Category Archives: Designer Blogs

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Bear Trap Designer Notes

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The core design of Bear Trap is now done, and the two-player game is polished. So, in today’s article I thought I’d share some comments on my experience designing Bear Trap.

Ideation

I first thought of creating a game about the Soviet-Afghan War while teaching Military Ethics at university in 2013. I was drawn to the topic because of my interest in the Cold War. But there’s a lot of other interesting things going on in this conflict, beyond being a feature of the Cold War.

The Soviets used a fighting force designed for an anticipated European conflict. The Soviets had visions of a quick war which didn’t align with the realities they would face over the decade long struggle. They weren’t up for the task they would face in Afghanistan. They were ill-suited to deal with under-trained freedom fighters wanting to repel foreign invaders through a widespread insurgency. As the war dragged on, in many ways, the Soviets effectively committed a sunken cost fallacy. While these might be oversimplifications here, these factors—and the narratives around Soviet tanks streaming across the border, the desertions, and the terror wrought by Soviet airstrikes—pulled me in and engaged my interest.  But even for those not explicitly interested in the Soviet-Afghan War, Bear Trap—as a learning tool—can act as a lens through which they can learn more about aspects of history that have helped shape, or have been informed by, other things that that they are interested in. 

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Inside GMT One: How I Designed a Solo Bot for Twilight Struggle: Red Sea

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Twilight Struggle has long been the game that I most wanted to find a satisfying way to play solo. The game rewards knowing your hand intimately, and guessing what’s in your opponent’s hand as well. Because the game is so tactical in determining the order and timing of card play, it is a difficult game to play solo. So when Jason Matthews asked me if I would help design the Solo Opponent for Twilight Struggle: Red Sea I jumped at the opportunity to solve these really hard problems.

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Private Companies in 18EUS

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In last week’s blog post, I discussed the Bank of New York and the strategic flexibility is adds to 18EUS. In this final blog post, let’s talk about one of my favorite parts, the private companies. I had so much fun with the design of the private companies of 18EUS.  The auction mechanism draws from 1822, as does the generality that the private companies hold no intrinsic value, mostly pay a modest income when held by the player, and confer upon the owning company special abilities.  18EUS private companies diverge from there.

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18EUS: The Bank of New York

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In last week’s blog post, I discussed the games and people that inspired me to make 18EUS. As part of that, I mentioned that one of the key new elements of 18EUS is the Bank of New York, which allows players to either take elective personal loans or invest in the Bank if they do not hold loans.  I wanted to explore a space where players had access to more capital in stock rounds, like in 1817 with short-selling, with a different, unique mechanism.  Some have pointed out that the 18EUS “loans,” which both charge interest and increase in principle, do not behave like loans in a technical sense, but rather like stock shorts.  Indeed, the main design inspiration here was to create a “friendlier” method of short-selling that would appeal to a wider audience.  

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WELCOME TO PLUM ISLAND (or … A Brief Tour of a Soon-To-Be Hellscape)!

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Greetings again, ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls of all ages! After having been flooded by hundreds of thousands of emails and posts requesting more information about this game (well, that’s a rough estimate … maybe it was just Harvey from East Northport who wrote me, but I can’t remember just now), I had to succumb and return from my self-imposed exile and provide another eye-opening and inspiring article to this blog. 

As you may or may not have seen, the big breaking news is that the game board for The Plum Island Horror has been completed. I can attest to its historical accuracy, and I commend Terry Leeds and the team for producing such a wonderfully detailed and realistic depiction of the island just moments before the horrific events on October 24th of a year that we are unable to reveal for legal reasons. 

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18EUS’s Origin Story

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My interest in strategy board games started early when my grandfather taught me chess at six years old. In high school I enjoyed playing on custom-designed Risk maps with my friends, and in college I discovered Settlers of Catan.  Next was enjoying the plethora of modern Euro games.  I moved to Grand Haven, Michigan in 2018 and started attending Thursday-night gaming at a local game store in Zeeland where I was introduced to 18xx in 2019. I was hooked after my first play of 1846.

