waves. Each game play is very different on this front. Our Paolo, adept at siege assaults, nonetheless has an Achilles’ Heel—if he doesn’t assault at least once a turn, he is executed by his employer! This reflects the curious history of the real Paolo, whom the Florentines accused of treacherously soft-pedaling the siege of Pisa on their behalf. His execution enraged his brother Vitellozzo (another captain in the game), who will become an inveterate enemy of Paolo’s former employer if this happens (and it might be another power that employs Paolo, not necessarily Florence).

Then we have the illustrious Caterina Sforza, scion of a family of condottieri, but not herself one as classically defined. We felt it important that our game have a preponderance of captains who do fit that classic description, but we also wanted a few, unusual “captains” who don’t, but nonetheless had battlefield and even other impacts. Caterina is celebrated in Machiavelli’s Prince as a commanding leader defending the siege of Forlì, with Machiavelli (perhaps apocryphally) crediting her with this infamously defiant statement to her besieging enemies, who had kidnapped her sons and threatened their lives: “To show them that she did not care about her sons, she revealed her genitals, saying that she still had the means to produce more” (trans. Peter Constantine). Accordingly, in the true Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spirit of “printing the legend,” our Caterina excels in siege defense alongside other advantages upon “hiring.” If she has a vulnerability, it is that she will stand down and not fight against her beloved Milan. Every captain has a downside of sorts to go with the silver lining.

Finally, we have two card types familiar to series players, but with wrinkles. “Diplomatic Maneuvers in the Dark” is in one way your typical mandatory event; the event player gets 2 CP to spend after the mandatory event fires. What is important here is the event itself reminds us that a good number of event cards will drive the activities of the non-player great powers. Some of those events are optional, but many are mandatory to ensure regular activity on the part of the greats threatening Italy. This card also nicely pairs activation of one great power with evaluation of one minor power, the latter something quite familiar to series veterans.

The Home card example pairing here is also instructive. Both are from Florence. The first, “Civic Humanism,” exploits Florence’s advantages in patronage, lawgiving, and maintenance of dominion sentiment. The second, “Lucrative Textile Trade,” focuses on Florence’s distinctive economy in wool and cloth, but it also rewards Florence and its allies with additional florin generation beyond what is typical in the trade action. As remarkably different as the home cards of the others player powers are, this template of one ally-focused and one other home card is consistent throughout. Either card can be used with or without allies, but the ally-focused cards are especially attractive to courting, rewarding, and retaining allies. Until of course, they see you as being in the way of their own ambitions.

Grant: What role does Patronage play in the design? How have you modified the system used in Virgin Queen to fit this era and your focus?

Paul: The biggest change to patronage compared to Virgin Queen is the addition of humanists (broadly defined to include literary creators of all kinds) to the original categories of artists and scientists (also more broadly defined for our game’s purposes). We now have thirty patronage subjects (ten in each category), with two figures having different potential contributions in different categories (Michelangelo in both the arts and humanism for his poetry, and Da Vinci in both the arts and sciences for his engineering gifts).

Speaking to the broad definitions by category, a few examples suffice. Among the more predictable artists of the era, off the beaten path we have Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, a chronicler commissioned by Emperor Charles V. Vermeyen eventually designed the “Conquest of Tunis” tapestry series, and in some ways can be viewed as a proto-journalist. Among scientists in our game, we have Luca Pacioli, often credited as the “father of accounting.” And among our humanists (extended to include classicizing poets), we have Tullia D’Aragona, a brilliant courtesan-poet who can function as an espionage informant inflicted upon a rival; the rival must both pay Tullia and can never shake her off.

Another significant change from VQ is that for the most part, patronage figures are available for any power to patronize. A few have some restrictions; for example, Machiavelli is for Florence only, while Pico della Mirandola is available to any power except the Papacy given his storied troubles with the Church’s reaction to his more provocative ideas about syncretism. These less common examples aside, most patronage subjects are open to all comers.

We also modify the rollout of our many patronage subjects with only three in each category randomly selected from the available pool on turn 1, then three more added each turn thereafter (with all having appeared by turn 4, albeit in a different order each game). This creates a bit of uncertainty about when your preferred patronage target will become available; it also afford players less cognitive overload than were all ten figures of each type available from game start. Each patronage figure has unique game effects, some immediate and some long-term, and the effects run the gamut of applications to war, politics, economics, other patronage endeavors, or entirely different effects.

Unlike VQ where artists offered VP and scientists VP and/or abilities, every subject of each type in Foxes and Lions has a completely unique patronage ability and the capacity to reward VP. No two figures are the same, and each effect is tailored to the historical achievements or longer term influence of that person.

Grant: How important is Espionage? Why is it available early from Turn 1?

Paul: We wanted the cutthroat environment and skullduggery of Renaissance Italy to be captured from game start. We understand why Virgin Queen delays those things, but we felt Foxes and Lions needed it right off to be a believable recreation of that brutal environment in Italy. No one held back historically, so why should our players?

Espionage is one of the most effective tools at any power’s disposal in the game, but only if you really commit to it. We have seen some players go hard on it, while others stay focused on patronage, conquest, their own victory conditions, etc. If you are to make espionage work for you, having informants and (when possible by event) the cypher key (another holdover from VQ) goes a long way toward exploitation of these tools.

In addition to classic VQ-style espionage actions such as Plant Informant, Gain Intelligence, and Assassination, we also have Foment Rebellion to cause sentiment problems and unrest in enemy territory, as well as Appeasement to address or put down such problems.

We also offer a Sabotage Fortifications action that can remove fortified status from a target space—a nice complement we think to the ability in other series games to build fortifications. Successful sabotage doesn’t change a space’s key status (if any), and it can thematically be understood as anything appropriate to the space; in other words, it could be a literal sabotaging of town walls, but it could easily represent traitors in the leadership ranks of that town, undermining of garrison readiness, or anything else imaginatively appropriate. Fortifications themselves should also be understood in our game to be thematically diverse. In Forlì, there may be literal walls at Ravaldino, but in Volterra, this may additionally represent the natural defenses of high ground. In Venice, imagine the natural defensibility of Venice’s storied lagoon.

Lastly, the espionage action Suborn Captain allows a power to attempt corruption of a rival’s captain (i.e., a battlefield leader), causing that captain to join your cause and possibly causing defection of some of his mercenaries too. Our research has shown that, Machiavelli’s opinion notwithstanding, captains did not defect quite as often as is held by some, but we certainly allow for it to happen in the game as it did occasionally take place. It just won’t be a slam dunk without significant effort and investment (including florins).

In sum, we think espionage is especially robust in our game. Many creative uses are already being discovered in testing.

Grant: How is the next Pope decided when a change is called for? What dynamic does this create between players?

Paul: Pope Leo above is a good example of how the Papacy’s rollout of rulers is different from any other player power. You will note Leo becomes Pope by accession in Papal Conclave.

The Papal Conclave process is used anytime a pope has “shuffled off this mortal coil,” for whatever natural or nefarious reason you imagine. Other player powers have a fairly linear progression of rulers, who change based on shifting game conditions and/or survival rolls as specified on each ruler and discussed above. Yet early on, Liz and I decided it would be delicious fun to allow the popes of this era to roll out in a potentially different order based on conclave intrigue.

The short version is that a conclave does favor the Papacy player with some extra voting power, and any ties will be decided by that player. Ties are rare though as each player power in the game will have some voting power, which can be modified by territories lost to or taken from the Papacy. Having high influence on the Christian great powers (France, Spain and the HRE) can help one’s voting power, but having too much Ottoman influence will hurt it since you are viewed as consorting with an enemy of Christendom.

Finally, we allow players to spend their precious florins to bribe their way to an outcome in secret bidding, wherein even the preferred candidate of a player is not known till everyone reveals their pick and any florins spent.

So while the game begins with the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, it may wind its way to out-of-order candidates of the era succeeding him. Sticking the Papacy with a weaker pope (hello, scrupulous Adrian VI, who foregoes espionage altogether) may hinder the Papacy’s efforts, while the Papacy’s desire for the “Warrior Pope” Julius II will often be transparent. That said, sometimes a wise Papacy player will support a weaker candidate in hopes of drawing out financial support for that weaker candidate, with the knowledge that a better pope will come down the road at perhaps a more opportune time. The Conclave, like bidding on Captain auctions, is one of the major “head games” of Foxes and Lions.

You will also note in the Leo example above a great example of a ruler with downsides. Limitations on dominion sentiment are paired with higher costs to trade. The latter reflects Leo’s tendency to spend papal resources on his own extravagances; the saying ascribed to him comes to mind, “Since God has been pleased to give us the Papacy, let us enjoy it.” It doesn’t help either that Leo causes sentiment problems in Roma, in part due to his refusal to take seriously emerging threats to church authority, including Luther as the game reaches its end stage. At least Leo opens the possibility of a joint Florence / Papacy victory as described earlier. As with so many rulers in our game, there are always tradeoffs and always ways to exploit even a troubling ruler.

Grant: How do players bid for Impulse Order? Why was this important to include?

Paul: Impulse order might be the most debated subject among designers, developer, and testers so far. We decided to include secret florin bidding for variable turn order to create yet another arena in which to angle toward your goals and thwart those of others. We also see it as appropriately reflecting the chaos of Italy compared to the great power canvas of other series games.

Variable impulse order also allows us to use the current order (established after bidding each spring) as a tiebreaker for just about any situation in the game. We have found our current group of ten veteran testers to be unanimously in favor of the variable order bidding. Winning a bid only allows you to move one power’s marker (it need not be your own), thereby altering the impulse order in the Action Phase and impacting the tiebreaker mechanic I mentioned above.

That said, some players will surely not like it, and we had some recently who were new to the game at conventions argue that having a set table order is just easier to keep track of with seating, and we acknowledge this is valid concern for some groups. Online it might not matter, but in person with limited table space, it really might. My group of ten is vocal about keeping variable order bidding as a unique feature of the game, but who knows what wider testing will show.

The upshot is that we are most likely to have a set impulse order as the default rule, but with two variants. In one variant, you can embrace the full “wild west” of variable order bidding described above. For groups that like such volatility, they’ll still have the option. Another variant we have in mind is that you can bid, but all you are changing is which player goes first, while the order proper doesn’t change. We are happy for play groups to use whatever approach they prefer. If fully variable order bidding is not used, the tiebreaker that mechanic affords disappears and is replaced by a dice off. The argument for fully variable order could be that its tiebreaker usage will entail less dice rolling in a game series that is already chock full of that.

Grant: I see there are more ways to declare war during mid-turn. How does this work?

Paul: We knew early on that we needed shifting alliances, betrayals, and overall volatile situations of war and peace in the game. While we love the other series games, we tend to find them a bit too stately for Italy in this period. Yes, some of the other games have a card that lets you start a war mid-Action Phase (famously, Machiavelli’s Prince card in HIS), but we wanted more of this to be possible and more of it to happen!

Originally, we had a mechanism that allowed mid-turn betrayal of allies and declarations of war on the fly at any time provided a cost in CP and florins was paid. This still proved to be too easy and common. It was more in keeping with the wildness of the original Machiavelli game from Avalon Hill, itself a nasty and rich Diplomacy variant.

When we discovered that process was making mid-turn betrayal and declaration of war too common and easy for the good of the game, we compromised. Most declarations of war and making of alliances will happen as normal in the Diplomacy Phase in Foxes and Lions. We still want uncertainty about the reliability of an ally (or the intentions of a possible attacker), so we created four event cards that involve the option of a) attempting to suborn a rival captain on the eve of a battle or b) declaring war mid-Action Phase, even against a current ally. The latter is relevant to this discussion.

There are a few other cards that might situationally create such an opportunity, but these are the big four that clearly do. And so long as you haven’t accounted for those four cards in the discard pile (or preferably, your own hand), you just don’t know who might be able to stab you in the back at any moment. This approach has preserved the paranoia that is necessary for the game, while at the same time preventing a betrayal from happening just anytime on a pure whim. Marshaling your hand effectively is always important in any CDG, but arguably even more so in Foxes and Lions. “Suborn” cards (that include the betrayal and DoW option) are worth their weight in gold, and smart players try to hold onto them for future use.

Grant: How is ultimate victory obtained?

Paul: We have a few types of victory, most recognizable to players of other series games. We have the classic, end-of-last turn race to highest VP (Virtù Point) total; our game is 7 turns long maximum. We have the possibility of the series-typical domination victory from turn 4 on, whereby if you are leading all other players by 5 or more VP at turn end, you can claim victory that way. Finally, we have the traditional autowin condition (getting all your key markers out on map), in essence a military victory, although diplomacy and the minor power influence game may play a large role in that outcome too. What we tinkered with was adding to autowin another requirement for each power. For example, for Florence to autowin, it must retain control of Pisa-Livorno, an historical objective that obsessed many a Florentine government. For Venice to autowin, it must have a certain number of Balkans colonies still in it is possession. And so forth with other playable powers. Autowin isn’t automatic unless you meet that power’s sine qua non condition too.

Frankly, the biggest change in our game is not to victory conditions so much as the introduction of collective defeat. Having all players lose to the “great powers” (France, Spain, HRE, and Ottomans) because Italian Virtù has tanked is our favorite innovation and very appropriate to the situation historically. The game also specifies in the rules which one or two players at your table the others get to blame (perhaps unfairly, but who said life or games are always fair). The lapdog in a collective defeat will be the player with the most VP at the time of that outcome. Many in Italy see the lapdog’s ambitious rush to personal glory as the cause of the great power triumph. The scourge in a collective defeat will be the player with the most influence on all four great powers at the time of that outcome. That influence will not reflect all the influence invested over the course of the game, but those looking for an easy scapegoat will find one in the player currently dallying most with the great powers at that moment. It is even possible for one player to be both the scourge and lapdog; no greater infamy in our game is possible.

One inspiration here is another Avalon Hill classic, Republic of Rome (soon to be back in print, it seems). In that game, players are Roman patricians battling each other, but they are also battling the game, which throws challenges at them like the Carthaginians, Gauls, manpower shortages, etc. We felt Foxes and Lions absolutely needed that possible outcome of collective loss. We are also working on variants to calibrate how likely that is to happen in any given play. The default will be collective defeat as a serious threat, but we will have variant options to make that outcome more or less likely depending on a group’s wishes. If a group wants the focus to be on a likely player triumph, they can reduce the impact of the greats; if a group wants players constantly on their heels, they can increase it.

One can reliably argue that the Italian Wars ended in great power triumph by 1559. As our current game ends with the year of the Sack of Rome in 1527, we allow the game to put that writing on the wall sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be that way if players stand tall against the great powers as Machiavelli wished—often far easier said than done. We are estimating collective defeat to be less common an outcome in the game, but a constant worry. Testing will tell on that front, but we will certainly allow play groups to calibrate this possibility to their tastes as mentioned above.

Grant: What are some general strategies for each of the sides?

Paul: We will have eventually have detailed strategy guides for each power in upcoming InsideGMT pieces and of course, in the eventual Playbook. For now, referring to my answer above about player power asymmetry, the short version for strategies would look like this.

Florence

Put your messy house in order early. Try to move past Piero de’ Medici, even if you must play cards and create conditions for that yourself (Piero’s awful 0 Admin rating is a killer). We did once in testing see Piero persist three turns and threaten a joint victory with a Clement-led Papacy, but Piero is overall a drain on your prospects. You will also have to adapt to each of your next rulers in turn; Florence has perhaps the most dizzying political dance to do in the game. They also begin with serious sentiment problems in their dominion (Pisa, for example, is not particularly thrilled about losing its republican liberties to Florence).

Milan

Keep Genoa under thumb at all costs and find ways to expand into the Romagna, Tuscany, or the Veneto Region at the expense of the Venetians. Alternatively, play nice or even ally with Venice until it’s just the two of you with a viable shot at victory, bearing in mind other players will have a lot to say about such an alliance.

Naples

Continue your investment in Feudal Aristocracy in your capital and beyond. While your kingdom is safe on most sides, you need to expand to win. Papal territories seem the best and nearest opportunities for that, but you can get creative. Even Roma itself is calling you, but you must remove some pesky exclaves of Milan and the Papacy from your dominion before you truly commit to broader expansion. You will also need to play the patronage game like anyone else.

Papacy

Manage the flow of your popes through the conclave process to your advantage whenever possible. Don’t rush to get Julius II till you feel you are ready militarily. It would be premature to install him as pope, then have him die due to a survival roll before you can fully exploit him. Learn to manage the weaker popes (Adrian VI and Pius III), sometimes opting for them when your enemies least expect it and may have spent precious resources trying to inflict them on you. And above, make hay while the sun shines with Cesare Borgia. He is called “Darth Vader” by our testers for a reason. He will burn out at some point once Daddy (Alexander VI) dies, but like Roy Batty in Blade Runner, he should burn “so very, very brightly.”

Venice Maintain your top dog status as the game begins. Your bigger problem is growing into actual victory, which will take playing every aspect of the game wisely lest you be overtaken by lesser lights. You must preserve your colonies in the Balkans against often constant Ottoman threats. You need to expand on the mainland where you can without courting the wrath of all others upon you; historically, this was the disaster of Agnadello, which Machiavelli said cost Venice the efforts of eight centuries. You should patronize strategically to boost your VP total and ability profile. And you should always ensure lots of florins in your treasury; each turn end that you have 20+ florins brings VP to you. Weather your weaker doges and exploit your best; above all, the incomparable Leonardo Loredan

Grant: What has been the feedback of your playtesters?

Paul: One recent tester, Stephen Franco, made a comment that was truly gratifying: “Similar to what actually happened historically, the game is a free for all in a confined space, making for entertaining and unexpected outcomes. Great game.” That “knife fight in a phone booth” vibe, which I’ve always loved in games like Cuba Libre, has been shining forth in Foxes and Lions.

There has been a similar reaction from testers both internal and external at select conventions. That said, we are about to extend TTS testing more widely, followed by Vassal testing down the road. There may be very different reactions, concerns, and suggestions there. We look forward to all of it. Like myself, my core testing group of ten people has been very appreciative of the “thesis-level” interests of the game, and they have been amazing with suggesting how to capture the game’s theses in a way that is compelling for players while faithful to the history, as much as any game can be.

The area in which testers have been the most helpful is with implementation of the non-player great powers. That took a lot of play and effort on their part, and their ideas got us to a place where we are now very happy. Joe Dewhurst has also been terrific in helping us calibrate the greats too.

Grant: What do you feel the design excels at?

Paul: Recreating the feeling of the political and cultural climate in which Machiavelli labored, and in which he continually agonized over his beloved Florence’s fate, not to mention Italy’s. The game also has plenty of the paranoia, second-guessing, and treachery that characterized the era, but as I mentioned earlier, above all it’s a game about Machiavelli’s ideas and ideals, however pragmatically or provocatively he expressed them.

That testers have talked mid-game and afterward about Machiavelli’s deepest political concerns—that they have gotten beyond the image of the treacherous Machiavel of the Shakespearean stage in Richard III or the like—is what most gratifies me. Foxes and Lions is meant to stimulate conversation, including about our own political moment when democratic republics are in grave danger indeed. The “Machiavellian moment” is that invoked by John Pocock’s great book—the moment when any state, especially a republic, realizes its utter, temporal fragility in the wake of Fortuna. And when such a state realizes its own contradictions and failings are as dangerous to its survival as any external threat.

An example of how Machiavelli remains front and center in our game is found in three event cards dedicated to his incredible body of work, not just The Prince. Here are these cards, with a brief comment following.

We wanted our game to have some events that reflect the diversity of Machiavelli’s thought and literary output. We also wanted the event effects to tie into those key works and to be usable by any player. With the first card above, the focus is squarely on The Prince and the Discourses on Livy as political explorations of de facto princedoms and republics respectively (bearing in mind that each text explores the ostensible subject of the other too). The second card puts us in the realm of military theory and historiography; the Florentine Histories are in fact the subject of a scholarly book on which I have been working for years now, so I really wanted it to appear. Lastly, the third card always generates the most belly laughs at the table, focused as it is on Machiavelli’s scandalous sex comedy, a tale of cuckoldry and trickery worthy of the ancient comedian, Plautus. The card effect puts quite a hit on a rival, but the mockery the player endures is perhaps even more stinging. This card has had some wonderfully odd uses (e.g., as mentioned above, Savonarola instigating a cuckolding of Julius II has gone down in my tester group as legendary).

Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?

Paul: My next game, a design on my own and not in any existing series framework, is called Catasto. I have a prototype now that I plan to share at Circle DC next spring. This is another Renaissance game, but about something that hasn’t been treated before in games to my knowledge—Renaissance tax evasion. The Florentine catasto of 1427 is an extraordinarily important document in late medieval and Renaissance social history. In essence a combination of census and property assessment, the catasto permitted political appointees the right to dig into their fellow citizens’ wealth and other holdings to be sure everyone was paying their fair share. This was especially important in the context of ongoing military conflicts between Tuscany and the ambitious Visconti of Milan, all of which had to be funded.

