Step one in my still as-of-yet hypothetical book “How to design a tabletop wargame” is “don’t”. This is a hard won lesson from over a decade of game design theory and practice and the most important thing you can do is ignore it. But it remains step one precisely because making a wargame is a stupid thing to do on your own because it requires a lot of things to come together exactly right and if any of them don’t, then everything goes to pot.

I should note that this does not apply if you’re just making games for yourself, or for your friends, both of which are perfectly valid options and honestly the better options unless you have the specific brain worms I do.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

This post is about a game I started writing a few years ago in anticipation of the 110th anniversary of the start of the Great War. It started from a dare, that it was not possible to write an authentic WWI post-field-war wargame that wasn’t fundamentally a depressing experience. You can play the field war using any ruleset that has rifles in it, any WWII game will do and you can even do some of the bigger no-mans-land offensives. But outside of a few big battles, most of it was sending a few guys over the top and then retrieving their machine-gunned corpses under cover of darkness, a lot of shelling, and a lot of killing men with poison, acid, or acidic poison.

There’s a reason WWI fiction emphasises the horror rather than the gallantry often present in fiction about WWII.

But there are the trenches and my eye was caught by the prospect of playing a game set in the trenches that did something other than just taking traditional skirmish rules and slapping you in an enclosed space. I had, years prior, written a draft for a spaceship boarding game in which the primary measurement wasn’t the inch or the centimetre, it was the bulkhead. You moved your troops between bulkheads into contact with the enemy or up to the next door. That game never went anywhere (it was an idle speculation) but in 2023 I remembered it and gutted it to turn into the first draft of Trenchgame.

Raiding for Fun and Profit

Trenchgame is not a traditional symmetric skirmish game. The board is the trench network, and this is split into sections, or a length of trench about 3-4 inches long without a corner or significant curve. Troops occupy sections, and can attack adjacent sections. One player is the defender, they start the game with a small number of soldiers standing guard and on patrol. The other is the attacker, they choose points to infiltrate the trench and move their soldiers in.

The attacker builds a list of soldiers to form their raiding party. There are no reinforcements for the attacker. The defender has their garrison, but during play they can bring back dead soldiers to represent additional reinforcements. The balancing factor here is the metacurrency of “alarm”. The attacker generates alarm for the defender when they do things that make noise like firing a gun. The defender can also generate alarm with soldiers who have been alerted (defending soldiers start out following specific instructions and its only upon seeing an enemy soldier, or being activated with alarm, that the defending player gets to freely activate them) at the expense of not doing something more valuable.

Trenchgame also had a novel mechanism for its objectives. The defender would choose three objectives from a list, which included things like “capture an officer” or “destroy a weapons cache” or “steal intelligence”, and then place the things that objective needs in the trench, like an intelligence report in a dugout or making sure an officer is on patrol. The attacker chooses two of these in secret, and a third from a list of their own objectives like “eliminate all machinegun nests” or “hold a specific section of trench”. This two phase objective selection process ensures that there is a real solid reason why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s not just “stand on this point for three turns and you win”. Both you and your opponent have a real reason to fight that is grounded in both the fiction and the history. Hopefully you could take the events of the game and turn them into a coherent narrative without much embelishment in a way that’s impossible with modern 40K or even any random pickup game of Bolt Action.

The game playtested well, with the main mechanical issues being tailoring the way objectives worked to make them fast and fun whilst retaining enough of the idea of the narrative to keep them true to the concept, and balancing how alarm was generated and spent. The game wanted to be on a knife edge where the attacker needs to constantly push, knowing that if they mess up, the defender can flood the board with troops, whilst making both phases of the game (where the defender is still resource limited, and when they are fully free to act) entertaining for both players with meaningful decisions for all.

Trench Art

When the game was at a stage where I could concievably start writing the rest of the book that would need to go around it, I started pitching it to various wargames publishers. Trenchgame is a good name for a prototype, but it developed into “The Spade War” based on an informal manual written by german soldiers during WWI, printed on the sly and distributed throughout the trenches. The book would have been three parts: an opening section containing a potted history of the period of the Great War where trench raids were common and enough detail of the practice to give a potential player inspiration and grounding in the history; the middle section with the rules of the game; and a third and final section with guides on how to build several kinds of trenches from early French efforts (which were intentionally of poor quality to “encourage the men to advance and claim enemy trenches”) to the over-engineered german offerings with their neat clapboard and iron walls and orderly signs.

Wargames Atlantic were selling nice enough WWI miniatures for the major powers in hard plastic, which solved the problem of where were people going to get miniatures (and even had offerings for files for 3D printing for trench raiders, although largely anachronistic in specific detail). The problem was functionally no-one owned a trench board, which is a pre-requisite for playing the game. And talking with various publishers, this was the fundametal problem.

There are two ways you sell things relating to a wargame. The first is that you find a person who is already playing the game and you sell them something to help them play the game more/better/differently. The second is you find a person who isn’t currently playing the game and you sell them something that makes them think they will be the kind of person who plays the game.

New games don’t have the former, so it is vitally important to construct the marketing and overall aesthetic of a game to ensure that prospective customers will be able to look at a game and go “yes, I want to be the kind of person who plays this game, it will be so fun/interesting/invigorating and all my friends will cheer for the day I showed them this game”.

