Believe it or not I'm actually working on some ideas for games of my own. Some are more recent concepts, while some have been percolating for quite a while. I hope to be able to report on progress with the design of these in future posts. Below are just a quick summary of the basic game concepts of each.
Middle East Peace
A simulation of efforts to broker and maintain peace in the Middle East, from 1945 through to 2005. Players represent external powers. I'm undecided as to whether they have additional special characteristics - e.g. Britain, France, the US, Russia - or whether to keep this all fairly generic. The objective is to stop war from breaking out, and if it does, resolve it as quickly as possible. On one level it is a coop game, as it is in the interests of all players to keep war from happening, on another level, players also score points for exercising political control.
This is not just a game about Israel and the Arabs, however, as Iran, Iraq and possibly even Afghanistan are in scope. I've not decided whether North Africa should be part of the equation.
Time is measured by an events deck - there are generic events and also period specific events. The first 'era' is 1945-60, for example, and there are specific events which will occur during that period, for example the creation of the state of Israel and the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Egypt.
The overall feel should be one of managing a region in constant crisis, preventing the pot from bubbling over so to speak. There is also going to be an oil mechanic in here somewhere, with all players being penalised if the oil price moves into the danger zone. Establishing and maintaining functioning oil fields will be essential.
Storm From the Steppes
This is a medieval strategic wargame about the Mongol invasions of Europe and the Middle East in the 13th century. It is relatively abstract and casts the players as rulers in the Europe - e.g. the kings of Hungary and Poland, the Byzantine Emperor, the king of Bohemia, etc. The game runs the Mongol hordes which burst out of the steppes. There are also other more localised problems to deal with at the same time like heresies and peasant revolts.
Players control their own armies and agents, including ambassadors, bishops and pilgrims. They also receive their own secret victory conditions. It is important, however, that certain strategic objectives are protected at the same time - namely holy cities like Constantinople and Rome. As with the old Games Workshop board game Blood Royale, I'm thinking of making knights a hard to replace resource. If you lose a lot of your noble troops in a single battle, it takes time to get them back (or they are expensive to recruit). Peasants are less effective, but you can raise there more easily. However they tend to only fight to defend a specific province.
Until recently I had not considered including the Middle East on the map, but this could be an expansion, with the Caliphate, Asia Minor/Armenia and Persia added, and with Mecca and Jerusalem as additional objectives for the Mongols.
The Bear Bites Back
This is a modern, fairly abstract wargame that is evolving in my head from the old Red Storm Rising system which I used to play in the 1990s. I wanted to adapt that game to a future conflict in Eastern Europe with Russia challenging NATO in Ukraine and Poland.
Unlike in Red Storm Rising, in this game the emphasis is on local forces with tier one NATO troops arriving as reinforcements. NATO air power is there in spades from the start, but armoured formations will arrive gradually, giving the Russians the initiative early on.
In the original game which focused on Germany, NATO was already highly coordinated and well-prepared, but this game should reflect a degree of political uncertainty and disjointed command structures on the NATO side.
The map is going to be a bit different, running from the Baltic down to the Crimea. While I might use the same formation levels as Red Storm Rising, there will probably be fewer of them to reflect current realities in terms of balance of forces in Europe. What I liked about Red Storm Rising was the air game, which forced players to decide how they divided squadrons between the battle for air superiority over Germany and flying support missions against ground targets.
I'm also pondering a naval game which would break into two parts - NATO in the Black Sea and also the campaign in the Baltic. That might be a phase two project. I want to include a political confusion mechanic in which some NATO members that were heavily committed in the 1980s might prove more unreliable now - e.g. Turkey. This will be simulated using an alliance coordination mechanic pinched from War of the Ring.
Viscounts & Vagabonds
I've written about V&V on the blog before. This is my game of 18th century capers in Georgian England. It still has a lot of moving parts. I originally toyed with using the core mechanics from the World of Darkness games, but have progressed on from there. This is a tabletop RPG in which players control a Viscount - a noble down on his luck with many flaws - and a Vagabond, a criminal who also works as the Viscount's dogs body.
The current iteration is drifting towards a variant of the science fiction RPG Gaean Reach which I hope to play test myself at some point to get a better feel for the system. GR has an excellent fast character generation mechanic. It incorporates some of the rules from Gumshoe and Dying Earth.
The other option is to actually head down the route of using some of the mechanics from King Arthur Pendragon. In this game knights travel with a squire; in V&V the viscounts have vagabonds who are in effect their man - or woman - servants - e.g. think of an ageing dowager with a faithful maid who has some thieving skills and acts as her eyes and ears 'below stairs'. Part of the fun of the game is that these vagabonds are unreliable and unpredictable - they are not just a second character for players. I am still considering whether they should be played by other players, or even better managed using some form of loyalty mechanic coupled with an event deck that can introduce bonuses and complications. Another option is to leverage the Cypher system and have the vagabonds' complications become a source of XP for characters which the player can accept or decline.
Very much like the look of all of these.
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