The game explores how far Florentine families would go to hide their assets, and how far their enemies would go to expose those assets while protecting their own from scrutiny. An especially influential (yet very different) design is Tyler Brown’s 23 Knives on the conspiracy to eliminate Julius Caesar. That game uses some very clever mechanics to show how Romans hid, revealed, or unwillingly had exposed their positions on Caesar. The game also allows that the assassination may or may not ultimately succeed. This has been helpful in thinking through how my Florentine players in Catasto might go about concealing their wealth (or excusing it somehow once uncovered). There will also be a tension between seeking to be the catasto investigator and effectively hiding your family’s gains, however ill-gotten.

I’m also working on outlines for a prequel and sequel expansion to Foxes and Lions—no promises and don’t take this as anything from GMT!  Just exploring so far, but very much on my mind. The prequel would be set in the 1464-1493 timeframe and feature the Italy of Lorenzo il Magnifico. While military matters remain important there (and Genoa would be a playable power too), there is overall less chance of collective defeat to the great powers. There is much more focus on behind the scenes skullduggery and espionage in that one, including conspiracies like the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy to eliminate the Medici hatched by factions across Italy, including Pope Sixtus IV.

As the main Foxes and Lions game covers the 1494-1527 period, any sequel would cover 1528-1559 (the year of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis that in essence ended the Italian Wars). That era would see a very high chance of collective defeat throughout and great transformations in the situation (e.g., Florence and Tuscany morphing into an eventual Grand Duchy, Venice’s overseas position worsening, Naples finally accepting its dependent status, etc.). If this envisioned triptych for Foxes and Lions comes to pass, I imagine it along the lines of the amazing Fire In the Lake with its prequel and sequel, and the last bit of Foxes and Lions would definitely have a “Fall of Saigon” feel of desperation. Again, no promises, but lots of passion and research on my part in these early days. We have to finish the main stage drama of Foxes and Lions first!

And after (or perhaps a bit alongside) all that, I am working on a CDG game on Skanderbeg, hero of my wife’s home country of Albania, as well as a game on Savonarola and the power of Renaissance rhetoric. I have no lack of projects, but of course the contingencies of time and space remain challenges. Still, good challenges to have!

If you are interested in Foxes and Lions: Renaissance City-States in the Age of Machiavelli, you can pre-order a copy for $88.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1229-foxes-and-lions-renaissance-city-states-in-the-age-of-machiavelli.aspx

-Grant

Seit über zehn Jahren entwickeln Autor Stefan Feld, Illustrator Dennis Lohausen und Redakteur und Inhaber unseres Partnerverlags Hall Games, Ralph Bruhn, gemeinsam Spiele. Ihr erstes Projekt war 2014 AquaSphere. Es folgten 2016 Das Orakel von Delphi, 2020 Bonfire und 2026 Medico.

In Medico bewegen wir uns als fahrende Bader über einen modularen, achtteiligen Spielplan. Unser Ziel ist es, auf unseren Reisen Wissen zu sammeln, um irgendwann zum Medicus aufzusteigen. Und um das zu tun, haben wir zahlreiche Optionen:

Als Bader im Mittelalter geht natürlich nichts ohne Heilmittel, zumal die auch Prestige oder Münzen bringen können, je nachdem, ob wir sie für ein Rezept nutzen oder verkaufen. Bezahlt werden wir außerdem dafür, die Bevölkerung zu behandeln. Die eingenommenen Münzen benötigen wir, um unser Instrumentarium zu erweitern, uns beim Medicus weiterzubilden oder selbst Lehrlinge auszubilden. Prestige, das wir unter anderem auch durch Überbringung von Briefen erhalten, brauchen wir, um in Prestigeduellen am Rundenende die Nase vorn zu haben. Immer dann, wenn nämlich zwei Bader und/oder der Medicus auf demselben Feld landen, erhält der Bader mit dem höheren Prestige eine weitere Aktion als Belohnung. Was sich immer lohnt, ist den neutralen Medicus aufzusuchen, denn der bringt Wissen und Wissen ist bekanntlich Macht. So auch bei Medico, denn Wissen schaltet wertvolle Fähigkeiten frei, die entweder sofort, am Spielende oder dauerhaft Vorteile bringen. Besonders lohnenswert ist auch die Behandlung von Adeligen. Von denen erhalten wir zur Belohnung zwar kein Geld, dafür erhalten wir aber ihre Gunst, die sich in Form einer von etwa 20 unterschiedlichen Gunstkarten zeigt.

So ziehen wir also in acht Runden über den Spielplan im mittelalterlichen Setting und versuchen, uns selbst, die Bevölkerung, die Adeligen und den Medicus davon zu überzeugen, dass wir das Zeug zum nächsten Medicus haben. Dabei können wir selbst jede Runde neu entscheiden, welchen der sieben Orte wir besuchen. Allerdings erfolgt die Auswahl geheim und wo es die anderen hin verschlägt, hat Auswirkungen auf unseren eigenen Zug. Um zum gewählten Ort zu kommen, müssen wir zwar den kürzesten Weg nehmen, dafür können wir aber – zusätzlich zur Hauptaktion am Zielort – auf jedem Wegpunkt, den wir passieren, eine Nebenaktion ausführen. Der Weg ist hier also das Ziel oder zumindest ein wesentlicher Teil davon.

Apropos Weg. Der Weg zum fertig entwickelten Spiel war im Falle von Medico etwas länger, denn die Entwicklungszeit von mehreren Jahren war für ein so erfahrenes Trio ungewöhnlich lange. Woran das lag, was das Spiel so besonders macht und wie die Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Dreien aussieht, das erfahrt ihr im Interview mit Ralph (Bruhn), Dennis (Lohausen) und Stefan (Feld). Viel Spaß!

Wie kommt es, dass ihr immer wieder zusammenarbeitet?

Ralph: „Das ist für mich einfach zu beantworten: Ich mag die beiden so gerne, dass ich auch über die Spieleentwicklung hinaus Kontakt zu ihnen habe. Da ich Stefan bei dem einen oder anderen Spieleevent treffe und so Gelegenheit habe, seine Prototypen zu testen, bin ich über seine neuesten Entwürfe immer auf dem Laufenden. Und wenn es dann irgendwann viel später darum geht, einen Illustrator für das Spiel zu finden, ist Dennis mein erster Ansprechpartner. Und wenn er dann Zeit und Lust auf das Thema hat, ist er dabei!

Was mir besonders wichtig ist: Wir haben eine sehr ähnliche Auffassung davon, was einem Spiel guttut, sodass die Ideen des einen gerne durch den anderen aufgenommen und weiterentwickelt werden können. Das läuft immer sehr harmonisch ab.“

Stefan: „Hier kann ich mich nur anschließen. Für mich ist die Beziehungsebene beim Spieleentwickeln total wichtig. Und über die Jahre hat sich eine Freundschaft zu Ralph gebildet, die dazu führt, dass wir immer wieder zusammenarbeiten. Tatsächlich geht es immer konstruktiv zu und wir schaffen es, ein für uns beide schönes Spiel zu entwerfen. Und Dennis als Grafiker und Illustrator ist dann immer das Sahnehäubchen bei der Entwicklungsarbeit. Er bringt dann noch weitere Ideen ein, wie man in einem mechanisch sehr gut funktionierenden Spiel auch noch die Ästhetik und thematische Finessen einbaut.“

Dennis: „Ich freue mich immer, wenn eine neue Projektanfrage von Ralph kommt, da ich sehr gerne mit ihm zusammenarbeite. Wenn das Spiel dann auch noch eine neuer ‚Stefan Feld‘ ist, ist die Sache perfekt! “

Ihr habt schon an sehr vielen Projekten zusammengearbeitet. Habt ihr in den vielen Jahren der Zusammenarbeit schon so etwas wie Routine entwickelt oder ist da jedes Projekt anders?

Ralph: „In der Regel läuft das so ab, dass Stefan und ich die Spielmechaniken seiner Prototypen weiterentwickeln und das Spiel weitgehend fertigstellen, bevor ich dann mit Dennis an die grafische Umsetzung gehe. Dass wir ein Spiel zu dritt gespielt haben, ist bisher leider nur einmal vorgekommen, nämlich bei Bonfire.“

Stefan: „Wie Ralph schon gesagt hat, treffen wir uns bei Spieletreffen ca. 4-mal im Jahr. Diese gehen immer mehrere Tage, die wir auch nutzen, um direkt an den Spielen zu arbeiten. Ansonsten testen wir sehr viel in unseren jeweiligen Runden und besprechen uns dann regelmäßig über Telefon und Mail. Dennis sehe ich leider meistens nur in Essen bei der Messe. Und da wir ja auch bei anderen Verlagen zusammenarbeiten, nicht nur wegen Hall Games. Civolution lässt grüßen … .“

Dennis: „Wenn eine neue Projektanfrage von Ralph kommt, spielen wir den Prototyp mindestens einmal, damit ich ein Gefühl für die Spielmechanik und die Stimmung während des Spiels bekomme. Bei diesem Treffen tauschen wir uns auch intensiv über die thematische Umsetzung und die Materialanforderungen aus. Es ist dann sehr hilfreich, alles auf dem Tisch liegen zu haben und gemeinsam das Für und Wider zu besprechen.

Im weiteren Verlauf besprechen wir uns regelmäßig per Mail und Telefon. Da wir uns auch privat einiges zu erzählen haben, mischt sich dann das konkrete Arbeiten am Spiel mit diversen Off-Topic Themen, was grundsätzlich eine schöne Arbeitsatmosphäre schafft. Im Idealfall bringt der Smalltalk dann auch noch neue Inputs für die Spielgestaltung. Mit Stefan direkt habe ich im Prozess leider weniger Kontakt, da ist Ralph dann der Mittelsmann.“

Was ist das Besondere an Medico?

Ralph: „Ich finde es ungewöhnlich, dass alle nur sehr wenige Spielzüge haben, aber trotzdem kein Downtime-Gefühl aufkommt. Das führt dazu, dass es sehr belohnende Spielzüge gibt, in denen man das Gefühl hat, richtig etwas bewegt zu haben.

Zudem ist es eine schöne Mischung von eigenständigem Planen auf der einen und Interaktion mit den Mitspielenden auf der anderen Seite: Ich kann versuchen, 1-2 Züge vorauszuplanen, um mein Spiel zu optimieren. Dabei sollte ich aber die Pläne der anderen im Auge behalten, nur für sich selbst zu denken reicht hier oft nicht aus.“

Stefan: „Für mich sind es zwei ganz ähnliche Dinge: Zum einen die Struktur des Planes mit den 7 Bereichen und die daraus erwachsenden Zwänge, den kürzesten Weg zu nehmen. Zum anderen das Einschätzen der Mitspielenden. Es ist nämlich durchaus wichtig zu antizipieren, was die anderen machen, um dann mit einer geschickten Ortswahl Vorteile zu generieren.“

Worauf seid ihr – aus eurer jeweiligen Perspektive – bei diesem Projekt besonders stolz?

Ralph: „Ich bin ein bisschen stolz darauf, dass wir es nach einer sehr langen Entwicklungszeit und einigen fehlgeschlagenen Versionen doch noch geschafft haben, nun ein Spiel zu veröffentlichen, mit dem ich sehr zufrieden bin.“

Stefan: „Da gehe ich mit. Und es zeigt sich, dass man ein Spiel auch mal etwas liegen lassen muss, um dann anschließend mit neuen Ideen weitere Impulse zu geben. Ich glaube, was das Spiel dann wirklich für alle zugänglich gemacht hat, ist die Anordnung der Aktionen entlang des Weges. Das erhöht die Usability enorm. Davor war es überfordernd, alle mögliche Aktionen und Nebenaktionen im Blick zu behalten.“

Und gab es auch besondere Schwierigkeiten bei der Entwicklung?

Dennis: „Ich hatte zu Anfang eine Idee davon, wie die 7 Landschaften dargestellt werden könnten, nämlich einmal nicht aus der Vogelperspektive, sondern als frontale Ansicht mit jeweils unterschiedlichen Architekturen und Landschaftstypen, wobei die spielentscheidenden Elemente dennoch immer gleich platziert und ähnlich umgesetzt werden mussten. Das war gar nicht so einfach und ich bin froh, dass es funktioniert hat.“

Ralph: „Das Spielsystem mit den 7 Orten, das Einsammeln und Verkaufen von Dingen fand ich von Anfang an sehr interessant. Aber es hakte lange Zeit daran, dass die Spiele zu selten bis zum Schluss spannend blieben. Das Austarieren war schwieriger als üblich, es hat sehr lange gedauert, bis wir das in den Griff bekommen haben.“

Stefan: „Das größte Problem aus meiner Sicht war, dass das Spiel in der Anfangsphase durchaus konfrontativ war und einige Frustelemente drin hatte. Aber das haben mir Ralph und unsere ‚Haupt-Testerinnen‘ ausgetrieben …“

Auf dem Cover und in den Illustrationen des Spiels sind die Charaktere – anders als der Titel vermuten ließe – nicht immer eindeutig männlich. War dir diese Differenzierung besonders wichtig, Dennis?

Dennis: „Ja, auf jeden Fall. Das Setting von Medico ist offen genug dafür, und sowohl Ralph als auch mir war es wichtig, dass nicht nur männlich gelesene Personen auf dem Cover zu sehen sind. Tatsächlich habe ich mir viele Gedanken darüber gemacht, welche Person welches (vermutete) Geschlecht haben kann, und hoffe, dass ich ein einigermaßen ausgeglichenes Ergebnis abliefern konnte.“

Stefan, du bist ja fast schon dafür bekannt, Prototypen erstmal weitgehend ohne Thema zu entwickeln. Wann kam denn bei Medico das Thema ins Spiel?

Stefan: „Ja, das ist richtig. Für meine Protos nehme ich eigentlich nie ausgefallene Themen, sondern welche, die die Mechanik unterstützen. Deshalb ist es für Ralph jedes Mal eine Herausforderung aus meinen 0-8-15-Themen etwas Ansprechendes zu machen. “

Ralph: „Das Thema hat sich im Sommer 2024 entwickelt. Bis dahin hieß der Prototyp ‚Händlermanager‘ und wir haben Händler durch die Orte gezogen, die die Waren eingesammelt (früher auch noch eingekauft) haben, um sie in den Städten zu verkaufen. Aus einer Spielrunde im Freundeskreis entstand dann die Idee, dass Druiden im Wald diverse Zutaten für ihre Tränke sammeln. Aber ein Spiel mit Druiden gibt es von Stefan schon … . Ich wollte jedoch bei dem medizinischen Thema bleiben und irgendwann kam mir die Geschichte um Bader und Medicus in den Sinn.“

Nachdem das Thema schließlich feststand: Wie wichtig war euch eine Anlehnung an historische Fakten?

Ralph: „Für meine Spiele gilt eigentlich immer: Das Thema dient primär dazu, die Mechaniken möglichst intuitiv spielbar zu machen. Die Geschichte, die wir erzählen, soll natürlich möglichst schlüssig sein, hat aber nicht den Anspruch, historische Realitäten korrekt darzustellen. Aber Dennis hat mich da wieder wunderbar bei der Detailausarbeitung des Themas unterstützt.“

Dennis: „Das Spiel erzählt grundsätzlich eine fiktive Geschichte, die in einem nicht näher definierten historischen Rahmen spielt. Da gibt es dann keinen Anspruch, ganz bestimmte Fakten ganz korrekt darzustellen. Das ist ähnlich wie bei einem Spielfilm oder Roman, der eine eigene Geschichte vor einen historischen Hintergrund erzählt: Vom Bauchgefühl her sollte das stimmig sein.“

Euer letztes gemeinsames Projekt, Bonfire, hatte dagegen ein rein fantastisches Thema. Macht dir eines davon mehr Spaß zu illustrieren, „Realität“ oder Fiktion, Dennis?

Dennis: „Es ist schon so, dass ich bei Spielen wie Bonfire meiner Phantasie mehr freien Lauf lassen kann, als bei Themen, die in der realen Welt zumindest verankert sind. Bei historischen Themen muss ich immer mal wieder Details recherchieren und darauf achten, dass mir keine groben Fehler unterlaufen. Der schöne Nebeneffekt davon ist, dass ich so auch Dinge lerne, dich ich vorher nicht wusste oder auf Themen aufmerksam werde, die mich dann über das jeweilige Projekt hinaus interessieren. Bei Medico fand ich es besonders reizvoll, einen Aspekt des mittelalterlichen Lebens zu beleuchten, der noch nicht so häufig in Spielen verwendet wurde.

Bei der reinen Illustrationsarbeit ist es dann kein großer Unterschied mehr, oder das Thema fantastisch oder historisch ist. Ich habe diesen Beruf gewählt, weil ich das Handwerk an sich liebe, also einfach am liebsten dasitze, einen Podcast, Musik oder ein Hörbuch höre und zeichne bzw. male, unabhängig vom jeweiligen Thema. Wenn das nicht so wäre, könnte ich Illustration als Beruf gar nicht dauerhaft ausführen.“

Um beim Vergleich zwischen eurem letzten Spiel und Medico zu bleiben: Bonfire war ein Expertenspiel, Medico ist dagegen als Kennerspiel kategorisiert. War das eine bewusste Entscheidung?

Ralph: „Nein. Das Spiel ist schon seit vielen Jahren in der Entwicklung, das war keine bewusste Entscheidung. Ich würde auch sagen, dass Stefan und ich uns gar nicht vornehmen, wie komplex ein Spiel werden soll. Wir machen das Spiel so, dass es uns beiden gefällt – und wenn es komplexer wird wie bei Bonfire oder AquaSphere, ist das ok. Wenn es aber etwas zugänglicher bleibt wie bei Medico oder auch dem Orakel von Delphi, gefällt uns das auch.“

Stefan: „That’s it! Und Medico ist in der Grundstruktur super einfach. Die Spieltiefe entsteht durch variantenreiche Karten, viele Möglichkeiten und durch die Interaktion mit den Mitspielenden, also das gemeinsame Wählen der Aktion, was eine Einschätzung meiner Mitspielenden verlangt. Deswegen für mich Kennerbereich.“

Macht es dir eigentlich mehr Spaß, die Ikonographie, also die Symbolik im Spiel, zu entwerfen oder die Illustrationen z.B. für das Cover, Dennis?

Dennis: „Das macht schon alles Spaß und es gibt ja noch viel mehr Aspekte in der Gestaltung: Die Formen und Größen der Stanzteile in Abhängigkeit zu der bestmöglichen Nutzbarkeit und der idealen Anzahl von Stanzbögen, die Formen und Farben der Holzteile, die Verhältnismäßigkeit der Symbolik zur Illustration und schließlich das Verhältnis zwischen Coverartwork und Optik des Spielmaterials.

Das alles zusammen ist bei keinem Spiel gleich und das macht immer wieder den Spaß an der Arbeit aus. Das alles hat aber auch im Verlauf seine ganz eigenen Tücken, und dann wird aus Spaß auch immer wieder harte Arbeit.“

Und wie lange brauchst du für die komplette Illustration solch eines Spiels inklusive der Entwicklung der Ikonographie?

Dennis: „Es ist so, dass ich immer mehrere Projekte gleichzeitig bearbeite und dabei keine Stoppuhr laufen lasse. Die genaue Zeit, die ich für Medico investiert habe, kann ich also nicht nennen. Aber als Richtschnur plane ich für ein Projekt dieser Dimension 5 bis 6 Monate vom ersten Entwurf bis zur Abgabe der Druckdaten ein.“

7 verschiedene Orte, 6 Neben- und 4 Hauptaktionen sowie verschiedene Wissensmarker und Gunstkarten. Habt ihr eine Gewinnstrategie für Neulinge parat?

Ralph: „Da wiederhole ich nur den Tipp, den ich für jedes etwas komplexere Spiel empfehle: Versucht nicht, im ersten Spiel alles perfekt zu machen! Probiert etwas aus, selbst wenn es schief gehen sollte – dann lernt ihr etwas, was ihr im nächsten Spiel anders machen könnt. Es gibt mehrere Strategien in dem Spiel – aber diese zu entdecken sollte Teil des Spielerlebnisses sein .“

Stefan: „Da bin ich der falsche Ansprechpartner. Ich verliere meine Spiele nämlich überwiegend .“

Und last but not least: In Civolution hat es Stefan als Direktor-Gott ins Spiel geschafft. Gibt es hier auch solche Easter Eggs?

Dennis: „Es gibt in diesem Spiel einige Verweise auf andere Titel von Hall Games und Stefan ist auch gewürdigt worden. “

Ralph: „Dennis und ich lieben Easter Eggs, und auch in diesem Spiel sind ein paar versteckt. Aber es wäre ja langweilig, sie hier zu verraten…“

Vielen herzlichen Dank! Wenn ihr noch mehr über Medico und die Entwicklungsarbeit erfahren wollt, schaut auch in Ausgabe 3/2026 unseres Pegasus Spiele Magazins Ringbote. Dort findet ihr nicht nur eine ausführliche Spielvorstellung, sondern auch ein Interview mit Ralph Bruhn.

Der Beitrag Im Interview – Stefan Feld, Dennis Lohausen und Ralph Bruhn über ihr gemeinsames Brettspiel Medico erschien zuerst auf Blog und News.