Favorite titles of our group included 1846, 1862, 1822 and 1822MX. 18USA was polarizing – it was Mark’s favorite title, and everyone liked the randomized setup, but some did not like the shorting mechanic or extended length of the game.  During setup of an 18USA game, Bill remarked, “Someone needs to make a game on the 18USA map without the shorting.”  Around the same time, I listened to an 18xx podcast that had a segment on “Things you wish to see in an 18xx game,” and they talked about personal, elective loans.  It became clear to me that elective loans could easily replace shorting.  I adopted the “Sure, why not?” attitude and went about creating 18EUS.

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Infernal Machine Bibliography

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19 November 2022

Good afternoon, everyone.

Ed Ostermeyer here.

Several readers have requested information on the works I’ve used in the design of “Infernal Machine: Dawn of Submarine Warfare.

Herewith is my bibliography (current as of 19 November 2022) for the game, alphabetized and annotated for your use.

Comments and remarks are my own opinions on the indicated text’s usefulness, ease of same, and value as a source.

So, here you go: 

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Designing the Congress of Vienna Solitaire Game, Part 1of 2: Diplomacy and The French Bot

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Introduction #1 from Congress of Vienna Assistant Designer & Editor Fred Schachter: I’ve had the fun and pleasure of helping Designer Frank Esparrago on his journey, now our journey, to bringing his labor of love CoV game vision from dream into reality.

This GMT P-500 game is now undergoing a wonderful transformation from playtest into production graphics thanks to the talents of Terry Leeds.  For the latest status of Terry’s efforts and a host of Congress of Vienna game material see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna .

But for all the content readers will find within GMT’s site for the game; there’ll be a dearth of current material relevant to Congress of Vienna’s Solitaire Version and Bots.  Those rules and Bots are to the credit of CoV Team members: initially Jim Gutt and David Illanes and more recently David Schoellhamer, who is architect of those Bots’ latest rendition.  Well done guys!

With that, I’ll turn further introductory honors to Frank…

Introduction #2 From Congress of Vienna designer Frank Esparrago: Previous InsideGMT articles explain how the CoV Team agreed to offer a version for solitaire play. However, Developer Dick Sauer and I did not have sufficient experience to address this creative task fully and properly. Our first approach was to consider emulating the Churchill game’s Bots. Alas, they were too simplistic for a CoV solitaire game which needed to deliver the kind of interesting, uncertain, fun to play gaming elements we sought and, above all, to put pressure on a human player and make attaining victory an entertaining challenge.

Consequently, we increased our development team with new members having experience in designing a solitaire game. As Fred mentioned, these CoV solo game developers were Jim Gutt and David Illanes.  They created the game’s inaugural French Bot. Their tenacity, highly critical minds, detailed knowledge of the Congress of Vienna  game system, as well as game design orthodoxy in general; allowed them to build a series of summary tables (in Excel or Word). This enabled me to convert those guidelines into suitable Flowcharts or rules which can be easily understood by future players.

In Spain, both myself and Ignacio Badal commenced efforts to create a 2-player CoV version. This would have similar concepts to what Jim and his United States team derived. We had to change a few game mechanics of this highly interactive multiplayer game to make it into a viable 2-player contest!

Once those design concepts were fixed; we realized if we created a good 2-player Congress of Vienna game; designing a derivative solo game could be easier than by advancing directly from 4-players to just a single “human” player! That worked out to be a good intermediary step.  Serendipity!

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Infernal Machine: The Torpedo Boat during the Civil War – Part Five – The “Spitting Devil”

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While technical “wizards” like Dr. St. Julien Ravenel and Theodore Stoney were creating the CSS “David” torpedo boat as the Confederacy’s response to the US Navy’s overwhelming superiority on the nation’s rivers and oceans, the Union wizards were not idle in that field, either.

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Downfall: Conquest of the Third Reich Preview 3 — The Soviet Offensive Continues

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In Downfall Preview 2 the Soviet faction began the game by playing their “Operation Uranus” action card to resolve a free attack order. Since doing so had no initiative cost, the Soviets retain the initiative and may now select a Soviet order marker. As previously stated, the Soviet Partisan Warfare order and STAVKA order are available on the Action Track, as is the Attack order in the Soviet Planning Box.