In fact, once a game has been purchased, the longer is stays in this phase the better it is, as in this state none of the issues of the game (like the miniatures being poorly constructed, or the rules being obtuse, or the game lacking any meaningful decisions past a certain point) are present yet and instead a purchaser may freely evangalise the benefits of the game to their friends, who might themselves buy the game and its ephemera. Of course, as a designer I want my game to be enjoyed and loved and critically acclaimed, but honestly I’d take people buying the game if only one of the two options is available.

Commercial Realities

Unfortunately it was the opinion of basically everyone I spoke to that the strict requirement for terrain killed the game flat. Kallistra sell vacuformed trench sections, but they are dated in their appearance and built on a hex grid (which puts a lot of people off). Several manufacturers make reasonable 10 and 15mm trenches, but now you’re working in a weird scale and whilst I love 10 and 15mm skirmish games, I’m now asking people to purchase from a much smaller range of manufacturers for everything. I even floated the idea of packing the book with sections of papercraft or 2D printed trenches, but the fear was this leaned into the realm of board game or pushed the cost of production over the typical price point of a standalone historical wargame.

And so The Spade War died on the vine.

I was asked about this time why I didn’t take the game, polish it up and release it for free (or just as a PDF on something like Wargames Vault) and the answer is twofold.

Firstly, there is more free wargames content on the internet than you can consume in a lifetime and if I am being very honest, most of it is very bad. People are, often unfairly, very wary of free media because of the perception that if it’s free then it’s not good enough to be worth selling. If I had an audience, and I could justify it as an exercise in growing and maintaining that audience, then maybe it’s worth it and maybe one day when I am a person of leisure I will finish it and publish it for the world to enjoy.

The other problem is that actually designing a game isn’t even the first half of the process of making a game. There’s all the other writing. There’s layout. There’s sourcing and producing artwork. There’s promotion. All things I’m very happy to do if I think there’s a benefit at the end of it but when I’d spent six months talking to publishers and being told left and right that they didn’t think it had legs, why would I spend six more months of my one life on this earth polishing a turd?

Fighting the Last War(game)

The lesson here is that I wrote Spade War from the wrong perspective. Sure, trench combat with a real sense of versimilitude is something that a lot of people will tell you that they want to play, but the reality of producing that explains why it’s not something they’re already doing. Just to reinforce that, when someone says “oh it would be great if X”, remember to ask them “what’s stopping you from doing X”.

In a real sense, Spade War wasn’t a failure because I enjoyed the process of writing it, people enjoyed playing it, and I stopped working on it before I’d invested too much time or money in taking it further than it got. As untasteful as it is to me to say this, a game has to be a product to get it into people’s hands, you have to be able to sell them on the idea that they will be the kind of person who plays that game, even if you’re giving it to them for free.

This is what sells people on objectively bad games like Mordheim: you look at people playing Mordheim and you think “yes! I could be playing on a lovingly detailed ruined city board, shiving a man-rat over some shiny rocks with my lovingly painted 6-12 highly converted miniatures” and, to call back to earlier, the investment to actually play Mordheim is so high that you remain in this blissful state of “not actually playing mordheim but hoarding coffee stirrers and maybe converting a ‘test miniature’ or two” basically forever and never discover that actually it’s a game in which half your games end either with your entire warband dead and now you have to play the next twelve games with six half blind peasants sharing a single sharpened stick between them, or with neither player having done anything of note because your standard movement is two inches and no-one got into combat.

But there’s a reason GW stopped selling Mordheim and never brought it back.

Anyway if the good ship Ordinary could turn around and change its mind about us being part of the control group and induct us into the Culture already so I can spend my time making commercially infeasible wargames about trenches and spaceships, that’d be wonderful thanks.

A Historical Coda

To close out this post, I will share two weird things I discovered whilst writing Spade War.

Firstly, when the Americans joined WWI they brought with them shotguns. Previously relegated to civilian use, they suddenly found themselves well suited to clearing trenches in close confines. The German government objected, claiming they were inhumane (unlike gas, or explosive shells, or machine guns) and said they’d execute any soldier they found carrying one unless the Allied Powers banned them. The American military instead made it a capital offence to take a photograph of a soldier carrying a shotgun.

Secondly, British copyright law is weird. During the period of WWI, copyright over photographs had to be asserted, and whilst if anyone had asserted their copyright over said photos they would have all passed into the public domain by now, most photographs do not have recorded photographers and are digitised from large collections of unattributed photographs. This means that unless you know who the author is, and know that they publicly asserted their authorship around the time of the photograph’s creation, use of that photograph is a murky situation legally as the photographers descendants could in theory claim ownership rights today. Unlikely, but enough of a risk that publishers were uneasy publishing them.

The US on the other hand just put them all in the public domain.

Also, the UK changed the law around 2023 to say that a recording of a work that is otherwise in the public domain (i.e. a digitisation of an old photo, a transfer of a public domain film, a photo of a statue) that is only a recording of that public domain work is no longer eligible for copyright protection. But, a lot of organisations (like museums) have decided “yeah we’re not going to obey that” and will continue to threaten you for using their photographs of otherwise public domain works.

And don’t get me started on the idea of Crown Copyright…