I do love a good Napoleonics wargame and The Conquerors Series from Shakos is really very good as we have played a few games over the years. They have a new volume in that series on Kickstarter that is designed by a tandem of great designers in Brian Asklev (Baltic Empires from GMT Games and 1812: Napoleon’s Fateful March from VUCA Simulations) and Fred Serval (A Gest of Robin Hood and Red Flag Over Paris from GMT Games as well as A Very Civil Whist from PHALANX) called Napoléon 1870: The Collapse of the Second French Empire from Shakos. This game is set in a different period but uses the same system to tell the story of the collapse of the Second French Empire during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870’s. We reached out to Brian to get some answers to our questions and he was more than interested in working with us.

If you are interested in Napoléon 1870: The Collapse of the Second French Empire, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shakos/napoleon-1870-the-collapse-of-the-second-french-empire?

Grant: Brian welcome back to the blog. What is your new upcoming game Napoléon 1870 about?

Brian: Thanks – Its nice to be back As the title hints at its about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and covers the opening weeks of that war.

Grant: Why was this a game that you wanted to design?

Brian: As a Frenchman and a Dane, Fred Serval (my co-designer) and I talked about how the wars of German unification (vs. Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870) are massively overlooked in our hobby, and we decided to go about to fix this.

I am a sucker for conflicts which had a decisive impact on history as well as wars where the belligerents have very asymmetric strengths and weaknesses at both the tactical and operational levels so 1870 fits this bill perfectly. The 2^nd Schleswig War in 1864 would also fit this bill but is a far less interesting topic for a game due to its static nature. This leaves out 1866 and I might just return and do that campaign in this series

Grant: What does the subtitle “The Collapse of the Second French Empire” mean?

Brian: The opening battles in August 1870, which led to most of the French army being trapped and besieged at Metz, was a crippling blow to the French Second Empire under Napoleon III (nephew to the way more famous Emperor of the First Empire, Napoléon Bonaparte). His attempts to salvage the situation led to the remaining part of the army and the emperor himself being trapped at Sedan and France becoming a republic again on September 4^th.

Grant: Why does The Conquerors Series work for this battle in the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870’s?

Brian: It’s a very flexible system so it can easily be adapted to different periods. Its fatigue system and uncertain movement system is perfectly suited to show some of the difference between the French and Prussian armies in this campaign

Grant: What unique challenges to this well-tried and highly acclaimed campaign system are explored here?

Brian: We have added Objective Cards which allow each player to secretly draw one of their sides 5 Objective Cards before play begins. This card then lists some additional ways of earning VP’s for your side and thus you will play differently in each game depending on what you are trying to achieve besides the usual VP’s for losses and controlling specific locations.

In addition, Event Cards allowed us to add some aspects, such as logistics, which we felt was underrepresented in previous games in the series. As the Event Card use in the system is so flexible we could add this without any additional rules to the series as such.

Grant: Who is your co-designer on this effort? What has their experience brought to the table?

Brian: Fred Serval of Red Flag over Paris and A Gest of Robin Hood fame. We work very well together and find it easy to build upon the ideas of the other as well as stop those ideas that only worked well in our heads
In addition, he has a lot of knowledge about the period as well as being able to read and understand French sources.

Grant: What was the division of labor between the 2 of you?

Brian: The design started when we lived in the same town and saw each other regularly, so it was easy for us to have brainstorming sessions and test ideas so we only divided the labor between us for the design of the various scenarios once we were sure the main scenario and the decks worked as we wanted them to. Besides this we decided it would be best if Fred did the translation into French

Grant: How does designing a game in an established system work? Any constraints on your thoughts for the battle?

Brian: I love designing in established series as I have a solid framework from the start and can do all my reading and thinking from the perspective of the series ruleset. This was also how I started as a designer (with GMT´s Musket & Pike Series). In many ways I am probably more of a tinkerer than a designer as I always start with one or more established systems as my basic framework and then expand, merge and tweak those gradually until I end up with something that is very different from my starting point.

If a suitable system is chosen for the conflict the designer seeks to model there should be few constraints apart from the basic parameters of the series in terms of what it does, and what it does not, focus on. One of my only critiques of The Conquerors Series is the lack of logistics and supply rules as I really like such rules both as a player and as a designer (as anyone who has played 1812: Napoleon´s Fateful March will know). Luckily, The Conquerors Series is very flexible and as noted above, we could easily represent the logistic challenges of the war by the inclusion of Event Cards.

Grant: What did you need to make sure to model from the Franco-Prussian War?

Brian: We needed to include and highlight the asymmetry of both of the armies involved: The French had a massively superior rifle called the Chassepot that in and of itself could have won them the war, while the Prussians had far superior artillery. In addition, the French command was very chaotic and disorganized while the Prussians were remarkably well organized and planned considering they were technically the defending side in the war.

Grant: What sources did you consult to get the historical details correct? What one must-read source would you recommend?

Brian: Fred and I consulted several sources, with Fred having the major advantage here of being French speaking.
We actually made our own draft versions of the decks and then compared to see where we agreed and where we differed in our choice of focus. To me this was my favorite part of the design process as its very enlightening to see how another person interprets the same source info into card effects and special rules. I would recommend Geoffrey Wawro´s The Franco-Prussian War as a good one-volume book on the conflict.

Grant: What is your overall design goal and thesis with the game?

Brian: My main design goal is always to produce a game that is a solid model of the historical conflict, show players their historical counterpart´s objectives as well as the restrictions they operated under, while being capable of producing plausible alternative outcomes.

When designing in an existing series I naturally adopt that series’ focus and design philosophy, so here we have a system that excels at showing a lot of the friction of war that commanders have little control over and must continually adapt their plans to. Movement rates and combat performance are never certain and both sides have plenty of events that interfere in the operations and capabilities of the other side as well as Must-Play events that can upset the plans of both sides. Historically everything went badly for the French as they were horribly unprepared for the war they started. Within a few days it was obvious that they had to change their overall plan from one of advancing into Germany to one of saving their army from destruction.

I wanted the game to represent this and give the French a chance of winning a sudden death victory by advancing into Germany and repelling their advance forces (and thus shaking up the internal cohesion of the Prussian alliance with the other German states), so the Prussian player is forced to act with some caution in the early phase.

Poor French planning & coordination (represented by initial fatigue levels, pesky Prussian Event Cards and low movement values on their cards) will then often create a situation where the French are in danger of being outmaneuvered and encircled and this next phase in the game will often see the French army trying to fall back in good order and utilize its defensive advantages.

Grant: How does combat work in the design?

Brian: Combat in this series is simple, smooth and elegant. Each side draws a number of cards from their deck and checks the symbols in the bottom corner to see how many losses and fatigue points they cause to the opponent. The number of cards you draw depend on the number of units you have present, their strength and their Fatigue levels. Good defensive terrain as well as unit specific bonuses (clearly shown with icons on the units) may increase the number of cards you draw as well. The two decks are intentionally different. The French deck causes more losses to represent the effect of their Chassepot rifle while the Prussian deck causes more fatigue to represent their superior breechloading artillery.

Grant: What is the area covered by the board? What strategic challenges does it present?

Brian: The game covers only the first phase of the war and thus covers the area of France from (and a bit beyond) the border to Prussia in the east to the area just west of Metz. The fortress of Metz is a key terrain feature on the map and a lot of the late game revolves around it. In game terms it is impassable for the Prussians who have to go around it and control the areas behind it to besiege it. But Metz is not the only VP area on the map and the Prussians have to advance along several axis as well as prevent the French from advancing into their rear and capturing the VP areas inside Prussia. Depending on the Objective Cards drawn for each side some areas may have their VP value further increased, which will make them more important.

Grant: What role does Fatigue play in the design? How do you track this aspect?

Brian: Fatigue is a critical aspect of the system and each unit´s Fatigue Level is tracked on an off-map display which also serves to track its current strength. The Fatigue Track goes from 1 to 8. If a unit´s Fatigue Level goes beyond 4 you draw one less card for the unit in battle, and at the end of the turn if will lose a strength point.
If Fatigue reaches 8, the Cohesion of the unit collapses completely and it is eliminated. Players can discard cards at the end of the turn to recover 1 or 2 Fatigue Levels on a unit and units that do nothing for a full turn get to remove all their Fatigue at the end of the turn.

Grant: How does the game use cards? Can you share a few examples with us and explain how they work?

Brian: The series uses cards for movement, combat, Fatigue recovery and for events during your own and the opponents turn, so it is very much a card driven system

Whenever you wish to move a stack you declare who is moving and then draw a card – the number in the upper-right corner is the stacks movement points (with some modifiers from leader presence and the size of the stack)

The icon in the upper left corner show when a card´s event (the text in the middle) is playable:

• Cards with a sabre icon are battle events that are (as the name implies) playable during battles.
• Cards with your side´s flag are playable when its your turn to move units while cards with the opposing side´s flag are playable in their turn.
• Cards with their title in a blue box are played at the start of the turn and generally add reinforcements or effects that last throughout the turn.
• Cards with their title in a red box are played immediately and usually represent bad stuff, outside the control of the historical commanders, happening. This could be bad weather but also logistical problems.
• The icons in the lower right section show how many fatigue points you get to remove from a unit if you discard this card at the end of the turn while the icons in the lower left section shows how many losses and fatigue points you cause if this card is drawn to resolving a battle.

Disclaimer: The cards below are low-resolution images from the pre-proofreading so they contain small errors that have already been corrected. Blue background cards are from the French Deck while grey background cards are from the Prussian Deck.

Grant: How is victory obtained?

Brian: Victory is obtained by capturing VP cities and causing losses as in the other games in the series.
In addition to that we, as mentioned above, added Objective Cards that give players options for scoring additional VP’s by fulfilling the conditions on them.

Grant: What are some general strategies for each of the sides?

Brian: The French are definitely the weaker side in this campaign and will be fighting to prevent their army from being destroyed and the Prussians from placing Metz under siege. But on a unit-on-unit basis the French are usually superior, especially when defending, and in the early game have a chance to inflict enough losses on the Prussians to win a sudden death victory. So the Prussians are on a tight schedule and have a lot to do – but also have to be careful in how they to it.

Grant: What different scenarios are included?

Brian: The main scenario covers the period from the start of the war up to encirclement of Metz and then we have a short scenario covering the battles on the border in the opening days of the war and a short scenario covering the battle of Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte.

Assuming we reach all the stretchgoals, there will also be a hypothetical scenario covering the same period as the main scenario but assuming the French command and logistics were better planned and organized.
All the scenarios come in a fixed setup version and a free setup version.

Grant: What do you feel the design excels at?

Brian: I think we achieved our goal of showing the different strengths and weaknesses of the two armies.
The French, with their accurate and long-ranged Chassepot rifles, will usually cause more losses than they suffer but be forced to fall back to prevent their units’ cohesion from collapsing under the weight of the effective artillery and superior numbers of the Prussians.

Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?

Brian: WAY too many!

I am working on a new Operational level game series with Fred Serval which will include little gamed topics on a vide variety of conflicts in the 1900-1990 time frame. Once we launch this series, we will likely be able to put out titles quickly as we already have several games that are ready to go now.

I am co-designing Enlightenment Empires: Power and Politics in Eastern Europe, 1725-1795 from GMT Games (the sequel to Baltic Empires) with Roman Rogov.

I am both designer and developer on 3 new games in VUCA Simulation’s Marshals & Quartermasters Series, which currently only consists of 1812: Napoleon´s Fateful March but will soon include games on the 1813 German campaign (by me), 1814 invasion of France (by Pete Manning), 1796 in Italy (by Antonello Salvatucci) and 1812 in Iberia (by me).

For Academy Games I am (hopefully) finalizing games in the Birth of Series on the Vietnam War and the 2^nd Punic Wars. The latter is a co-design with Jose Rivero.

I am also working on new games in VUCA Simulation’s War Chronicles Series I started with Thirty Years of Misery that is just coming out now. One of these will also be a co-design with Jose Rivero on Al-Andalus (medieval Spain).

Lastly, I am also doing final testing on The 38^th Parallel in Bellica 3^rd Generation’s criminally overlooked Campaign Commander Series

If you want to learn more about the game, you can watch this preview video put together by co-designer Fred Serval for the Kickstarter page:

If you are interested in Napoléon 1870: The Collapse of the Second French Empire, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shakos/napoleon-1870-the-collapse-of-the-second-french-empire?

-Grant

Schandmaul ist eine deutschsprachige Mittelalter-Folk-Rock-Band aus Gröbenzell bei München.

Hier findest du alle unsere Inhalte zu Schandmaul: Interviews, Konzertberichte, Fotos, Videos und weitere Beiträge von DieHausis, die Seite wird regelmäßig überarbeitet & erweitert.

Interviews & Berichte

26.08.2026 – DieHausis unterwegs: Eisheilige Nacht 2025, Konzertbericht mit Musik-Impressionen, Video auf NRWision TV

22.12.2025 – SCHANDMAUL Interview mit Thomas & Till, Eisheilige Nacht 2025 & Pläne 2026, Video auf Youtube

Konzertfotos

Unsere Bildergalerie mit Impressionen vom Auftritt bei der Eisheiligen Nacht 2025 und beim Folkfield Festival 2026 kommt in Kürze!

Weitere Informationen

Offizielle Webseite von Schandmaul:

www.schandmaul.de

Der Beitrag Schandmaul – Interviews, Berichte & Konzertfotos erschien zuerst auf DieHausis.

A new series, and we have seen how well series have done at GMT Games, a new designer and a new concept to wargaming (lane battler), I think that this game has great potential and it happens to be focused on one of my most favorite wars to game – the Vietnam War. Iron Triangle: Search and Destroy Operations in the Vietnam War is designed by Darren McGuire and takes a look at the struggle between the United States military and the Viet Cong insurgents as they fight over control of three key “lanes” or regions. I am very much excited about this one and reached out to designer Darren McGuire for some additional information.

*Note: The pictures used in this interview showing the various components and cards, are still in the design and development process and as such rules, event effects and text might still change prior to final development and publication. Also the art and layout of the cards are only for playtest purposes at this point and the game will enter the art department as it nears publication.

Grant: Darren welcome to our blog. First off please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?

Darren: Hi Grant, I live not too far from Glasgow in Scotland, which is a board gamer’s delight, by which I mean, plenty of rainy days and dark evenings. By day, I work as a Quantity Surveyor (Cost Engineer) on major water infrastructure projects, dealing with cost control, commercial management and contractual disputes, so it’s excitement all round! Away from work, my wife and four children keep me more than busy.

As you may have guessed, my main hobby is board gaming, which has now expanded into board game design. Unfortunately, my best ideas seem to arrive in the middle of the night rather than at my desk. When I’m not thinking about games, you’ll usually find me following Glasgow Celtic, the best football (soccer) team in the world…well, Scotland at least. Other interests include noodling away on my guitar and getting out for the occasional hike.

Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed the most about the experience thus far?

Darren: I am relatively new to board gaming, having played regularly for only four or five years. My growing interest in historical games was sparked by Rodney Smith’s discussion of Cuba Libre in the Discovering the COIN series. After learning and playing the game, and later watching a documentary on the Cuban Revolution, I became fascinated by how game mechanics can represent the political, military and social dimensions of historical events.

This experience led me to appreciate game design not just as entertainment but as a way of communicating history. My interest in creating games developed further through roleplaying games, particularly the Basic Roleplaying system, which inspired me to write and run a Second World War-themed scenario. Seeing others enjoy something I had created was highly rewarding and encouraged me to pursue game design more seriously.

What I enjoy most about design is the iterative process, watching an idea evolve through testing, refining it based on feedback, and carrying lessons learned from one project into the next.

Grant: What is your upcoming Game Iron Triangle about?

Darren: Iron Triangle is a 2-player card battler game about the struggle between US and Viet Cong forces in the III Corps region of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Players compete across a series of Operations while also managing the wider military, political and social factors that shaped the conflict.

The US player must balance military success with the need to maintain stability and support for the South Vietnamese government. The VC player, meanwhile, seeks to undermine government authority through guerrilla warfare, hidden infrastructure, and the careful preparation of the Tet Offensive. While battles are fought over individual Operations, success ultimately depends on how effectively players manage resources, control territory, influence Public Opinion and pursue their broader strategic objectives.

Rather than focusing solely on military confrontation, Iron Triangle aims to capture the asymmetrical nature of the war, where political legitimacy could be just as important as success on the battlefield. The result is a fast-paced experience in which decisions can have consequences beyond the immediate fight.

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest?

Darren: I have always been fascinated by David versus Goliath conflicts, where a seemingly weaker side challenges a much stronger opponent. The Vietnam War particularly captured my interest because it was a conflict I initially knew very little about. Like many people, my early perceptions were shaped largely by Hollywood films, but after becoming interested in historical conflict through board gaming, I began to realize there was far more nuance and complexity to the war than popular culture suggests. The more I explored the subject, the more intrigued I became by the political, military and human factors that shaped the conflict.

Grant: What is your design goal of the game?

Darren: My goal is to create a fun and engaging game that feels thematic within what is traditionally quite an abstract genre. I want the mechanics and player decisions to reflect the realities of the conflict, so that the theme is expressed through gameplay rather than simply through artwork or historical flavor text.

Beyond providing an enjoyable experience, I hope players come away with a greater appreciation of the unique challenges faced by both sides in this part of the Vietnam War. The conflict was not decided solely by battlefield success. Political support, public opinion, hidden infrastructure and competing strategic priorities all played important roles. Capturing these tensions within an accessible and entertaining game has been one of the central objectives of the design.

Grant: What from Search and destroy missions in Vietnam was most important to model?

Darren: Two aspects were at the forefront of my mind. The first was capturing the cat-and-mouse nature of search and destroy operations through the card play. These missions were rarely straightforward engagements; instead, they involved a constant struggle to locate, pursue and evade the enemy.

Equally important was ensuring that the tactical outcomes of these operations were connected to their wider political and societal consequences. In Vietnam, success on the battlefield did not always translate into strategic success. Capturing that tension between military achievement and its broader impact on public opinion, political will, and the course of the war was therefore a key design objective.

Grant: What sources did you consult about the details of the history? What one must read source would you recommend?

Darren: The principal sources I consulted were:

• The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns
• Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
• The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate

Of these, I would recommend The Tunnels of Cu Chi as essential reading. The book argues that the Cu Chi tunnel network became one of the most powerful symbols of Viet Cong resilience and ingenuity, demonstrating why overwhelming American military superiority alone could not guarantee victory. That theme had a significant influence on the design of the game. Mechanics such as tunneled cards, Tunnel Bases, and the creation and use of caches are intended to reflect the hidden infrastructure that enabled the Viet Cong to survive, recover and at times overwhelm a conventionally stronger opponent. Capturing this asymmetry between military power and insurgent resilience was one of the central goals of the design.

Grant: What is the goal of the game?

Darren: The VC player seeks to undermine the local population’s trust in the South Vietnamese government. To achieve this, they must win Operations, carefully manage their resources, and, most importantly, plan and execute a successful Tet Offensive.

The US player, meanwhile, has two paths to victory. The first is through attrition, exposing and neutralizing enemy forces. The second is through pacification, placing pacification chits on regional tracks to strengthen government influence. Whichever strategy they pursue, they must contend with the fallout of scorched-earth tactics, maintain control of pacified areas and disrupt the enemy’s Tet Offensive preparations whenever possible.

Grant: What is the layout of the board?

Darren: The operations are divided across three regions, with players contesting one operation in each region during every round. Running alongside these battles is a strategic layer represented on the board, which tracks the overall situation across the theatre. This includes the level of control within each region, regional stability, public opinion, and refugee generation. As a result, success in individual operations can have far-reaching consequences, forcing players to balance short-term military objectives against their broader strategic and political impact.

Grant: What are the “lanes” and how do they work?

Darren: The three lanes represent the key operational regions north of Saigon: War Zone C, War Zone D and the Iron Triangle. Each lane contains a dedicated deck of Operation Cards representing historical Search and Destroy missions conducted in that region during the period.

During each round, players will contest one Operation from each region, fighting simultaneous battles across all three lanes. The outcome of these Operations will influence the wider conflict, affecting the various tracks and areas of the main board. Success on the battlefield can shift regional control, impact public support, alter available resources and shape each side’s broader strategic objectives.

Grant: How does the game use cards? How are the player decks asymmetrical?

Darren: Each player commands a unique deck of cards representing the units, tactics and capabilities available to their side. These cards are committed to Operations, where players compete for control and the rewards those Operations provide. Every card has a strength value and a special action that can be utilized when played.

The game’s real asymmetry lies in how the VC player can deploy their cards. VC cards may be played in one of three states: Exposed (face-up), Concealed (face-down) or Tunnelled (face-down and rotated). This system forces the VC player to balance protection against flexibility. A Tunnelled card, for example, is much harder for the US player to expose and inflict attrition upon, but it requires additional effort from the VC player to reveal and activate its ability.

These mechanics give the VC player multiple strategic options. They can bluff with hidden forces, launch surprise attacks, prepare units for future engagements or hide powerful cards for the decisive end-of-round reveal. The US player, meanwhile, is rarely certain of the strength or composition of the forces they are facing, creating a constant risk that an attack may not go as planned.

To counter this uncertainty, the US player can resort to scorched-earth tactics, exposing and neutralising enemy forces through attrition. However, this approach has consequences. Such actions generate refugees, a resource that can ultimately be exploited by the VC player to advance their own objectives.

The card system is therefore central to how the game’s theme is reflected in its mechanics. Through hidden information, bluffing and the constant tension between searching for the enemy and avoiding detection, it captures the cat-and-mouse nature of the conflict and the uncertainty faced by US forces throughout the war.

Grant: What different type of cards are included?

Darren: There are several types of cards in the game. The Operation Decks form the core of the conflict, with each card detailing the rewards available for successfully completing that mission. These rewards can include gaining regional control, destroying enemy caches or bases, reducing public opinion or generating refugees, all of which contribute to the wider strategic situation on the main board.

Each faction also has its own unique deck containing units and tactics, with cards featuring different strength values and special abilities. These decks reflect the contrasting approaches employed by the US and VC forces and provide players with meaningful tactical decisions throughout the game.

Currently in development are Commander Cards, which can be employed throughout the course of the game. Each commander provides powerful advantages but also introduces specific drawbacks, requiring players to carefully consider who is best suited to lead their forces at any given stage of the conflict.

Also in development is a dedicated solo mode, being designed by Joe Dewhurst. This system includes a bespoke bot deck for each faction, aiming to deliver a challenging and thematic opponent that captures the strategic priorities and character of both sides.

Grant: Can you show us a few examples of cards and describe how they work?

Darren: Here are a few examples that highlight the key decisions and interactions players will encounter during a round.

Operation Cards

Players battle over three Operation cards during each round. The rewards gained depend on the final Strength differential between the opposing sides.

For example, on the Operation shown above, if the VC player ends the round with a Strength differential of 3 or more, they move the control marker on the Warzone C Region Track one space toward Saigon and remove one US Firebase.

Action Cards

Infrastructure symbols indicate that the Operation takes place in a populated area. When the US player uses Scorched Earth actions, such as Zippo Raids, Refugees are generated as a result of the destruction.

In this example, the Zippo Raids Card generates two Refugees for each Infrastructure symbol shown on the Operation Card and allows the US player to destroy two Caches from the VC supply.

The card also gives the US player the option of playing it rotated to its lower-strength Pacification side. When played this way, the US player may place one Pacification chit on a Region Track if the Tet Offensive has not yet occurred, or two Pacification chits if it has.

This creates an important strategic decision for the US player. They can use the card’s high Strength value to help win the Operation, potentially generating Refugees that the VC can later exploit, or they can focus on Pacification to reduce the effectiveness of VC Tax actions and move closer to their alternative victory condition.

The Ambush Card from the VC Deck illustrates the different states in which a card can be played. It may be played face-down (Concealed or Tunnelled) or face-up (Exposed).

The Attrition symbol represents a key objective for the US player, who seeks to expose and exploit these cards as part of their Attrition victory condition. The US Activation symbol indicates that the card’s action may also be triggered when it is exposed by a US card effect.

This gives the VC player meaningful agency. They can play the card face-up to gain the action immediately, play it face-down and activate it later in the round, or use it as a bluff to lure the US player into exposing it.

These are just a few examples of how the decks interact. The game includes numerous ways for players to influence and counter each other’s cards. K9 Units can negate the US Activation effect, Hueys can move cards and place Firebases, Tunnel Rats can flush out Tunnelled cards and locate Caches, Booby Traps can eliminate Tunnel Rats and Supply cards can place Caches on Operations to increase Strength.

Together, these layered interactions ensure that every card choice can have lasting consequences, creating a tense and highly interactive contest between the US and VC players.

Grant: How are the cards concealed by the VC player? What does this represent?

Darren: VC cards feature symbols indicating whether they can be played face up, face down, or either. Face-down cards represent concealed forces, while rotated cards represent units operating through tunnel networks.

The VC player must use Action Cards, such as Manoeuvre, to flip or rotate cards already committed to a lane. This creates a constant balancing act between revealing powerful effects, such as Ambushes and Night Raids, and protecting the valuable Attrition symbols contained on those cards.

These mechanics also enable bluffing. For example, a low-value Booby Trap Card can be tunnelled, encouraging the US player to believe it is a high-strength Support Card with significant Attrition potential. The uncertainty forces the US player to carefully consider where to commit resources and when to challenge concealed threats.

The VC player must also decide whether to play a card face up and immediately benefit from its effect but exposing it to US attack, or instead commit it face down from the outset and save its reveal for a decisive moment later in the round. This flexibility reflects the hidden nature of VC operations and rewards careful planning and deception.

Grant: What challenges for the US are created by this concealment?

Darren: Attrition is a key US victory path, but many VC Attrition symbols remain hidden on concealed or tunnelled cards. To succeed, the US player must reveal and engage these forces while making difficult decisions with incomplete information, risking costly overcommitment if hidden threats prove stronger than expected.

Military operations can expose VC units, destroy bases and uncover caches, but they often generate Refugees, which the VC can exploit to gain cards, add Tet tokens or reduce Regional Stability. As a result, the US player must constantly balance immediate military success against longer-term political consequences. These mechanics create a tense contest of information and deception, with the VC concealing their strength while the US works to uncover and eliminate hidden assets before they can affect the wider war.

Grant: What is the Tet Offensive draw bag? How is it built?

Darren: The Tet Offensive was the watershed moment of the Vietnam War. Although it did not bring the conflict to an immediate end, it fundamentally altered US strategy and set the conditions for the gradual withdrawal of American forces. Capturing the importance of this moment was a key design goal.

The Tet Bag is one of the most important systems in the game. Following recent design changes, it no longer acts as a simple end-game decider but instead serves as a mechanism that can greatly influence the course of the war. At the start of each round, the VC player secretly decides whether to launch the Tet Offensive by selecting one of two cards: one commits to the Offensive and the other acts as a bluff. This creates uncertainty from the outset of the round, as the US player must react without knowing whether a major offensive is truly imminent. The VC player may retract their decision during the round, but doing so becomes increasingly expensive as the cost in Caches rises with each turn that passes.

The bag begins with three US tokens and two VC tokens, but its contents constantly evolve throughout the game. The VC can add tokens through Infiltrate actions and by exploiting Refugees created by US operations. The US player, meanwhile, can remove tokens through Round-Up actions and through Attrition in an attempt to limit the impact of any future Offensive.

The primary way for the VC to influence the draw is through the accumulation of Caches. These can be generated through Tax Actions or received as end-of-round supply from the North. When the offensive is launched, the number of available Caches determines how many Tet tokens can be added to the bag, while Tunnel Bases deployed to region tracks act as multipliers, increasing the number of tokens generated from those Caches. Control of key regional spaces provides additional opportunities, with certain track positions allowing a player to add Tet tokens at the end of a round if the Offensive is launched.

If the VC player commits to the Tet Offensive, the appropriate tokens are added to the bag at the end of the round and five tokens are drawn at random. Each VC token drawn reduces Public Opinion by one step, while each US token drawn increases Attrition by one step. This can create a dramatic swing in the strategic situation. Even if neither victory condition is immediately met, the outcome of the draw can significantly alter the state of the war and shape the decisions available to both players in subsequent rounds.

The timing of the Offensive is therefore a critical consideration. The VC player must decide whether to launch early with limited preparation or delay in order to strengthen the bag’s odds while risking discovery or disruption. The US player, meanwhile, must balance efforts to contain the insurgency on the ground against the need to manage the growing threat represented by the Tet Bag. This creates a constant strategic tension that mirrors the historical conflict.

Grant: What is Public Opinion? How is it changed?

Darren: Public Opinion represents the local population’s perception of the South Vietnamese Government and, by extension, the effectiveness of the US-backed war effort. Managing Public Opinion is crucial, as it forms one of the key strategic battlegrounds in the game.

The primary driver of Public Opinion is Regional Stability, which is determined by the position of Control markers on the regional tracks. As the VC expands its influence and gains control across a region, Stability declines, reflecting a population that increasingly doubts the government’s ability to maintain order and security. Conversely, government control and stability reinforce confidence in the existing regime.

Beyond regional control, both players have additional means of influencing Public Opinion. The VC can erode support for the government by achieving decisive victories in key Operations, demonstrating its strength and undermining confidence in official authority. A successful Tet Offensive can also significantly damage Public Opinion, representing the political shock caused by the scale and visibility of the attacks.

The US player is not without tools of their own. Through Pacification actions, they can improve conditions within contested areas, securing spaces on the regional tracks and creating opportunities to increase Public Opinion. By achieving key objectives and restoring Stability, the US player can demonstrate progress and strengthen support for the South Vietnamese Government.

Grant: What is urban infiltration?

During the build-up to the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong infiltrated towns and cities across South Vietnam, embedding cadres among the local population. These operatives remained hidden until called upon to conduct terror attacks, sabotage missions, or support the wider offensive once it began. Their ability to operate covertly within urban areas was a key factor in the scale and surprise of the 1968 Tet Offensive.

This aspect of the conflict is represented in the game through a dedicated VC Action card. When played, the card allows the VC player to add a Tet token to the Tet Bag, reflecting the gradual preparation and expansion of the underground network in advance of the Offensive. While the immediate effect may seem modest, repeated use of these actions can significantly alter the balance of the eventual draw.

Grant: How are bases used and what benefits do they bring?

Darren: Bases are another important asymmetrical element of the game. While both factions use bases to influence control of the battlefield, there are significant differences between VC Tunnel Bases and US Fire Bases that reflect their distinct approaches to the war.

In general, bases are deployed to a Regional Track adjacent to a Control marker through the use of Action Cards. Once in play, they allow a player to either reinforce their position or exploit success in an Operation.

A base can be placed defensively on a Region Track between the player and the Control marker. In this position, it acts as a buffer against enemy advances. If the opposing player wins an Operation and would move the Control marker towards their side of the track, the base absorbs one of those control shifts before being removed and returned to its home space. This allows players to protect hard-won gains and makes regional control more difficult to reverse.

Alternatively, a base can be deployed aggressively between the Control marker and an opponent’s side of the track. This represents a player anticipating success and positioning assets to exploit a breakthrough. If the Operation is won, the Control marker effectively leapfrogs the base, allowing it to advance further than it otherwise would. In this role, the base accelerates territorial gains, helping a player press their advantage.

When a VC Tunnel Base is used offensively, it is flipped to its exposed side, representing increased activity and a greater risk of detection. Exposed bases are significantly easier for the US player to locate and destroy.

This creates an important strategic dilemma for the VC player. Tunnel Bases are not only valuable for influencing regional control but also contribute to the Tet Offensive system by acting as multipliers for Tet tokens generated through Caches. Committing them aggressively can produce short-term gains on the board, but doing so risks losing assets that could have a major impact on a future Tet Offensive. The VC player must therefore balance the need to consolidate territorial gains against the benefits of preserving their network for a decisive political strike later in the war.

Grant: What role do refugees play in the game?

Darren: Refugees represent one of the key consequences of the counterinsurgency strategies employed during the war. Population displacement was frequently used to separate the VC from the rural population and disrupt their support networks, creating both military opportunities and political challenges.

The US player has access to powerful Scorched Earth Action Cards. These are high-strength cards that can be used to destroy VC Caches and generate Attrition, helping the US pursue one of its victory conditions. However, such operations can also displace civilians, creating Refugees as local communities are caught up in the fighting.

When a Scorched Earth Card is played, Refugees are generated based on the concentration of the local population in the targeted area, represented by infrastructure symbols on the Operation cards. For each Refugee generated, a Refugee token is placed in Saigon.

While these operations can successfully disrupt VC activity, the resulting Refugees create opportunities for the VC player. On their turn, Refugee tokens can be spent in several ways:

• Recruit – Draw additional cards,
• Infiltrate – Add a Tet token to the Tet Bag, helping prepare future offensives.
• Destabilise – Reduce Regional Stability, further undermining confidence in the South Vietnamese Government.

This creates a difficult strategic dilemma for the US player. Aggressive operations may achieve important military objectives by destroying enemy resources and inflicting Attrition, but they can also generate conditions that the VC can exploit for political and organisational gain.

To counter this, the US player has access to Resettlement Action Cards, which reduces the number of Refugees in Saigon. These actions represent efforts to restore stability, provide support for displaced civilians, and mitigate the wider consequences of military operations.

The Refugee mechanic reinforces one of the game’s central themes: success on the battlefield does not always translate into strategic success. Players must consider not only the immediate impact of their actions, but also the longer-term political and social consequences that can shape the course of the war.

Grant: How is victory achieved?

Darren: For the VC, victory is achieved by reducing Public Opinion to the bottom space of its track. This is accomplished through the rewards gained from winning Operations and by successfully planning and executing the Tet Offensive.

The US player has two possible routes to victory. The first is Attrition, achieved by exposing VC forces, revealing Attrition symbols on their cards, and capitalising on those symbols. Successfully pacifying individual regions and repelling the Tet Offensive also support this strategy.

The second route is Pacification. If the US player can fill all the spaces on the lower half of each regional track with Pacification chits, they have successfully stabilised the countryside and strengthened support for the South Vietnamese government. Achieving this level of security and political control results in a US victory.

Grant: What type of experience does the game create?

Darren: The aim is to create a fast-paced and tense experience in which both players must balance the military, political and social aspects of the conflict. While Operations provide the focus for direct confrontation, victory depends on managing a range of competing priorities rather than simply overpowering an opponent.

The game is not intended to be a straightforward tug-of-war over territory. Players must constantly weigh short-term gains against long-term objectives, deciding when to commit resources, when to accept setbacks, and when to focus on the wider strategic situation. Success comes from understanding how the different systems interact and adapting to an ever-changing battlefield, creating a game that rewards careful planning while still maintaining a constant sense of pressure and uncertainty.

Grant: What are you most pleased with about the design?

Darren: I am most pleased with how I have taken a relatively abstract style of game and made it as thematic as possible, capturing not only the military aspects of the conflict but also the political and social factors that shaped it. I am also very happy with the recent design changes, which have expanded the game’s scope and increased the decision space for both players. In particular, turning the Tet Offensive into a flexible strategic option rather than a fixed endgame event has created more meaningful choices for the VC player, while adding greater uncertainty and tension throughout the game. Overall, these changes have made for a richer and more engaging experience without losing sight of the historical themes I wanted to explore.

Grant: What other designs are you working on?

Darren: I have several other card battler designs at various stages of development, covering topics such as the Eastern Front, the Arctic Convoys of the Second World War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Russo-Chechen War, the latter of which served as a precursor to Iron Triangle. Each design approaches its subject in a very different way, and I am hopeful that the lessons I have learned during the development of Iron Triangle will help me refine and strengthen these projects.

I’d just like to finish by saying thanks for taking the time to reach out and for the opportunity to talk about Iron Triangle.

If you are interested in Iron Triangle: Search and Destroy Operations in the Vietnam War, you can pre-order a copy for $41.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1215-iron-triangle-search-and-destroy-operations-in-the-vietnam-war.aspx

-Grant

Rauhbein: Deutschrock mit irischen Folk-Einflüssen, aus Hessen.

Hier findest du alle unsere Inhalte zu Rauhbein: Interviews, Konzertberichte, Fotos, Videos und weitere Beiträge von DieHausis, die Seite wird regelmäßig überarbeitet & erweitert.

Interviews & Berichte

18.10.2023 RAUHBEIN die Interview – Crasher – Das INTERVIEW 2023 – DieHausis fragen nach!

Konzertfotos

Unsere Bildergalerie mit Impressionen vom Auftritt beim Folkfield Festival 2026 kommt in Kürze!

Weitere Informationen

Offizielle Webseite von Rauhbein:

www.rauhbein.de

Der Beitrag Rauhbein – Interviews, Berichte & Konzertfotos erschien zuerst auf DieHausis.

Last year, while attending SPIEL Essen in Germany, we had the chance to sit down separately with 3 wargaming designers in Wolfgang Klein/Erich Rankl with Assault! Games, Florent Coupeau with Nuts! Publishing and Uwe Walentin with Sound of Drums and shoot interview videos about their games and upcoming projects.

Wolfgang Klein/Erich Rankl with Assault! Games:

Florent Coupeau with Nuts! Publishing:

Uwe Walentin with Sound of Drums:

-Grant

The Dietz Foundation has a new game from Yoni Goldstein on Kickstarter called The Nights of King Ludd: The Luddite War on Industry, 1811-? (the game has already funded). The Nights of King Ludd is a 2-4 player game that deals with direct oath-sworn secret societies of English Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the English Midlands. Working together, players will build a secret network of saboteurs, ferry provisions and weapons on the black market, assemble raiding parties, and if all goes as planned, smash those “dark satanic mills” to cinders. Here is Part II of our interview with Yoni.

If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd

Grant: What is the layout of the board and the different locations?

Yoni: The board is divided into three panels. On the left, you will see the two card pools. The top row is where you place the “Regency” Cards, reactionary forces from London sent to quash the Luddite revolts. Below London are three cards representing the “Commons,” a shifting market of dual-use cards helpful to the players.

The central panel features the mills and enclosures. This is where players place their pieces (Weavers sympathizing with the Luddite cause), and the local Militia (the knight piece). The map depicts the “Luddite Triangle:” the West Riding of Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire. 

The right panel holds the Manufacturer’s House (and the current Manufacturer), the pool of Employed Weavers, and the Stocking Market to track wages and productivity in the mills. On the far right panel, is the Australia space for weavers punished by transportation, and the “Saboteur Dice Pool.”

A ribbon at the bottom of the board displays His Royal Majesty’s Army progress toward the Luddite Holdout. This is effectively the round track, if the Luddites are unable to sabotage the three mills by the end of the third round, the game ends in collective defeat.

Grant: How does the game use cards? What different type of cards are included?

Yoni: In The Nights of King Ludd players build a collective card engine by acquiring dual use cards from the “Commons” to upgrade their actions (aka “Conspiracies” – more on those below). The main pool of cards is called “The Commons” which, as the name suggests, represents a mutual aid network of provisions, tactics, and personalities that the Luddites may draw from in the course of their clandestine operations.

“Commons” cards are dual use and drawn from the Draw Deck. They are beneficial in two ways: the top of the card displays a persistent upgrade to any Conspiracy action and is locked into the player board to form a tableau. The bottom of the card displays a “Raiding Party” effect, a one time effect that can be triggered when a Raiding Party is formed and dispatched to a local mill.

The antithesis of the Commons is the “Regency,” a deck of cards reflecting the alignment of the aristocracy in London with an ascendent industrial class against the Luddite cause. They are drawn whenever the Luddites make themselves known in public: fomenting a mob, carrying out an assassination, or setting a factory on fire. When drawn, they set the machines of industry into motion; driving up productivity, plummeting wages, and calling the local constabulary to police the countryside. 

Once more than three cards are in the “London” track above the Commons, a nasty event is resolved. These effects will intensify the game’s challenges. Sympathetic weavers will be exiled to Australia, the militia will sweep into the local mill to root out hidden raiders, and  the Commons will be parceled off and sold to the highest bidder.

Grant: What is the role of the Persona Cards? Who are these figures?

Yoni: As mentioned in Part I of this interview, each player represents a secret society of Luddites organized around a particular “persona.” These personae introduce a special ability, as well as their their own victory condition, aka a “Motivation”, and a unique “Woe” – a card shuffled into the Draw Deck at setup that will, inevitably, undermine their efforts. There are six persona to choose from.

In clockwise order, they are:

• Mary Molyneux, 19, and Lydia Molyneux, 15, were two sisters who, in 1812, stormed a steam-driven cotton mill outside Bolton shouting, “Now Lads!” – encouraging the mob to set the building afire (and they steadfastly did so).

• Lady Ludd: “The “Lady Ludd Riots” took place in 1812 when a group of women and young lads – “distressed” by the precipitous rise in corn prices – marched through Leeds, assaulting merchants and “beating up for a mob.” They were led by a disguised person “who was dignified by the title of LADY LUDD.”

• George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, “a young poet with the chiselled good looks, the oddly deformed club foot, and an obscure and very prestigious peerage,” was an eloquent Romantic dandy who rose to defend the Luddites before the House of Lords in 1812. Byron sympathized with the weavers near his home north of Nottingham; “the real cause of their misery [was] the destructive warfare of the last eighteen years, which has destroyed their comfort, your comfort, all men’s comfort.”

• Elizabeth Studham was one of seven women tried for arson during the Swing Riots of 1829-30, an echo of the Luddite rebellion. At the age of 19 she set fire to an East Kent workhouse, demanding a wage increase for farmers threatened by threshing machines. Studham was deported and served 14 years and two months in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) during which time she gave birth to two children of whom records are sparse. She would later be sentenced for 10 offences, primarily for bad language.

• Lt. George Mellor was a Cropper and Yorkshire Luddite known to the movement as General Ludd’s Right-Hand Man. A strong willed and roguish machine-wrecker, he eventually faced a hanging sentence for the murder of a wealthy mill owner whom he shot in the groin. Eventually, Mellor was arrested in October of 1812. It is said he raised his hands in shackles and shouted “Three cheers for General Ludd!” 

• John Baines the elder was an “intelligent Hatter” and president of the local Republican Club of St. Crispin. Baines dreamt that Luddism would one day blossom into a democratic revolution;  “Let the people now rise and rid themselves of this vile brood who flung upon them the sole taxation of the country and reduced them to the condition of galley slaves!” He was found guilty at the York Special Commission of administering illegal oaths and died on board a prison hulk in a Portsmouth harbour, on December 21st, 1814. 

Grant: What is the purpose of the Manufacturer Card?

Yoni: At the beginning of each game, one of the three Manufacturer Cards is selected at random and placed face up in the “Manufacturer’s House” space on the board. The initial effect (tuck 6 cards from the draw deck beneath the manufacturer) represents the nascent industrial class’ emphasis on extracting from the commons, resolving at the start of each round. In practical terms, this prunes away the players’ available card pool over the course of play as well as ambiguates the composition of the draw deck. When a manufacturer is assassinated, all the cards tucked beneath are discarded (and will shuffle back into the Draw Deck) and the Manufacturer Card is flipped to reveal a more reactionary and dangerous side.

Grant: What are Conspiracy Actions?

Yoni: At the beginning of the game, each player has five conspirators (four for Lord Byron) at their command. Spending a conspirator allows the player to activate one of the four following Conspiracy actions (per turn):

Rally Local Weavers: either place a weaver from the supply pool at your presence pawn, or move your pawn and any weavers to another enclosure on the map.

Trade in the Commons: pick up a card from the Commons and tuck into one of the columns on your player board. That card allows for secondary actions whenever that matching Conspiracy is activated.

Assemble a Raiding Party: a two step action, move one or more weavers from an Enclosure (spaces on the map adjacent to Mills) into a Mill. This sets up a future sabotage action. Then, activate one of the Raiding Party effects in the Commons. This is the primary means of building your Saboteur Dice Pool. The more raiders you have at the Mill, the more dice you are permitted to roll during a Sabotage operation.

Lastly, you may Incite a Mob, placing a Mob Tile next to an adjacent Mill. For a sabotage roll to be successful, the die rolls must match an icon depicted on the Mob tile – hammer, gun, or torch.

Grant: What type of secondary effects come from cards tucked into the Column on Player Boards?

Yoni: Once you use a Trade conspiracy to move a card from the Commons to your tableau (your “Secret Society”), you can activate it, along with any other card in that same column on your player board, every time you resolve that conspiracy action. This allows for chaining and sequencing a series of effects that may have significant impact on your objective to destroy the mills.

Grant: Can you show us a few examples and explain their use?

Yoni: For example, let’s say you are George Mellor and you are seeking to assassinate the manufacturer. You resolve the Trade conspiracy to take “Dispatch Delegates to Neighbouring Counties” and place it in your Trade column, meaning it will be available to you immediately after this primary action. In previous turns you’ve already acquired an ongoing ability, “Mellor Takes a Shot at Mr. Horsfall!”, giving you an extra die for Assassination roles (helpful, since these operations are so risky!). You activate “Dispatch Delegates…” to activate a Raiding Party effect (the bottom of the card) in the Commons, which happens to be your partner in crime, “Martha Mellor Defends the Accused.” She allows you to roll for Assassination, but will be removed from play once that effect is resolved.

Grant: How does Sabotage and Assassinations work in the game?

Yoni: At various points in the game, players may elect to roll for Sabotage or Assassination. Of course, certain maneuvers must take place for these brazen attacks to succeed. Sabotages are larger scale events and are aimed at the Mills. You must have assembled a raiding party at the Mill and incited a Mob to spurn them on. As mentioned above, you roll one die per weaver cube at the Mill and attempt results matching the icons on the Mobs you’ve placed. The dice are D6s with the following faces: 3 blanks (a miss), 1 Torch, 1 Gun, and 1 Hammer. So with one Mob tile matching one of those icons, each die you roll has a 1 in 6 chance of hitting. If all three Mobs are in place, the odds climb to 1 in 2 per die. 

An assassination is a similar roll, but only one die may be cast and hits are only the gun or hammer. Beware, the Regency will respond with a draw from its deck for both sabotage and assassination rolls!

Grant: What are you most pleased about with the design?

Yoni: As Dan Thurot noted, “The Nights of King Ludd points toward a more experimental direction than Chicago ‘68 and I feel it reflects a degree of growth and maturation as a designer. It’s a game that seeks to capture both the panoramic view of a people’s struggle as well as sketching out the personal incentives that motivate individual participation in (and sometimes sacrifice for) a collective cause”. 

Grant: What other games are you currently working on?

Yoni: I am currently working on a commission for an international art exhibition on “sociopolitical freefall.” This will be a smaller box game and will also be developed by Joe Dewhurst. I’m also co-designing a project about Mai ‘68 with Fred Serval. This game is about the French experience of student and labor riots in 1968. While it shares the themes of Chicago ‘68 it’s driven by a completely new system.

If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd

-Grant

Mit Die Legenden von Andor wagte Michael Menzel den Schritt vom Illustrator zum Autor. Die Abenteuer des Robin Hood führten ihn auf geheimen Wegen in den Sherwood Forest. Nun kündigt er ein neues Abenteuer an. Mit Batman – Gotham City

Der Beitrag Auf Schurkenjagd mit Batman erschien zuerst auf brettspielblog.ch.

We have played several games designed by Adam Starkweather in his Company Scale System (CSS). These games are really good solid chit draw systems that really puts some unknown in what groups of units can activate and even when they will activate. There are also events and if the chit cup runs dry before all of the units can activate due to the end round chit then you are just sore out of luck. You have to prepare for this inevitability and I love the concept of prioritizing your activations and making sure you activate what you absolutely have to before doing those units that would be beneficial to activate. Now Adam has created his own publishing company called Bring it on Games and they have announced their first pre-order game in a new system called Advanced Company Scale System Game One: Anzio: A Lost Opportunity. This is a huge wargame and includes 10 large maps, 20 counter sheets and tons and tons of charts, tables and player aids. This is a MONSTER wargame…no doubt about it but it looks really good. I reached out to Adam to see if he could provide us some additional insight into the game and he was more than willing to discuss with us.

If you are interested in Advanced Company Scale System Game One: Anzio: A Lost Opportunity, you can pre-order a copy for $350.00 from the Bring it on Games website at the following link: Shop — Bring it on Games

Grant: Adam welcome to our blog. First off please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?

Adam: First off, my hearty thanks to The Players’ Aid crew for giving me the opportunity to introduce myself and tell you about my new adventure.

As my waistline will attest, my hobbies and interests are decidedly sedentary. I love watching basketball and baseball (go Knicks – had a great year). And several years ago, I decided to rekindle – ha! – my love of reading. For many years, for work, I read non-fiction. But now, every night before I crash, I read for fun for a half hour.  Currently, I’m reading both for work and for fun as I am journeying through Stephen King’s multiverse with a goal of making a game on it. I have an inside to get to King, and I’m hoping I can get him to glance at it and spark some interest. It will be decidedly war gamey in its presentation.

Believe it or not, for over 20 years, I have been blessed that wargame design has been my main gig and what I do for work. With over 50 titles that I’ve designed, developed, or project managed, it has been a productive period for me in the hobby.

Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed most about the experience thus far? What have you learned about design over the years?

Adam: A day I remember well. 3 friends and I were playing SPI’s Highway to the Reich, and it just fell apart while we were playing it. Things were happening that just didn’t make sense, and it wasn’t balanced. Once that suspension of disbelief is done, we wargamers just bail on a game. We thought we could do better. All four of us started making a Market-Garden game, but only I kept with it, and my first design The Devil’s Cauldron, was the result 7 years later. As for enjoying what I do, there are occasional hiccups, of course, but I have a dream job. I’m like a professional NBA player – doing something that is tons of fun, and I get paid to do it. I’m the luckiest man in the world.

As for what I’ve learned, of course, I’ve learned how to design – often under tremendous time pressure, but if I had to name one thing, it is knowing what I’m good at and when I need help. I’m great at coming up with new concepts and innovative mechanics, but I can’t research worth a damn nor do I have the patience to rewrite rules again and again. With my new company Bring it on Games, I have both the time and assets to attack my weaknesses and focus on what I do well – and love doing. I have dedicated researchers, dedicated rules editors, and dedicated playtesters. I finally have the time to do a game the right way.

Grant: What is your upcoming game ACSS Anzio about?

Adam: My first game for my new company is on the Battle of Anzio. It is at company level and at 500 meters a hex. It has two campaign games in the box – one for Operation Shingle (the landing and advance inward to the furious German counterattack) and Operation Buffalo – the final breakout and advance to Rome. The middle months in which a World War One type situation happened is not in the game. Two massive campaign games and some 20 smaller scenarios are included.

Grant: What does the subtitle “A Lost Opportunity” represent from the history?

Adam: It is likely for such a famous operation that most people reading this know that Anzio presented an opportunity to end the Italian Front with an aggressive approach to the battle.  Instead, the General in charge (Lucas) was tentative and did not advance with the aggression needed. In all my research, I have found that it wasn’t entirely his fault, but it wasn’t a time to be tentative. In the Campaign game, you can try and defeat the Germans with the hand you were historically dealt, or there is an alternative scenario (aptly called “Killer Whale”) where the restrictions on your aggressiveness are removed, and perhaps you can end the Italian battle in two weeks.

There were also missed opportunities in the second campaign in the box. The Allies went for the glory to capture Rome but allowed the Germans to retreat from the Gothic Line mostly intact. The war in Italy was allowed to continue, but again, it didn’t have to be that way. As with Operation Shingle, there is an alternative campaign game in which glory is set aside for a few weeks, and you as the Allies attempt to cut off the German forces and end the war in Italy.

“We were hurling a wild cat on the shore, but all we got was a beached whale.” -Winston Churchill

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest?

Adam: Why Anzio? As is often the case, the subject matter of a game is about work that has already been done.  Why start from scratch if months of work have already been done? My historian worked on a game for another designer several years ago and had a great Order of Battle for the game. There was plenty of game in the battle, so Anzio it became. Utah Beach is likely next up for my company as I’ve already made the Grand Tactical Series game on the battle. So I have a complete order of battle and map already made. After that, or before that, might be Salerno. A gamer has already made the game using another system, but the conversion would be easy enough. And of course, a game for ACSS will be on Market-Garden. I have already made a game at this scale.  Years of work have already been done. This also gives me time to start fresh on new topics like Omaha Beach or Gela – they become the game with work already done and join the conga line.

Grant: What is your design goal with the game?

Adam: Oh that’s easy. I want to finally be able to make the best company level game I can make. GTS was made when I was a novice and CSS was made when I was under tremendous time pressure. I have both the expertise and the time to do it right this time.

Grant: How have you modified the Company Scale System to become “Advanced”? 

Adam: I started work on this a few years back and called it ACSS. The name stuck with me, and I kept it. It keeps Eric Smith’s brilliant combat system and is a chit pull, but much has also been improved and changed. I think I answer much of the realism issues of both systems with ACSS.

I have the rules available online for anyone to read – simply go to rules and you can read it and see where we are at. 3-4 more edits still to go, but it is more complete than anything I’ve made before, even as it sits now.

As for new stuff and mechanics that my playtesters have said they’ve never seen in a game before – I have two standouts. Situational Awareness matters in this game as does an orders system that influences what and how you do things. They are in the above rules so I won’t go deeply into it – but it has a novel way of presenting Fog of War but still allows for solitaire play. There is much, much more that is new – but those two are mentioned by my playtesters the most.

Grant: What elements do you feel are most important to model from World War II and the Allied invasion of Italy?

Adam: I make wargames, so to me, the most important aspect is to get the history correct and honor those that fought and risked their lives to make a better world for me and my children to live. So the history has to be right and fully immersive. In addition, playing a game on a battle is a different, albeit as involved as reading a book on the battle – but it is also a game. It should have decisions and fun aspects in it to make it fun to play.

Grant: What sources did you consult for the historical details?

Adam: If you go to my website at https://bringitongames.com/, you’ll find everything you need to play an introductory scenario using my system – but if you have a look at the end of the scenario book you can download, you’ll see the extensive bibliography for the game. As an aside, over the last 25 or so years of game design, it is really interesting to see how the web has become indispensable in researching military topics.

Grant: What one must-read source would you recommend?

Adam: I asked this very question of my historian a few months ago.  He suggested:

Anzio 1944, The beleaguered beachhead, Osprey Publishing Campaign #155, Steven J. Zaloga, 2008, ISBN 978-1-84176-913-4

Although I’m partial to:

Fatal Decision, Anzio and the Battle for Rome, Carlo D’Este, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-057649-3

A more involved read and perhaps not as great for wargamers as the Osprey volume, but I think the added effort is worth the trouble.

Grant: What is the scale of the game? Force structure of units?

Adam: As with my other company level systems, ACSS is 500 meters a hex, mostly company level units, and each turn is 2 hours. It is a scale I’ve used for two decades and I’m comfortable at this level. In addition, I fell in love with this scale because it offers both tactical mechanics but you can play an entire battle (although you’ll need space and time of course).

The system uses a chit-draw method to activate units and this is at division level. You draw a chit and do things with an entire division and then move to the next chit.

Grant: What are the differences between the playable factions of the Allies and Axis powers?

Adam: At this level of company actions, the difference between the two armies is quite evident. The Germans have fantastic equipment but are brittle, while the Allies have so much firepower at their disposal. To show one example of what you can show at this scale: the Germans based their tactical dogma on their excellent MG 42 machine gun, while the Americans based their tactics on the excellent Garand rifle. They each operated differently – and I can show this at this scale. Many other aspects from more effective counter-battery fire to specialized tactics are also there. Check out the rulebook above and you’ll see.

Grant: What is the layout of the board?

Adam: Almost all monster games focus on the campaign game, and the scenarios are snippets of the larger campaign game. That is certainly true of my large games. For me at least, it was always a matter of speed. I could test scenarios while I tested the campaign game. My scenarios often started when the campaign game started.  There are a few exceptions to this where the scenarios are the primary game, and the campaign game is the added bonus. Games like Pacific War by Victory Games are like this. 

I, however, want to have both scenarios and the campaign games have equal importance. Each scenario has its own counter set and its own map. The map size goes from 8 1/2 inches for the introductory scenarios, to one map for the majority of intermediate and advanced scenarios, to two maps for a larger game experience. Finally, there are the two full campaign games, which each have 4 full-sized maps and two half maps – a total of 5 maps.  But there are some ten double-sided maps in the game (a total of 20 maps) – this is a map for each scenario and a campaign game map.

Grant: How are units activated? Why do you feel chit-pull is such an effective method?

Adam: I love chit-pull as a mechanic and have used it for decades. It has the advantage of being great for solo play. There is the drawback that if you have a lot of players, you might have to wait for your turn to come up – although there are ways around this that I talk about in the rulebook, I find the great advantage of board games over computer games is the social aspect of playing them.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?

Adam: A great question. When I first open a game, there are two things I look at first. The Sequence of Play and the victory conditions. They tell me more about the general concepts behind the game than anything else. Of course, a far more complete Sequence of Play is in the rulebook that you can download, but the basic SoP that is used in the VASSAL module is:

But check out the rules for a much more exhaustive Sequence of Play.

As for victory conditions, I blatantly steal from great designers that have great victory conditions – in concept. Some designers just know how to make victory conditions that drive a game and allow for incredible excitement in play. There are some 21 scenarios in the game, and I use different types of victory conditions in each and every one. I did the same thing to a lesser degree in my Greatest Day game. But whatever type of game you like, I’ll have you covered in one or more of the scenarios and the campaign game.

As for how the basic mechanics work, I have a ton of examples in the game for you to have a read and see how things work. Check them out.

Grant: Tell me about Bring it on Games. How are you different from other game companies?

Adam: I changed The Players’ Aid’s last question to talk about this a bit. I take the slogan “A Game Company run by Gamers” seriously. As we have aged, what we expect from games has changed. The games are expensive, but while we all, hopefully, have more money now, we have less time and less patience. I used to love reading rules, but now it is like pulling teeth – it is painful to get into a game. This game and all that follow are about making the games convenient and easy to approach. It is expensive for sure for all of this added stuff that you haven’t seen before – but again, we have more money but less time. You’ll see things here that will make you wonder why all the companies don’t do this.

Also, I don’t want to be GMT or MMP. I want to make games. I won’t have a warehouse, so only orders will be printed. Once I go to press, the game will be out of print. I’ll also limit the total number of orders I will accept. I like making the games. I don’t want to spend my time with all the company stuff. Trust me when I tell you that the owners of all the game companies aren’t having as much fun in the hobby as you are – they are busy running a company, tracking inventory, and all that stuff. I don’t enjoy that very much. So I’ll give up selling games after they print and keep having fun.

I hope you’ll go to my website at www.bringitongames.com and download the sample rules and Vassal set – and see if it’s your thing. I’d love your support. You can also subscribe to my newsletter. And I apologize in advance if you, as more than a few gamers have said to me, “you’ve ruined GTS and CSS for me”.

If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me at:

Email: adam@bringitongames.com

Discord: https://discord.gg/tRSUe2Tr

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/843702163901347

BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/470818/anzio-a-lost-opportunity

Comsimworld: https://talk.consimworld.com/WebX?14@@.1de55d9f/60

Thanks so much for your time in answering our questions Adam. I am very much looking forward to this system and wish you the best of luck in bringing it across the finish line. I have very much enjoyed my experience with the Company Scale System (Saipan: The Bloody Rock and The Enemy is at the Gates: Battle for Berlin, 1985 both from Compass Games) as well as the Grand Tactical Series (Devil’s Cauldron and Where Eagle’s Dare both from Multi-Man Publishing) and very much enjoy the feel of the game and the combat system.

If you are interested in Advanced Company Scale System Game One: Anzio: A Lost Opportunity, you can pre-order a copy for $350.00 from the Bring it on Games website at the following link: Shop — Bring it on Games

-Grant

As you know, I do love me a good Card Driven Game….or a game that uses cards….multi-use cards. I love cards because it allows for the designer to keep a game going while using a vehicle that incorporates special rules that fit a historical situation but also to be able to use bits of the history itself to teach the players about the topic. A few months ago, I caught wind that The Dietz Foundation was working again with Yoni Goldstein on his second game called The Nights of King Ludd: The Luddite War on Industry, 1811-? that recently launched on Kickstarter (the game has already funded). The Nights of King Ludd is a 2-4 player game that deals with direct oath-sworn secret societies of English Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the English Midlands. Working together, players will build a secret network of saboteurs, ferry provisions and weapons on the black market, assemble raiding parties, and if all goes as planned, smash those “dark satanic mills” to cinders. I reached out to Yoni to get a bit more information about the design and he was more than willing to share.

If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd

Grant: Yoni welcome back to our blog. What have been your feelings about the reception of your great game Chicago ‘68?

Yoni: I’ve joked that I’ve taught this game now more than I’ve played it (of course this is only true if one just counts the last couple years!). Since 2024, I’ve taught it to a diverse and intergenerational cohort of non gamers, grognards, peace activists, veterans, and even a few spooks. Inevitably players relate the experience they are having on the board to what they see in their neighborhoods: protests and tear gas, troops deployed into cities, election interference, and so on. Those conversations are still ongoing and I’m heartened that Chicago ‘68 is facilitating a space for that.

Grant: What lessons did you learn from that experience that have helped you with your new game?

Yoni: I’m grateful that Joe Dewhurst, who developed both Chicago ‘68 and the upcoming The Nights of King of Ludd, guided me through the design, testing, and development processes. Ludd is my second game and it went through a number of iterations, but this time we had a proper methodology in place. Likewise, The Dietz Foundation was very transparent with the manufacturing and publishing side of things, which gave me a deeper understanding of the timeline and proofing / editing process that accompanies those final stages of production.

Grant: What is your new upcoming game The Nights of King Ludd about?

Yoni: The Nights of King Ludd is a collaborative game for 2-4 players about the Luddite revolts in the English Midlands. Set roughly around 1811, the game tells the story of local workers in the textile industry (“weavers”) forming secret societies and leading armed raids against mills and factories in their communities. Players command an oath-sworn organization of conspirators working with the Luddites to achieve the collective goal of machine wrecking while also attempting to meet their individual motivations (which may include assassinating the local manufacturer, spurring a republican revolution, or just avoiding an Australian exile).

In terms of game mechanics, you are building a dice pool while also maneuvering pieces and collecting multi-use cards to modify your roles. Collectively you are building a tableau and operating it together to mount a series of raids against the three Mills on the map.

Grant: What is the meaning of the title of the game? What should it convey to players about the game and the history it represents?

Yoni: The title of the game is borrowed from a chapter in Gavin Mueller’s book from 2021, Breaking Things at Work. Mueller is among a cohort of authors, including Kirkpatrick Sales (Rebels Against the Future), Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine) and Cory Doctorow, who are working to reconsider the Luddites’ reputation in the age of AI and the gig economy. Rather than seeing them as misguided revolts against the inevitability of technological progress, these writers appraise the Luddites in their historical context as severely desperate labor movements against tech oligarchies. The Luddites’ aims were, ultimately, to raise the minimum wage, cease child labor, and to maintain a higher standard of craftsmanship and quality in the production of textile goods. At every point their appeals to authority were spurned. So they turned to mob justice. “You may call the people a mob,” remarked Lord Byron before Parliament, “but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.”

The subtitle of the game, “The Luddite War on Industry, 1811-?” is also a cheeky nod to Volko’s Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?. While these games don’t share a mechanical similarity, they both explore the ongoing and unpredictable nature of insurgencies. 

Grant: Why was this a subject you wanted to focus on?

Yoni: My area of interest in game design, broadly speaking, is movement politics on an operational scale. As with Chicago ‘68, the Luddite war on industry feels an under-explored subject matter in historical gaming. While there are certainly titles about the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of barons and magnates (especially in the Euro game niche), little is mentioned about the social, political, and ecological costs of these endeavors for progress. 

Moreover, the story of the Luddites and their “secret societies” is about the tensions of modernity. New technologies combined with extensive wars abroad drove a rise in food costs and detonated an affordability crisis in the imperial homeland. Communication media (handbills, newspaper editorials, and pseudonymous letters) was an instrument of persuasion, vitriol, and threats. Suspected Luddites and their sympathizers were surveilled by the state, which increasingly saw its interests entwined with industrial capital. We’ve seen this all before! 

Grant: What are the unique features with the system used for the game?

Yoni: The Nights of King Ludd has a unique framework for collaborative engine building. Initially, players draw from “The Commons” (a shifting card pool) where each card has the same “trade cost.” On your turn, you may activate a Conspirator (spending an action point) to draw a card into one of the columns in your tableau. Each column upgrades your actions with a permanent ability. If you specialize your actions, you can harmonize a collective strategy between players and hone in on the steps you need to take to sabotage the mills. 

In the Commons we are evoking the notion of a shared economy. But this may shift dramatically when decreasing wages and increasing productivity converge. Then, the Commons transforms into the “Common Market.” Now, players are building their tableaux with an increasing cost, similar to the Pax Series (for example, Pax Pamir or Pax Renaissance). Each player is now facing a decision: overwork their cabal of conspirators or draw on the labor power of the workers in the textile industry (which drains their militant power on the map).

Grant: What does the collaborative portion of the subtitle mean for the game? How do the players cooperate?

Yoni: I choose “collaborative” not “cooperative” as a descriptor to emphasize the multi-victor nature of the game. In The Nights of King Ludd, each player chooses not only their persona and their role in the Luddite struggle (with asymmetric abilities and effects), they also put forward a “Motivation.” Motivations are personal victory conditions that unlock if the collective win condition (destroying all three mills on the map) is met. This gives shape to the degree of player friction in the game. For example, Lord Byron’s motivation is to turn down the heat from the ruling Regency. His motivation is in conflict with George Mellor’s, the famed assassin, whose attempts at the Manufacturer’s life will ratchet up the crown’s crackdown. But pair John Baines, a republican agitator, with the Molyneux sisters, two young women destined to labor in the mills, and the gameplay will tilt more toward cooperation. In this case, Baines is working to regulate the industriousness of the mill (keeping productivity low and wages high) while the Sisters are interested in keeping workers employed. So the degree of cooperation is up to the players, and as often happens, someone may have to make a noble sacrifice for the collective good.

Grant: What did you need to model regarding the English Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution?

Yoni: As EP Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class) notes, the history of the Luddites is, at best, “opaque.” We are grappling with a story about secret societies in an era where workers associations were illegal and damaging weaving frames was a capital offence. As such, we have dubious claims from government spies, confessions before “hanging judges,” and pseudonymous letters and handbills. Consequently, the model had to be expansive enough to capture the granular nature of these conspiratorial operations, but also open enough to allow for the plausibility of a broad range of player actions.

For example, one of the core actions is to “rally local weavers,” which is a form of recruitment. In game terms, this means moving one of the Employed Weaver cubes into an Enclosure where they can contribute to your force strength. This action may represent members of your secret society swearing in sympathetic workers in local pubs, or calling a clandestine meeting in the nearby woods. We don’t know precisely how the Luddites organized themselves, so the language has to be inclusive of these possibilities. Players then “assemble a raiding party”, which is to move the cubes from the enclosure into a nearby Mill. Each cube in the Mill space adds a die to the Sabotage roll (which is the primary means of wrecking machines). So here is a group of raiders hiding in the hedge and awaiting the signal from King Ludd. They are spurred on by the Mobs who have surrounded the site, represented by these Mob tiles. Matching a die roll to the symbol on the Mob Tile is how you roll a “hit.” The intention is to shape a series of amorphous and difficult to historicize chain of events into a familiar wargaming mechanism: rolling a handful of dice representing an “attack” and applying modifiers to the results.

Grant: What is your design goal with the game?

Yoni: My overall aim was to develop a system that could express a relationship between an abstract economic system, worker uprisings, and the coming together of industry and aristocracy to form a ruling class. But on a purely design level, I wanted to work within the framework of a Pax Series style market that you encounter in games like Pax Pamir and Pax Renaissance. That is, a shifting market of cards that players can purchase and place into their tableau. It’s an evocative description of history as a bazaar of possibilities and counterfactuals. The Nights of King Ludd tweaks this vision of history as somewhere between a commons (a gift economy) and a market (which costs worker power as in-game resources).

But really, I want this to be a “raiding party game.” Beneath the heady layers of history and theory is a brisk experience featuring dice odds, clever combos, and cooperation with your friends (while slyly pushing your own agenda!).

Grant: What other games did you use as inspiration?

Yoni: John Company from Wehrlegig Games is certainly one of the biggest inspirations, taking place in a similar era of British imperial economic imperialism (Ludd is at the tail end of JoCo’s later scenarios) and drawing on the satirical printworks of the time. Like John Company, players are asked to intervene in an existing ecosystem. In both games, player actions accelerate a system that will simultaneously reward and punish everyone at the table. How this is doled out is uneven, so players have to weave and dodge to make best of a collapsing infrastructure. 

Grant: What sources did you consult about the history?

Yoni: An invaluable resource for all things Luddite is the Luddite Bicentenary curated by Richard Holland. This is a comprehensive digital archive of historical ephemera devoted to Luddism, including handbills, court transcripts, and other images and texts. I also quote extensively from Rebels Against the Future by Kilpatrick Sale and The Risings of the Luddites: Chartists and Plug-Drawers by Frank Peel, E.P. Thompson, as well as The Making of the English Working Class also by E.P. Thompson.

Other reference texts include: 

Writings of the Luddites edited by Kevin Binfield

Ben o’ Bill’s, The Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale by Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes, George Henry Walker

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller

The Luddite Rebellion by Brian Bailey

Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

Women in Protests 1800-1850 by Malcolm Thomis

Convict Lives at the Launceston Female Factory (A swing rioter: Elizabeth Studham by Keryn Rivett), edited by Lucy Frost & Meredith Hodgson,

Grant: What is the dice pool building mechanic and how does it work in the design?

Yoni: At the core of the game is a fairly straightforward dice mechanic for resolving raids against the three mills on the map. Throughout the course of the round, players add “saboteur dice” to the dice pool, representing the Luddite’s militant capacity. These are D6’s with the following icons: gun, hammer, and torch (matching the “mobs tiles” – armed rabble surrounding the mill). The remaining three sides are blank and always result in a miss.

When a sabotage operation is initiated, the number of dice rolled is determined by the number of raiders you’ve positioned at the mill and what constitutes a possible hit is determined by the matching icons on the nearby mob tiles (again; gun, hammer, or torch). All misses are returned to supply but if at least one hit is rolled, you may push on and carry out multiple raids, striking at other mills as well.  

As your readers can deduce, the purpose of the tableau building and the card engine is to modify the odds of the roll in your favor, i.e. the more raiders you assemble the more dice you will roll, and the more mobs you’ve fomented the more likely you are to roll a hit.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?

Yoni: As neighboring societies of Luddites, you have three rounds before the Crown musters its army and crushes the revolts. Each round is structured the same: 

1. Dawn: Industry Operates – at the beginning of the second and third round your adversaries in London will take actions against you, sending the militia on patrols and accelerating industrial production.

2. Day: The Manufacturer Speculates – during this phase, the local manufacturer will take an action, depleting the Commons of its resources.

3. Night: The Luddites Conspire – this is the main phase of the game, where each player takes turns resolving a Conspiracy action by spending a Ready Conspirator cube on their boards. Each player takes a primary Conspiracy Action and resolves any secondary effects on Cards tucked into the Column of that Conspiracy on their Player Boards. In this phase, players can attempt a sabotage roll to destroy the Mills.
   
4. Round’s End – when there are no Ready Conspirators (or all players pass) players reset the components for the next round. 

Thank you for your time in answering our questions Yoni! I am very much interested in this game and its efforts to tell this very interesting story of resistance. While this is not a traditional wargame, in my opinion it certainly merits a serious look from wargamers who are interested in CDG’s and games that use cards and that are interested in seeing these type of non-traditional historical subjects represented. I have backed the project and look forward to getting my copy next year!

If you are interested in The Nights of King Ludd, you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dietzfoundation/the-nights-of-king-ludd

In Part II of the interview, we will dive more into the makeup and uses of the card, concepts of Breaking the Oath, profit and market manipulation.

-Grant

Ein Autor, drei Auszeichnungen: Reiner Knizia ist der erste Mensch, der das Spiel, Kennerspiel und Kinderspiel des Jahres gewonnen hat. Im Triple-Interview verrät er, dass er Besteck aus Flugzeugen klaut, zum Einschlafen Witzbücher liest und sich über unprofessionelle Verlage ärgert. Reiner Knizia hat als erster Autor die drei wichtigsten Auszeichnungen der Brettspielbranche gewonnen: das Spiel, Kennerspiel und Kinderspiel des Jahres. 2008 gelang ihm das Double. Damals gewann er mit Keltis das Spiel, und mit Wer war’s? das Kinderspiel des Jahres. Knapp zwanzig Jahre später komplettierte er das Triple. Das Kennerspiel des Jahres 2026 wurde Rebirth. Wir haben ihm passend dazu

Quelle

A few years ago, I came across this interesting looking wargame from a new company Cadet Games called They Were Soldiers: Battle of the Ia Drang Valley that was heading to Kickstarter at the time. The game was a 2-player turn-based operational level design based on the battle for LZ X-Ray during the larger Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam, 1965. Since that successful campaign, Cadet has designed and completed several other successful campaigns including Nguyen Hue ’72: The 1972 Easter Offensive in Vietnam, Linebacker II: The Historic B-52 Strikes Against North Vietnam, Armies & Alliances: Arnhem ‘44 – Operation Market Garden and Armies & Alliances: Blitzkrieg ’40 – The Battle for France.

They recently announced their next Kickstarter project that would take their system to the Anglo-Boer War called The Great Anglo-Boer War: The Battle for South Africa 1899-1902. The game is currently on Kickstarter and I reached out to my contact there Kevin Talley who acts as one of the Developers on the team for his input into the design to give us a better picture of how this new game plays.

If you are interested in The Great Anglo-Boer War: The Battle for South Africa 1899-1902 you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/647106057/the-great-anglo-boer-war

Grant: What is the focus of your new upcoming game called The Great Anglo-Boer War?

Kevin: The Great Anglo-Boer War is a grand-strategic level game of the war between the British Empire and the Boer Republics in South Africa from 1899 to 1902.

Grant: Who is the designer and what is their goal with the game?

Kevin: As with all of our designs, R.J. Mills is the designer. He has always been fascinated with the Boer War and the goal was to make a really good hex-and-counter wargame to cover the whole conflict.

Grant: What is important to model from the history of the Anglo-Boer War?

Kevin: Well, the Boer War was very unique. It began as an asymmetric conventional contest in 1899 between the relatively small citizen militia forces of the two Boer Republics (they had no standing professional armies) and nearly the entire army of the British Empire! Then, once the Empire had captured both Boer capitals in 1900, the Boers refused to surrender and instead decided to fight a guerrilla war (and that went on for 2 more years). So, given the dynamics of this truly unique conflict, making a realistic game presented some serious design challenges. The design had to accurately simulate the conventional period, where the fractional Boer forces soundly defeated the British in several key battles during the early months, and it also had to credibly represent the guerrilla phase of the war, where very small numbers of Boers roamed (often unseen) and raided (always with surprise) throughout a vast area nearly twice the size of Texas. For this phase, the Empire forces had 250,000 troops deployed unsuccessfully trying to defeat 20,000 guerrillas! It all ended (finally) 31 May, 1902, with the Treaty of Vereeniging.

Grant: What other games inspired this design?

Kevin: We had not intended to make a Boer War game here at Cadet until after we started seeking a good grand-strategic/operational game about the Boer War to play. We got the “Boer War bug” playing Geoff Noble’s Redver’s Reverse: The Battle of Colenso, 1899 from Legion Games and decided we wanted to play a game of the whole war. We had pledged the KS Campaign for Joseph Miranda’s The Boer War from Canvas Temple Publishing and were hopeful, but it wasn’t what we’d hoped for in the end. Then we tried all the other Boer War games out there, or at least those we knew about, but there just wasn’t a good, realistic, strategic level/operational game of the whole war – especially not with the kind of depth we were looking for. We wanted something more like Nick Karp’s Vietnam: 1965-1975 from Victory Games – but for the Boer War – something with that kind of simulative value, historical chrome and especially guerrilla war operational mechanics. The closest thing we found was the old 3W game from 1991 (Eric Faust and Lew Fisher) called The Boer War. It had a lot of what we were looking for, but it was under-developed, errata-riddled and had too many issues to list. Still, that game had some brilliant design ideas, so we decided to start with that framework and make our own game. We were surprised that this topic didn’t have more published games already.

Grant: How did warfare change during the Victorian Age? How did you capture these changes?

Kevin: The British Army was fighting in drill book formations all the way through the 19th century. Consider that, just a year before in 1898 at Omdurman, the infantry stood in close order (just like in the movie Zulu), easily repelling the 50,000-strong army of the Khalifa with Lee-Metford volleys, Maxims and quick-firing breech loading artillery. This all worked very well when the enemy had swords, spears or primitive firearms. But the Boers had Mausers. And Krupps. And Maxims! Tactics had to evolve to meet this new level of lethality and the British Army was not initially prepared to face an enemy that was equipped with the same weapons as they. And an enemy that chose trenches and concealment – inflicting severe losses on British troops in drill formations. The combat system in the game realistically models the advantages of entrenchments, terrain, unit formation posture, night marches and even artillery effects. The Boers on defense can be very tough. A typical attack will be costly. Best to use open order and artillery to great effect – even better to use maneuver and avoid the prepared defense altogether. It took the British some time to learn their lessons.

Grant: What sources were consulted for the historical details?

Kevin: The bibliography for the game is included in section 26 of the rulebook. We used 20+ books on the topic to get the information for the design, and of course those include all the most important works published about the war: Rayne Kruger, Pakenham, Farwell, Arthur Conan Doyle (who was there), Barthorp, Reitz (a famous Boer Journal of the war), Maurice’s official history, Amery (Times history) and more. Someone who has researched the war and knows the historiography will truly appreciate this game.

Grant: What is the scale of the game? Force structure of units?

Kevin: The map scale is 9 miles to a hex. The map is huge. 34″ x 44″ on the table. The unit scale can be as little as a half battalion on the Empire side (500 men) and a single commando element of as few as 333 for the Boers. But the system is so flexible that a single leader’s counter in a hex on the map could represent as many as 30,000 Empire soldiers (with supporting artillery) and up to 13,320 Boers with several batteries of their guns as well. The game scale works for both large conventional battles (early war) and small guerrilla actions (later war).

Grant: What is the layout and anatomy of the counters?

Kevin: The counters are the typical ½” variety, printed on both sides. There are Entrenchment markers that, when flipped, double as “Scorched Earth” markers; Rail markers (early war) that also double as Blockhouse Line markers (guerrilla phase); Boer Control markers that can also be used as Strength Point counters; Number markers that flip to various increments; dozens of Empire Detachment markers which flip to show either Infantry or Cavalry or Artillery Strength Points (and the rotated position of these markers indicates the detachment strength in the hex); Armoured Train unit counters; Supply Wagon unit counters; Unit Status markers for multiple conditions like Retreated, Disordered, Demoralized, Invasion VP’s and more; and of course the Empire and Boer Leader counters, which are the basic units of maneuver in the game.

Grant: What different types of units are available to both sides?

Kevin: A Leader counter on the map typically indicates a ‘Force’ (which is a leader and the Strength Points of soldiers and artillery in their command) for both sides. These Forces are the maneuver units that move around on the map. There are also Detachments, which are Strength Points of soldiers and artillery without a leader (these secure and patrol an area, with a ZOC but without the counter moving). The Empire Strength Points can be Infantry, Cavalry or Artillery, with each point equating to 500 soldiers or a battery of field guns. The Boers are basically all mounted infantry militia, with each Strength Point representing 333 Boers or one battery of their artillery. The Empire also has Armoured Train units (we kept the English spelling), which function as ‘line of communication’ forces that police Empire-controlled rail lines. The Boers also have their Republic Presidents (Steyn and Kruger) and their small government staffs, which serve to score Victory Points by avoiding capture and maintaining their presence as head of state, either in their capitals or out on the veldt.

Grant: What is the off-map Arrow/Wheel used for?

Kevin: There are “Unit Displays” for both sides. These typically show a small picture of the Leader next to a pair of Strength Point numbered ‘wheels’. The players use counters with little arrows on them to indicate on the ‘wheels’ how many SP’s of soldiers are in a Leader’s Force, with any artillery batteries indicated by using a number marker. This keeps the counter-density on the map low, since the battalions, regiments, batteries or commandos are indicated using these off-map strength displays, and only the Leader’s counter moves on the map.

Grant: What was the inspiration for this mechanism?

Kevin: This came from the 3W game. Some players dislike this method for managing unit strength, and it took some getting used to, but we eventually decided it was the best mechanic we had seen in any design for this aspect of the game. Now we love it. Especially because of the flexibility it allows once the war changes from conventional to guerrilla. Historically the forces changed from divisions and brigades fighting large Boer commandos to much smaller columns of Empire troops chasing small Boer units of a few hundred all over the map.

Grant: How does it show the importance of Leaders in the game?

Kevin: I think this whole method of organizing the armies of both sides by each “Leader’s Force” really works perfectly to simulate the Boer War. It matches the real history. Everything a Force does boils down to the influence and command capabilities of the Leader. And forces of widely varying strength and unit composition were assigned to different leaders on both sides at different times throughout the conflict.

Grant: What is the Leader specific initiative rating system? How does it aid in your telling of the Anglo-Boer War?

Kevin: A Leader has to ‘roll for initiative’ to do most actions. Each Leader has an initiative rating which either helps or hurts their odds of a successful die roll, and the ratings are based on the historical performance of that Leader. This represents more than simply a Leader’s tendency to act decisively or not, but also his relative command influence for scarcity of resources, typical Victorian-era officer rivalries, orders and communications variables, bad intelligence and other typical “frictions” of war. The history of the war is full of instances where orders didn’t get communicated, sometimes weren’t given at all, or were ignored. Battles were lost many times because this leader or that failed to act on their own initiative or had some other priority override their commander’s intent. There are some Leaders whose rating is so good, they can nearly always do anything the player wants (and those are almost exclusively Boers). Other Leaders are reliably ineffective, and special care must be taken by the players to choose the right missions for these people. The realism of the design is greatly enhanced by this aspect – a player might have a great plan, but there is no guarantee that their Leaders will enact it. As Lord Roberts said after the battle at Poplar Grove, “In war you can’t expect everything to come out right.”

Grant: What is the layout of the game board?

Kevin: The Game Map contains almost all of the area of the war, from the eastern Transvaal and much of Swaziland and Zululand all the way to the Kalahari desert in the west; from 150 miles west of Port Elizabeth on the coast all the way up past Durban in Natal – and all of the mountains, ridges, rough and veldt of South Africa contained therein. It is a very large area and the map scale is 9 miles per hex. Using .625 hexes (for standard ½” counters), the map is 34″ x 44″ on the table.

Grant: What key terrain features are included and how do they affect maneuver and tactics?

Kevin: The terrain types for hexes include mountain, rough and veldt. Special hexside types can be ridge or river, bridge or rail. The mountain ranges are all there, as are the ridgelines and heights, rivers and rail, towns, ports and capitals. Even the passes and “neks” are indicated. The actual escarpment of the Drakensberg are all mountain hexes, but the Biggarsberg north of Ladysmith, as an example, is treated as ridge-type hexsides with rough terrain hexes. There is a real distinction between mountains and typical rough country/hills. The geography of South Africa was a serious factor in the conduct of the war and the terrain effects for both movement and combat are significant in the game.

A Force attacking across a river hexside is reduced by 50%; a Force attacking across a ridge or into mountains is reduced by 25%; a Force defending in mountain terrain is doubled; a Cavalry Force crossing a river pays 2 extra movement points to do so, while an Infantry Force pays 3; a veldt hex costs 1 point to enter, a rough hex 2, a mountain hex 4, and crossing a ridge hexside adds 2 points. Geography is key. Often, the only way to effectively dislodge an enemy Force from a position is to maneuver them out of it, because the odds for a successful attack are slim based on the terrain. The Tugela River line in Natal is a famous example of a natural fortress, and so it is with the game. To get past a competent Boer defense there, it will take an Empire player who understands the map and the combat system (plus some good dice and a card or two).

Grant: What type of cards are included? Can you share a few examples.

Kevin: The cards are great. Mostly they modify the combat odds or DR’s by providing for an odds-column shift or a DR mod for one of the many on the Battle Board (the Empire Attack Scouting Effect, the Artillery Effect or the actual combat DR). But there are also many cards that influence very specific game actions – like evasions or recruiting, siege surrender extensions or supply situations, armoured trains or movement or initiative effects. Some cards influence the unit formation or entrenchment posture during a battle, while some may determine the outcome of night marches. Some are related to intelligence and reveal hidden enemy units or prevent unknown strength in a combat event. Others influence scouting and observation, signals and orders, escapes and ambushes…I could go on.

All the cards were created based on actual events that happened during the war. Here is an excerpt from the Campaign language and the “design notes” section of the rulebook: “The game cards are designed to build historic realism into the game, especially for the combat system. As in all wars, small instances of chance – moments of decisive leadership (or not) – a thunderstorm – an oil-less signals lamp – a wire fence – a flooded drift – a poorly drawn map – a mistaken guide – an enemy surprise…all these historic events and elements of chance are represented in our design by game cards for both sides. We think this adds to the design immensely, since these can account for odds column shifts and DR mods that the players cannot anticipate. Like their historical counterparts, the players cannot know exactly what their odds are until the battle is joined and the card(s) are revealed!”

Grant: How does combat work?

Kevin: The combat system uses an odds-based CRT and a combat die roll to determine battle results, so it is fairly typical of a hex-and-counter wargame. What gives the system the right depth is that combat can happen during the movement as well as the combat phases. Combat can also be initiated by the non-phasing player using a reaction mechanism – so it isn’t nearly as simple or predictable as “I go / You go”. Based on the history, we felt the combat system (even at this scale) needed to incorporate strength ratios, unit tactical formations, weather, visibility, unknown Boer strength, artillery strength and effects for both sides, leadership, scouting and intelligence, terrain, night march outcomes, unit morale, “dummy” defensive positions, entrenchments and more.

Grant: How does the Battle Board work?

Kevin: There are so many effects and modifiers that contribute to the combat system that we decided the only way to keep everything straight was to have a Battle Board. For example, an Empire attack vs. a defending Boer Force would look like this: First, the Force attacking commits their desired number of Strength Points to the battle using the Attacker’s SP display, then the defending Boer unit’s SPs are indicated on their display. Any unit status particulars (Disordered, Demoralized, Retreated) are also indicated. The next step is to see how many unknown Boer SPs there are, so a die is rolled and that number goes on the Board (usually the Empire player cannot know their exact combat odds until after they commit their SPs to the attack because of this “unknown SP” die roll). Then any terrain or supply state modifiers are applied (there are markers for these) for both sides to establish the initial combat odds, and a counter for that ratio is placed in the appropriate box on the odds track (always rounded in favor of the defender). Next, any factors that modify the combat odds are noted and applied (entrenchments, the Empire Attack Scouting Effect DR, any other enemy units in the attacker’s ZOC, a Demoralized defender, any cards – attacker first). Now a marker is placed for the final combat odds on the final odds track. The last bit is to calculate what modifier (if any) is going to apply to the combat DR. The Artillery Effect is determined with a DR, if the Empire is using a night march there is another DR, the Empire Force’s Leader combat rating is applied, if the attack is made from a rail-move ZOC it matters, and finally any cards that modify the DR – attacker first. Once the Battle Board has been completely and correctly configured, the combat die is rolled and the CRT consulted to determine the result. The Battle Board is really essential to keep track of all of it.

Grant: What role does scouting and intelligence play in the game?

Kevin: The British generals were famously ignorant of the Boer dispositions in the early battles, for they had almost no intelligence organization in their army corps and they were especially short on mounted troops for effective scouting. The Empire Attack Scouting Effect is built into the combat system to reflect this. If the “E.A.S.E.” DR is greater than the number of Cavalry SP’s in the attacking Force, there is an odds-column shift to the left for the combat on the CRT. Later in the guerrilla phase, there is a “mystery movement” dynamic which keeps the Empire player guessing about which Boer commando markers are real units and which are only decoys. Some of the game cards confer valuable intelligence by allowing the Empire player to reveal a “mystery” commando of their choice (and native spies can help both sides).

Grant: How is artillery used?

Kevin: There is an Artillery Effect Track on the Battle Board which compares the arty strength of the two sides in a battle – whomever wins this comparison gets a modifier that applies to the combat DR. The Boers get a DR to add to their battery count, so even an Empire Force with 8 batteries of guns might not win the Arty Effect Bonus if there are 3 Boer batteries (if they roll a 6, they have 9). This “Boer Arty Effect” DR does not necessarily represent additional unknown batteries/guns, but more simulates the Boer tendency to use superior artillery tactics, multiple prepared positions, gun re-positioning during a battle, indirect fires and hidden gun positions with range and target fire preparation. In addition, the British firepower was often wasted against cunningly prepared “dummy” trenches and positions such that seemingly impressive preparatory fires were completely ineffective. The Boer Arty DR serves to simulate both aspects. The Empire has far greater potential weight of fire, but qualitatively the Boer Arty is superior (as with the historical truth). There are cards for both sides that impact the Artillery Effect for a battle.

Grant; What is the role of Scorched Earth?

Kevin: As the Boers turned more towards guerrilla tactics, the Empire forces began burning farms and killing or confiscating livestock (and especially horses) as reprisals for Boer attacks and to destroy potential shelter and supply sources for the guerrillas. This often resulted in the re-settlement of the Boer women and children in concentration camps, where thousands perished from disease and hunger. There are several game mechanics during the guerrilla phase that simulate this aspect of the war, and one is the “Scorched Earth” program. If the Empire player chooses, they may assign Forces during a game turn to “Scorch” one or more district areas in the Boer Republics. A marker is placed, and Boer movement point costs in that district are doubled, while guerrilla recruiting is halved. Once “Scorched”, a district can no longer provide Boer VP’s during the District Control segment of the VP interphase. But there is a potential cost to this kind of “scorched earth” policy: every turn this is done the Boer rolls a die – if the result is equal to or less than the number of newly “scorched” districts for the turn, the Boers get 5 VP for each. These VP’s reflect negative public opinion, parliamentary outrage and press coverage back in England, as well as increased Boer resentment and dedication to fight to the bitter end to avenge the destruction of their homes and families. The Empire player must balance the military benefits against the possible consequences of the policy (and be careful).

Grant: How does the Attrition Phase work?

Kevin: There is a lot going on during the Attrition and VP interphase. Hundreds of the Boers in just about every Force will simply leave to go home (they are all volunteer militia, not regulars); The Empire may have thousands of losses to typhoid (it was a big deal during the war); Boer family deaths in the concentration camps may cause desertions in the commandos (and uproar back in Britain); Besieged Empire garrisons may suffer losses or surrender; Railheads may advance or be pushed back: Forces might entrench; Unit statuses (like Demoralized units) get updated; VP’s for the game turn are tallied and losses counted, and the totals for the war (or scenario) are arrived at. It gets even busier if a Boer capital has been captured during the turn, as this can drastically increase the number of Boers who choose to “take leave” and go home (low morale). At the end of the phase, the players advance the game turn marker and start the next month of the war.

Grant: How is victory determined?

Kevin: Victory Points are awarded to both sides for all kinds of events. Mostly major or minor battle victories, but also for siege outcomes (relief or surrender), Boer invasions of Empire territory, capture of Leaders and capitals, control of districts, consequences from the scorched earth policy and concentration camps, and even penalties for over-stacking. There is a VP table on the back of the rulebook so the players can double-check during the VP interphase, and there are handy player-turn and interphase record sheets to use as well. Whoever has the most VP’s at the end of the scenario wins, unless an automatic victory for either side ends the contest early.

Grant: What different scenarios are included in the design?

Kevin: There are three scenarios – the Conventional War, the Guerrilla War, and the Grand Campaign Game. Here’s an excerpt from the Campaign language: “The full campaign is the ultimate Boer War experience – from the first desperate siege defenses of 1899 to the treaty of Vereeniging (or maybe not?) – and everything tactical and otherwise in between: Battles, blockhouses, farm-burnings, evasions, escapes, raids, concentration camps, sieges, drives, armoured trains, 1-pdr automatic “pom-poms”, surrenders, entrenchments, typhoid, barbed-wire, native spies, night marches, supply wagons and more. If it was part of the real Boer war – it is in the game.”

Grant: What does the game do well in modeling the Anglo-Boer War?

Kevin: We feel the game succeeds in modeling just about every aspect of the war, but there are a few particulars. Again, from the Campaign language: “For our design, we wanted a more granular scale of both movement and combat than any other strategic-level Boer War game yet published. Rayne Kruger, in chapter 23 of his “Good-Bye Dolly Gray” pointed out that, perhaps more than any other Boer advantage, the Empire was fighting “a war against space.” We ended up having two 22″ x 34″ map sections at 9 miles/hex to pull this off. A very large game on the table – but very typically “Cadet.” As it goes here, bigger is better. More hexes = more realism.”

Also, the Empire forces during the war were especially dependent on the rail lines for supply, while the Boer forces were far less dependent on any supply system to keep their forces in the field. The supply rules in the game really do justice to history, as everything the Empire player wants to do will be substantially constrained by their proximity to a rail line. In fact, some remote districts simply cannot be effectively garrisoned by Empire forces or detachments, because those units will be out of supply. Moreover, the scarcity of draft animals (oxen and mules) during the war meant only a handful of supply wagon units were available to extend an Empire LOS away from any rail line, and so it is with the game. These few substantial wagon convoys are also prime targets for the marauding Boers (as with countless examples from the war).

Grant: What has been the experience of playtesters?

Kevin: The game plays very well, indeed, but there were a few unexpected outcomes from the initial design, especially the combat system. In our first run of the conventional war scenario, we discovered that the “Boer unknown SP DR” mechanic needed a change. The Boers simply fought too well. Every time the Empire committed SP’s to an attack, the Boers would essentially be ‘reinforced’, owing to their unknown SP die roll. It always added SP’s to the Boer Force, since it wasn’t designed to subtract them. True, this kept the Empire player uncertain as to the combat odds until the forces were joined, but it had the effect of representing the Boers as ahistorically disciplined regular troops – prepared to fight to the death and hold their ground even when attacked by 15, 20, or even 30,000 British with 50+ field guns. The Boers just didn’t do that. There are far more examples of the Boer volunteers fleeing in droves from large Empire forces (in spite of exhortations and even threats by their leaders and even presidents) than examples where they stood their ground. In many ways this tendency served to preserve their forces and denied the Empire the showdown battles they hoped for during the second phase of the conventional war. A small rearguard of hardcore Burghers (farmers) would usually hold off the exponentially larger Empire forces, allowing their thousands of fleeing comrades to make their escape. They traded ground for time and blood, almost always avoiding any decisive loss.

So, we amended the rule so the DR can go either way, depending on the size of the attacking Empire force and on another DR modified by the Boer Leader rating of the defending force. This solution made a huge difference and resulted in the historical outcomes we wanted. If you attack Botha with a large Empire Force, he will likely motivate several hundred more Burghers to join the defense. Attack Prinsloo, though, and he’s likely to have several hundred of them (or more) run away before the battle is joined. There is a card in the Empire deck that prevents the unknown SP DR altogether, and now freshly retreated or Demoralized defenders don’t roll either.

Grant: When can we expect the game to be fulfilled?

Kevin: We are optimistic that the community will support our Campaign for this one (gotta get successfully funded first), and we will start the production sample and the rest of the process immediately afterward. Our anticipated timeline is to have the games shipping to the backers by August of next year.

Grant: What projects are in the near future for Cadet Games?

Kevin: We would really like to get our Hamburger Hill game produced. The design is 100% done and it is a really detailed sim of that famous battle. We ran it on Gamefound back in 2025 but it didn’t hit the goal. So, we will likely run that one again to see if we can’t get that produced here sometime soon. We have a ton of other projects in the works, one of which is a solo design covering the Mayaguez incident and the battle for Koh Tang Island from May, 1975. We have been really immersed in the Boer War since the middle of last year, so this one has had almost all of our attention (and still does for now, since we are playing through multiple rounds of the guerrilla phase and all of its intricacies)! We also have Barbarossa ’41 on deck for our Armies & Alliances Series of WWII ‘miniatures and monster map’ designs. Thanks again for helping us get the word out about our passion for military history and wargames!

Thank you for your time in answering our questions Kevin and for the great care you guys are taking with these games to tell a fun and interesting part of history.

If you are interested in The Great Anglo-Boer War: The Battle for South Africa 1899-1902 you can back the project on the Kickstarter page at the following link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/647106057/the-great-anglo-boer-war

-Grant

AllGo ist seit letztem Jahr auf verschiedenen Brettspielmessen unterwegs. Grund genug, sich mit zwei Inhaber zu treffen und ein Interview zu führen. Firmendaten AllGo Games Sébastien Albert-GondrandClaudia Schrapel Sitz in Hainburg Homepage Interview mit AllGo Games – über Gründung und den Traum vom eigenen Verlag Brettspielbox: Claudia und Sébastien, stellt euch und AllGo-Games bitte zunächst […]

Our friend Gregory M. Smith is a solitaire game designing genius and has done many of these solo, narrative driven style wargames that we have all enjoyed for hours on end while we have been unable to find an opponent or just because we want to play a game on our timeline. We have interviewed him many times for his games such as Zeppelin Raider, Interceptor Ace, The Hunted, Western Front Ace, Amerika Bomber, Defending America, American Tank Ace, British Tank Ace, Rebel Tide, Sinking Yamato and most recently for a magazine wargame called B-52D Linebacker II. But Greg is a versatile designer and also has done many great 2-player games as well. He always has something cooking in his game design kitchen and recently we spoke with him about his new design with Kevin McPartland called Viking Dawn: A Game of Viking Exploration & Expansion 800-1040 A.D. from Compass Games. I was able to play this 1-4 player game while at the World Boardgaming Championships last month and you can read about my experience at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2026/07/27/world-boardgaming-championships-2026-daily-debrief-series-day-3/

I reached out to Greg recently to get a bit more information about the design to share with you and he was more than willing to talk with me about this new game.

Grant: Greg welcome back to the blog. What is your new upcoming game Viking Dawn about?

Greg: Hey Grant, a pleasure as always. I still think back to the first few of these interviews we did many years ago and laugh. Good times! [Editor’s note: When I reach out to Greg about doing one of these interviews, he is always willing to respond but often adds “don’t get medieval on my ass!” meaning he hopes that my questions are reasonable in number. He has a separate life to game design evidently.]

But, to business – Viking Dawn is an operational/strategic level look at the Viking raids and explorations in Europe, the New World and even into the Mediterranean and North Africa from roughly 800 to 1,000 A.D. 1-4 players will attempt to build a legacy for their faction, including the Swedes, Danes, Norwegians or Geats, by amassing Victory Points through wealth acquisition, exploration, area control, founding and growth of colonies and elaborate Leader burials. The game is playable in 4-5 hours with each of its 8 turns spanning a period of 20-40 years.

Grant: Why did you feel inspired to make this game?

Greg: One of my favorite games in college was Conquistador: The Age of Exploration 1425-1600 from Strategy & Tactics Press and one evening I was watching Vikings (the recent series from the History Channel) and I thought, hey, I should make a Viking version of Conquistador. There’s nothing quite as dramatic as a game that covers 200+ years.

Grant: What sources did you consult to get the historical details correct?

Greg: As you might imagine, there was NO shortage of research materials, which is great on one hand, but on the other, can be daunting. I thought the most scholarly and overall excellent of the bunch was Johannes Brøndsted’s The Vikings. Another great overall look was Robert Ferguson’s The Vikings. Another similar book was Jonathan Clements’ The Vikings. (Nobody hesitates to use that name, you might notice.) The best resource with pictures of artifacts, drawings, and maps included was a book by Richard Hall titled The World of The Vikings.

Grant: I understand you have a design partner in Kevin McPartland. How did this partnership come about?

Greg: It was quite hilarious actually. Kevin is an accomplished designer in his own right, but a couple years back I brought the first prototype of Viking Dawn to the Compass Con and explained how the idea originated. The light bulbs went on in his head, because he ALSO loved Conquistador back in the day and was upset he hadn’t thought of this first! We laughed, then after playing the prototype, he was making nonstop suggestions (and historical corrections and additions). He so improved the prototype I felt I had to have him as co-designer, to which he graciously agreed.

Grant: What was the division of labor between you two?

Greg: Well, I did most of the initial design work, but every time we got together he had some fixes, tweaks, historical corrections, and additions. I’d say he almost acted more as a developer, but he came up with enough mechanics I think co-designer is probably more accurate.

Grant: What other games inspired your design approach?

Greg: As mentioned, Conquistador was the primary inspiration for the overall theme of raiding and exploration, with leaders that last a turn or two before dying (typically of old age, with 20 year turns).

Grant: What is the players goal in the game?

Greg: As with many games, the goal is to amass the most Victory Points, which will determine the winner. Unlike many games, this is achieved through exploration, pillaging, looting, building settlements, and my favorite element through lavish burials for your deceased Leaders. They may have accomplished great deeds in life but if you don’t bury them with gold they aren’t really truly memorable.

Grant: What does a victory look like in the game?

Greg: That is a bit hard to define, as there are many paths to victory, but the most likely path to victory involves settlement income, exploration Victory Points and burial income. If you don’t develop your network of settlements and establish your economy, you will not be able to generate the needed funds to pursue further exploration and settlement and will also not be able to afford to keep your empire going at the end of each turn as you have to pay upkeep on Warbands and Longships.

Grant; What was important to include or model about Vikings in the game?

Greg: Despite the operational/strategic nature of the game, we had to have pillaging and looting or it wouldn’t really be a game about Vikings as this was one of things they are best known for historically and the reason that they were greatly feared in Europe. Just as important (in my mind) was to model the exploration aspects of their seafaring, and this is encouraged by getting Victory Points by being the first to explore various far reaching corners of the map including Russia, Constantinople, Persia and the New World.

Grant: What was your greatest design challenge to overcome?

Greg: The game was too long in its initial versions, and it took some creative editing to chop it down to a more manageable eight turns. It was fun at 12 turns, but just took an inordinate amount of time (6+ hours). I really dislike games that take too long.

Grant: What is the time scale of the game? Why was this important?

Greg: Unlike games about more recent conflicts, the Viking heyday was several hundred years. This was a serious design challenge, but we finally decided on the first two turns being 40 years each <!> and the rest of the turns 20 years each. This sounds crazy, but it actually works, and allowed us to cover the main historical time frame in a playable system.

Grant: What are the different Viking factions in the game?  

Greg: You can have 1-4 players, with the Danes, Norse, Swedes and Geats, an offshoot of the Swedes. Think of the Geats as the Portuguese from Conquistador.

Grant: How do factions gain new Leaders? How historical are these Leaders represented?

Greg: The Leaders in the game are mainly the more famous/notorious of the Viking faction they represent. They arrive on the Turn Track via their historical arrival dates, and depart via the same (most last only a single turn, some survive for two turns.) However, each player may spend silver and purchase temporary Leaders and Explorers if they don’t have one arriving for awhile. Leaders give a bonus in combat, and Explorers give a bonus in seafaring, so they can be significant. Part of the asymmetrical build of the game is map location, but also Leader arrival times. The Danes have early advantage, but the Swedes and Norse are stronger later in the game.

Grant: Can you share a few examples of these leaders with us?

Greg: For example, these are the Norse Leaders. They have arrival/departure turns (which is sometimes the same turn) and the specialized Explorers have the circular symbol denoting that status.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?   

Greg: In general, you receive income, buy units, send out expeditions in turn order, pillage, establish settlements, return home with exploration VP’s, and bury your dead Leaders. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist of things.  

Grant: What different units types are available to each side?

Greg: The basic combat unit is the Warband. The basic transport is the Longship. The basic “civilian” unit is a Settler.

Grant: How does combat and raiding work? How is it Press Your Luck?

Greg: Combat is mainly a combination of how many Warbands you have, modified by Leaders and/or Berserker chits. There isn’t much of a Press Your Luck aspect to combat (exploration, yes, trading, yes, but combat, no.)  However, there is a CRT so you have to know your odds. Trying to pillage with only a 50/50 chance of success is risky and should be avoided.

Grant: What actions does each player have access to?

Greg: Players have almost complete freedom in what they want to do – but should obviously focus on doing things that earn Victory Points (making silver, or being the first to explore an area and return home to tell about it). Basically, the actions are external trade, exploration, creating settlements, pillaging, raiding, even demanding ransom. Players can send out multiple expeditions even, with the caveat they have to be able to afford it.

Grant: What is the layout of the board? Who is your artist?

Greg: Here’s the map, being basically most of the places the Vikings went (which was a challenge to show!) Nadir Elfarra, my favorite artist, did the work.

Fun story about the map, I showed an earlier version to my wife, Cindy, and the first thing out of her mouth was “Where are the Sea Monsters???” So we corrected that

Grant: How does trade work? 

Greg: Internal trade happens automatically with your settlements, assuming you’ve paid for their upkeep.   External trade, on the other hand, is a decision the player makes via the External Trade Chart. It requires you to risk a silver and a Longship, and you decide which column to use.

Grant: How are colonies established and how do they grow?  

Greg: If you have successfully pillaged a green (habitable area suitable to be settled) you can drop off Settler(s) if you brought any. Each area has a Growth/Attrition number and also a Size Cap. At the end of each turn, you roll to see if the settlement grows (up to the size cap) or suffers attrition.   Obviously, England has less attrition and a larger size cap than, say, Greenland. One fun problem is that when areas reach their size cap, they roll to break away and become independent from the homeland.

Grant: How does Longship travel work? What dangers are involved?

Greg: You may travel a maximum of three legs (each leg being six areas or fraction thereof). This makes the theoretical maximum 18 areas. However, the further you go, the more likely you are to lose Longships and/or your entire expedition. Explorers can mitigate these risks, but there are very few explorers in the game. So there is definitely risk in exploration.

Grant: What type of experience does the game create for players?

Greg; I would like to think of Viking Dawn as a “historical Euro” for lack of a better term. It’s certainly more of a game than an attempt at perfecting simulating all the historical events of the time. Kevin’s fantastic knowledge really helped to make it better historically, and I think it does a really good job of doing a “broad brush” rendering of the Viking age.

Grant: What are you most pleased about with the design?

Greg: I really thought the turn order mechanic made it very tense. Everybody secretly purchases Warbands and Longships, but turn order (a huge advantage to go first early in the game) is determined by who has the most silver remaining after purchases. If you buy a lot, you can do a lot, BUT you’re probably low on silver and going last in the turn. So determining turn order by remaining silver turned out to be a great mechanic.

Grant: What has been the feedback of your playtesters?

Greg: Anybody who knows me knows that I’m my own biggest cheerleader, BUT seriously, we had a great time playing this the last several years at Compass Con. It’s just fun multiplayer, especially when bad things happen. I am very happy with the design, and especially since Kevin McPartland made it ten times better with his involvement.

Grant: When can we expect to see the game released?

Greg: I refuse to answer this question on the grounds I’m never right  but if pressed, I’d have to say early 2027. It’s done and at the printers.

Grant: What other designs are you currently working on?

Greg: I’ve got a few irons in the fire. Solo Banner (Burning Banners dungeon crawler), Western Desert Ace (North Africa WW2 version of Western Front Ace), Soviet Tank Ace, B-52D Linebacker II (magazine game), Gotha Raiders (magazine game), Project Z (Japanese hypothetical heavy bombers 1947), Ground Attack Ace (Stukas and Sturmoviks), Korean Tide (1950-53 Tide Series), Star-Spangled Tide (War of 1812 with Kevin McPartland again), a B-36 game, and a few others. Trust me I’m staying busy!

Thanks as always, enjoyed chatting.

If you are interested in Viking Dawn: A Game of Viking Exploration & Expansion 800-1040 A.D., you can pre-order a copy for $54.00 from the Compass Games website at the following link: https://www.compassgames.com/product/viking-dawn-pay-later/

-Grant

I think that every single wargamer knows the name Volko Ruhnke. He has designed several great series in the COIN Series, that has now stretched to a full 15 volumes, and then more recently Levy & Campaign Series, which has an astounding 5 released volumes with several others that are announced and about a dozen more in design. He can make a good game for sure! One of our first experiences in wargaming and the first Volko design we played was Wilderness War. He is now at it again with a new design in a continuing newer series called the Recon Series that uses hide and seek elements and hidden blocks to tell the story of the Allied intelligence efforts during World War I during the campaigns around Verdun in 1916. The game is called Drachen: Reconnaissance at Verdun, 1916 and looks to be very interesting and we reached out to Volko to get a look into the design.

Grant: Volko welcome back to the blog. What is your new upcoming game Drachen about?

Volko: Hi Grant & Alex! Thank you for this opportunity. I love what you guys do.

Drachen continues my new Recon Series, following on to the series’ recently released first volume, Coast Watchers. Volume II – Drachen – is about the struggle for reconnaissance information in a World War I trench battles, specifically, Verdun in 1916.

Grant: What does the title mean and why did you want to use it for this game?

Volko: “Drachen” means “kite” in German and is simply short for “Drachenballon” – kite balloon. The tethered observation balloons famous as targets for balloon-busting fighter aeroplane missions were really the queens of the battlefield in their ability to see what the enemy was up to and guide artillery fire onto enemy targets. They were in effect hydrogen filled kites in that they faced into the wind for stability. On a clear day, even a windy one, a spotter with binoculars in a kite balloon could provide information on enemy movements and positions up to 15 miles away. Tethered to the ground, unlike observer aeroplanes with either no radio or early transmitters only, balloons had instant and secure communications with friendly headquarters or batteries to coordinate fire.

Grant: This is Volume II in the Recon Series. Why does this subject fit your vision for the series?

Volko: I’m looking for the Series to visit settings in which secrets and their discovery really mattered to the outcome of a conflict. The advent of trench warfare on the Western Front was a remarkable moment in land battle because the age-old means of reconnaissance – the horseman – could no longer roam. For the first time, you would know nothing of the enemy beyond the next ridge unless you got up in the air. We gamers have tended to focus on ace-versus-ace duels in the sky. I wanted to explore what all the dogfighting was really about: winning the right to peer down upon your enemy.

Grant: How has your experience with series games assisted you in the development of this Recon Series?

Volko: OK, that’s a big question! I do try to learn, and I have developed some principles for series design:

1) Openness – Make room for other designers to take the series where you never imagined.

2) Complexity – Bigger is not always better. I wrote about this in depth in C3i Nr29.

3) Variety – Make it familiar, not samey. I wrote about that in C3i Nr30.

Regarding variety within a series, it helps to articulate a focus to guide selection of topics, what you keep the same, and what you vary for each setting.

• For the COIN Series, that was the premise that counterinsurgency and other popular conflicts were multifactional, that factional relations were key.
• For Levy & Campaign, it was that medieval warfare was equally complex as modern but in distinct ways, especially regarding command and logistics.
• For the Recon Series, then, it is that secret information – which side protects it or discovers it better – can decide the outcome, at least for certain conflicts.

That said, for me, principle 1) above trumps the other two. Other designers certainly have taken COIN and Levy & Campaign to places beyond my original intent. I hope the same for the Recon Series.

Regarding “bigger is not better” for Drachen in particular, that meant being sure that Volume II did not just add subsystems like more ornaments on a Christmas tree. Rather, I try to drop something unneeded out for every new thing added in. For example, Drachen gets much deeper into resolution of combat than does Coast Watchers, but then Drachen has a much simpler resolution of who won the struggle: just most of 3 Objective cards fulfilled, rather than Volume I’s “victory point salad”.

To keep Drachen “familiar but not samey”, we keep not only the location blocks and open versus secret spotting but also two chit cups for resolution, for example. Where Coast Watchers has Delivery and Patrol cups, Drachen features Air and Group cups to resolve clashes in…well, you can guess where for each.

Grant: What did you need to make sure to model from aerial reconnaissance in WWI?

Volko: The key historical dynamics that I was able to find and felt were important to incorporate in the game include:

• The main purpose of fighter aeroplane engagements as clearing the way for friendly observers and countering enemy observers.
• The difference between just spotting something and being able to loiter long enough to cooperate with guns or take photos.
• Which observation activity would be known to the enemy and which would be secret.
• The importance of attrition in aircraft to observation dominance.

Grant: What sources did you consult to get the historical details correct? What one must-read source would you recommend?

Volko: I scarfed up all I could about Great War trench warfare in general, including the nature and use of observation balloons, how aeroplanes cooperated with artillery, the purposes of trench raids, and so on. Naturally, I particularly dug into how things worked in the Battle of Verdun, which was a great learning laboratory for both sides.

My two key secondary sources were The First Air Campaign by Eric and Jane Lawson, which discusses the evolution of air power in World War I and the special juncture that Verdun was in its development, and Alistaire Horne’s The Price of Glory, still for me the best of the several English-language works on the iconic battle.

Grant: What is your overall design goal and thesis with Drachen?

Volko: The design goal is to take apart how reconnaissance worked in trench battles, with the premise that winning the reconnaissance struggle set up the possibility of winning the kinetic part, the fire and assault.

Grant: Why do you feel that blocks and chit pull are the best ways to tell this story?

Volko: Blocks are an age-old but powerful way to manage secret information on the tabletop, without writing or referees. The Recon Series uses blocks in a new way: not as units that the opponent can see massing and moving across the map but as location information about which you start out seeing nothing and have to act to gain any knowledge of.

Chit pull gives me as designer an ability unparalleled by dice to subtly manipulate probabilities – and to give the players abilities to influence those probabilities – in a relatively simple and inexpensively produced way.

Grant: What other mediums did you consider or explore?

Volko: One question was whether to use “record” markers for players to log what they find. The Japanese player in Coast Watchers has such markers on the board as reminders of what is known of Allied blocks that have stood up hidden again.

In Drachen, there is even more to keep track of: various sizes and types of units and fortifications. And some of what players spot they do so secretly. So Drachen provides a record sheet reproducing the battlefield in miniature, but with room to take notes, plus screens to hide that record, if players want to use them. I considered providing record markers to place on the sheet, but the variety of items to spot mean that it would have been a mess, a big pile of counters to sort through – not worth it when a pencil works fine!

Grant: What different units are available to the players?

Volko: Here is a look at the blocks and counters, including the units represented. By the way, no real art exists yet – these are just my homemade prototypes.…

The standup blocks represent the guns, soldiers, fortifications, and depots that fight out the duels between gun batteries and the offensive’s barrage and assault. They build up hidden and are the targets for enemy observation missions. Positioning your hidden blocks will be critical both to make them harder to spot and to get the best use out of them in your plan for combat.

The counters represent those forces carrying out or supporting reconnaissance. They build up openly on the battlefield, except for anti-aircraft emplacements that may be AA sections or just harmless trucks. (Other counters here are markers that support various missions and actions.)

Grant: What is the role of Depots?

Volko: Depot blocks – if they survive unsuppressed – during the offensive resupply guns to fire again or fire at double strength. If the attacker exploits an advance, the depots refill and can again supply guns.

Grant: What are the All Quiet blocks and what do they represent from history?

Volko: “All Quiet” blocks (also nicknamed “trees”) represent just the usual presence of defenses at a side’s positions. So they do not mean empty, rather nothing special to see and shoot at. There are some troops garrisoning the line in what are probably battered trench works, perhaps some wire or field guns. If attacked, at least a few machineguns hidden there will answer.

Grant: What different air assets are available to players?

Volko: The workhouse in the air is the “Air Patrol” – either single or group, the latter more effective but uses up more airframes. Each player has a supply of Air Patrols at their aerodromes (on their mat) and sends them on specific fighter and observer missions or puts them into the Air Cup to add generally to the density of friendly aircraft prowling and protecting the skies over Verdun. Air Patrols suffer loss in action, so you can run out if you don’t manage the air battle carefully, potentially requiring you to recall counters from the cup or the map.

Of course we have balloons too, aloft over friendly positions behind the front line. Enemy balloon-busting fighter missions can destroy them or, more commonly, force them to lower. As noted above, these Drachen are highly effective observers, in the game reaching out to a distance of 4 positions, spotting secretly – you won’t know where your opponent’s balloons are looking unless they range guns in on your blocks – and unlike aeroplane observers automatically succeed in spotting their targets.

On the ground but protecting your balloons and blocks against enemy Air Patrols, you get antiaircraft emplacements – “AA Sections” or dummy “Trucks”. These will make any enemy air missions at or adjacent to them more dangerous. They also occasionally can cause a loss among your own nearby defensive air patrols, representing friendly fire.

The counters for Balloons and AA Emplacements are round to signify that these units can built up, adjusted, and used for free – whereas use of Air Patrols and trench raiders cost actions.

Grant: How are the serial assets used to perform recon? How does this work?

Volko: As reconnaissance and the efforts of fighters to stop it are the focus of the sim, most Air Missions as well as Trench Raids use an articulated chit-pull procedure accounting for a wide range of circumstances.

On the Air Missions table, you can see that we account for the presence of the enemy’s defensive Patrols and AA, how deep behind enemy lines you are flying, whether you are using an Air Group, and how many enemy chits you are likely to draw.

Various Asset cards, like “Boelke & Immelmann”, can further affect these results.

Grant: Why do you feel this is so important to the game?

Volko: Most trench warfare games either focus on the assault by infantry and perhaps tanks or cover the air duels going on overhead. But before those assaults and the barrages supporting them kick off, there would have been a critical period in which the sides were struggling to figure out what the enemy was up to and where they were massed. And that is when most of those aerial dogfights would be going on. Drachen pulls all that together to try to illuminate just HOW reconnaissance got done and would then set the course of a “big push”.

Grant: What is the layout of the game board and the purpose of the different shaped fortifications?

Volko: The game board shows the battlefield of Verdun. Area spaces, called “positions”, each hold a single block hiding the forces or fortifications there.

Terrain is either Lowland, Hill, or Fort – the latter effectively on hills too but tougher to crack. Hills and Forts enable guns on them to shoot a little farther, are harder to take by infantry assault, and often are the very targets that the attacker is assigned to seize.

A road and rail network spans the battlefield. Its effect is to limit where depots can be built up.

Land and Meuse River segments separate the positions. Little wooden stick pieces will mark the front along these segments. Positions group into sectors, such as “Left French”, to guide setup and solo play.

A final feature of the map positions is that some are observation posts. They function much like balloons but with far more limited reach, and they can be suppressed by artillery fire.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play?

Volko: In each of between 2 and 4 turns total, each side first builds up forces (blocks and counters). Buildup limits are most lenient on Turn I, so players generally need to set a plan of attack or defense then and just adjust positioning on later turns. On Turn II and thereafter, revealed (face up) blocks hide again (stand back up) unless suppressed by enemy fire or under loitering air surveillance. On Turn III and IV – if the attacker has not yet launched an offensive – the defender receives reinforcement in the form of an added block.

The main part of the turn follows buildup, “Reconnaissance” activity by Fighters then Observers. That includes mounting defensive “Barrier Patrols” and offensive “Jagd” against enemy Air Patrols plus Balloon Busting, then Aerial Observation, Trench Raids, and spotting by Balloons and OPs.

After that, the sides will exchange “Directed Fire” by their guns onto previously “Ranged” targets. Or, on Turn II or later, the attacker can instead launch the offensive that will resolve the game.

Grant: How is victory achieved?

Volko: After the offensive, or after Turn IV in the rare case that the attacker never launches one, Victory depends on who has fulfilled more of their 3 drawn Objective Cards.

Grant: What are the purpose of the Attacker & Defender Objective Cards?

Volko: The simulation premise of the Objective Cards is that reconnaissance is trying not only to discover where the enemy is but what they are up to – what matters to them? Will the attack go for a breakthrough, or are they just trying to pin our forces in place and divert our attention from some other part of the front? Or even less, are they for now just trying to grind down our forces and soften up our fortifications? Is the defender set to hold everything at all cost? Or do they just want to bloody us as we advance?

A second set of questions concerns how big an enemy buildup we are dealing with. The Objective Cards give players more robust forces to carry out the more ambitious task. So that too is an essential element of information that reconnaissance is trying to gauge – what are we up against?

The Objective Cards provide a neat and easy way to set out that secret information. Through recon successes, such as finding out how your enemy’s fortifications or troops are deployed, you can discern what your opponent’s cards may be. And if you invest in trench raiding, your raiders might reveal one or more enemy Objectives for certain.

Grant: What are the various hidden objectives?

Volko: Attacker and Defender each draw 3 cards from up to 9 Objective Cards, most of which are unique tasks hidden from the opponent. Each card not only sets out a task to be achieved but also provides added blocks to that side’s “Reserves” and specifies a number of blocks that the player can build up on the map on Turn I.

One twist is that you don’t have to use a card’s specified forces for that task: the blocks just add to your total available.

A second twist is that particularly successful trench raids can obtain “Plans” that reveal your opponent’s Objective Cards to you: potentially highly useful, as you win not only by achieving your own Objectives but by impeding your enemy’s.

Grant: What different types of these cards are there?

Volko: There is a separate set each for Attacker and Defender. In sets of 3, they go from least to most ambitious/robust, for the Attacker, “Preparation”, “Push”, “All-Out Attack”; for the Defender, “Retrenchment”, “Attrition”, “They Shall Not Pass”. Different scenarios then might limit some of these sets for one or the other side to reflect that stage in the longer Battle of Verdun.

As you can see by the examples, the cards are specific as to their tasks and forces. Generally, the Attacker is either destroy certain defenses, mount strong attacks, or take key positions. The Defender generally is to hold key positions or destroy substantial attacking forces.

Grant: How do players go about accomplishing these?

Volko: A key premise of the game is that reconnaissance success unlocked success of an offensive push. So in the game, you won’t earn VP or whatever for how you run your reconnaissance effort. Rather, knowing what your enemy has where – and “Ranging” those targets for accurate fire by your gun – will set up the combat success that you will need to fulfill more of your own Objectives.

But you will need to add to that skillful positioning of your forces and fortifications to make use of the information that you gather, and then the right decisions when and where to uncover your guns to fire or send your infantry waves into assaults and counter-assaults.

So the game is about reconnaissance but also how that feeds into running trench war combat.

Grant: What challenges does each side face in their objectives?

Volko: Since fulfilling your Objectives flows from how you handle the entire Sequence of Play, they really distill all the game’s challenges. But specific challenges to do with the cards include that the easier tasks come with skinnier forces to fight with, and that you start out unaware of what your opponents Objectives are. That latter can be critical, as even decent performance against the goals in front of you may not be enough to win if your opponent does even better at their secret tasks.

Grant: How do offensives work?

Volko: When the Attacker decides to launch the Offensive, both sides first get to recover some of their suppressed positions. Then each side’s guns, Attacker first, can “Barrage” to suppress enemy positions without needing Ranging by observers, just using more shells. Then each side can “Bombard” Ranged targets to Suppress them more efficiently or destroy them outright (as in the earlier “Directed Fire” phase).

Then players place “Wave” markers to commit where infantry Assaults and counterattacks will occur. For the Attacker, these will attempt to take the defender’s frontline positions. Those get resolved rather simply, including a draw from the Ground cup to give at least some chance for a weaker attack or defense to succeed.

If any such Assault does succeed in taking ground, the attacker may “Exploit” – meaning one more round of Artillery and Infantry combat, usually to try to seize a 2^nd-Line position.

Grant: How many players is the game designed for? Is there a solitaire mode?

Volko: Drachen is a 2-player game. A larger number of players, divided into 2 teams, has worked well at the many demos that I have done.

There is a solitaire mode that enables a solo player to take the Attacking side in all the scenarios, whether German or French. It uses instructions and scenario setups found in the Playbook, a “Defenses” display to guide hidden block buildup, and a deck of 18 “Army HQ” Cards to help run Defender actions.

Grant: What opportunities for deception and signaling are there?

Volko: Great question! A point of the Recon Series is to feature not only secret information but both open and secret collection of that information – in part to enhance such opportunities for deceptive signals.

In Drachen, you will have plenty of secret information about which to mislead your opponent. And, critically, you will have potentially or automatically open information that you can transit selectively in order to mislead. Some ideas…in the game, you can:

• Put a few Soldiers to get spotted where you do not intend to assault, or fortifications that suggest Objectives that you did not draw.
• Range targets that you cannot actually or do not intend to Bombard.
• Deploy air defenses in areas that are unimportant to you.

And so on. Circumstances and your imaginings are the only limits!

Grant: What do you feel the game models well?

Volko: I am quite pleased with how the flow of the game models trench warfare’s set-piece buildups, the contest for control of the skies, the danger and importance of busting balloons and launching trench raids, the tit-for-tat artillery duels, including the danger of firing and exposing your batteries too soon, and more. In short, Drachen plays out on the table my mental model of WWI trench battles.

Grant: What are you most pleased about with the design?

Volko: The biggest thrill for me is that the design has held the interest of a talented corps of testers for many moons and many plays – and that it seems to get universally positive reactions at con demos. Ted Raicer has done wonders to bring out the fascinating aspects of the Great War, but even now trench battles don’t get the spotlight among us wargamers that I feel they warrant. And Verdun does not even have British or Americans (outside some volunteer fliers). So I’m proud that Drachen is adding to our hobby’s examination of WWI’s Western Front in between the famous mobile phases of 1914 and 1918.

Grant: What other designs are you contemplating or already working on in this series?

Volko: I already have a playable prototype for Volume III, and it even has seen some playtests. I call it Masher and it is set in Vietnam. Perhaps a topic for another visit here!

Thanks again for this opportunity to talk about the Recon Series!

I think that this new series, and this game particularly, look really interesting and I am all in on the subject matter and the approach. Also, the game offers 8 main scenarios and a solo learning situation spanning German and French offensives within the titanic 10-month Battle of Verdun. I did just receive my copy of Volume I in the Recon Series called Coast Watchers but have not had a change to get it to the table as of yet. I will rectify that sooner rather than later.

If you are interested in Drachen: Reconnaissance at Verdun, 1916, you can pre-order a copy for $79.00 from the GMT Games website at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-1162-drachen.aspx

-Grant

In Folge 43 lassen wir den letzten Jahrgang 2025/26 Revue passieren und orakeln den Deutschen Spielepreis. Zudem besprechen wir WINE & CHEESE sowie EMBERLEAF

Der Beitrag CfM043 Wein & Emberlinge erschien zuerst auf fjelfras.de.