Beginning April 16, 1862, the US Navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron under Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut began a thunderous bombardment of the Confederate forts Jackson and St. Philip, guardians of the lower Mississippi River and the approaches to New Orleans, Louisiana. Seven nights later, on April 23, 1862, after a pitched river battle, Farragut‘s West Gulf Squadron steamed past the two forts.
I have been designing games for 5 years. In that time, I have learned so much about the board game industry. One element of game design that instantly stood out to me and is thankfully being addressed by many publishers and designers is cultural appropriation in games. I remember how disappointed I was after my first play of Puerto Rico. While the game had so many interesting mechanics, the theme was not representative of what I knew my culture to be and greatly distracted me from the fun. While I didn’t know it at the time, my experience with Puerto Rico planted the desire in me to make a new game that shared a more holistic picture of my people.
My first experience of designing a game set in a culture that wasn’t my own was with Holi: Festival of Colors. The design that became Holi was originally pitched to Floodgate Game with a completely different theme, but Floodgate had been wanting to do a game with this theme and when they pitched the idea to me I was onboard. However, I urged them to have cultural consultants involved, so that we could be sure to do right by the theme. As it turns out, that was their plan all along and ultimately they did a great job incorporating and representing the theme in my game.Throughout that process, I learned that spending the time and resources to get that right made the game better and that there’s so much benefit that it should be a no brainer for all games that use real world cultures as a theme to make sure they bring in cultural experts.
In October 2020 Fred Serval (designer of GMT’s Red Flag Over Paris, and A Gest of Robin Hood) organized a ConSim Game Jam sponsored by GMT. Participants had 3 days to make a game. As participants, we had to use a pre-existing GMT COIN game at its core and make something new from it. We weren’t able to use any more wood pieces than were boxed with the original game. We were, however, permitted to apply stickers to the board, or to any of those wood pieces, and were able to add any amount of cardboard tokens and decks of cards we might want. Initial discussions focussed on geographical milieu, and narrowed our choices down to India (Gandhi), France (Falling Sky), and Great Britain (Pendragon), and the latter won out. So from Morgane Gouyon-Rety’s Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (2017) we derived a game called Boudica’s Revolt.
Shortly after finishing the third installment of this series about the tactility of the pieces, I took some time to capture a multihand playthrough of my physical prototype. Let me tell you a secret. I lost. In fact I lost in the first decade, three times in a row. Granted, this was the “Bronx is Burning” scenario which is hands down the hardest one in the game, but the fact of the matter is it took me four tries to get out of the first Decade, which is what you’ll see in this playthrough.
The New Orleans Action Board is the setting for the “brown water” naval battles, fought for control of the Mississippi River during the American Civil War.
Though it is not shown on the Action Board, the key to this conflict is New Orleans, Louisiana. Known as the “Crescent City” for the shape of its “Vieux Carre,” New Orleans grew from the French colonial settlement that today still clings to the north bank of the Mississippi River.
By 1861, New Orleans had grown into one of the largest port cities on the North American continent.
In the 1860’s the River’s main channel at New Orleans reached down over 50 feet (9 fathoms), deep enough that overseas shipping and other commercial traffic could sail up from the Gulf of Mexico to dock almost at the local merchants’ front door.
For the Confederacy, possession of New Orleans and its control of the Mississippi River was essential to the South’s survival as a nation.
The base game of Vijayanagara is a raucous three-player event set in medieval India. But we all know the feeling of not having the right player count in a given moment to pull a particular game off the shelf. Or maybe a player has to leave the game early, or you prefer to do your interactive history exploration alone over a cup of tea, savoring the decisions at precisely the right pace.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you may be pleased to hear that we have been very hard at work on cutting, sanding, and polishing three Non-Player Factions (bots), capable of running each of the player Factions in the game when you need them to step in. The bots are card-driven, similar to the Arjuna system for Gandhi, the Tru’ng system for Fire in the Lake, and the upcoming Calixto system for Cuba Libre, but streamlined and tailored for Vijayanagara.
Chief among the design goals for the bots was to retain the overarching narrative of the game in any configuration, while also seeking to create a streamlined interaction. After a lot of great playtesting efforts from the community and continual improvements, we are feeling pretty excited about where things stand.
After visiting Director Kellen Butler at the Lasch Conservation Center and seen the H.L. Hunley itself being painstakingly and lovingly restored, I needed to learn more about the locations where those involved in unleashing the Hunley upon the Union Navy blockading Charleston Harbor did their good work.
In this InsideGMT article, we’ll play through a few turns of Bear Trap.
The following playthrough is designed to demonstrate a few different aspects of the game, and to give you a basic sense of what it’s like to play—it’s not meant to be a demonstration of good play by the players.
In what follows, I won’t explain the game rules in detail. Instead, I’ll focus on describing what the players are doing. Insurgent play will be in green text, while Soviet play will be in red text, but I’ll also offer some commentary in italics. In all images here, all blocks are face up only for illustrative purposes; in an actual game, you would only be able to see the sticked side of your own blocks (until enemy blocks are committed in combat).
If you’re unfamiliar with the mechanics of how the game works, check out this prior InsideGMT article which provides an overview of gameplay, or take a look at the draft rulebook and player-aid (both on GMT’s product page for the game). Finally, note that the graphic design and artwork used here are for playtest purposes only and isn’t indicative of what the final artwork and layout will be like for the game when published. (What we have works fine for playtest purposes, but the GMT art department will eventually do a great job of creating something beautiful with a natural look that supports the gameplay.)
For this example of play, we’ll tune in about halfway through the game. The players have so far undergone 3 reshuffles and the Soviet player is getting close to their next reshuffle. A game of Bear Trap lasts up to 7 reshuffles, but can end earlier if a player satisfies their victory condition.
At the opening of the American Civil War, Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his people faced an enemy that had a substantially larger and fully ocean-going navy and was wedded to a strategic “Anaconda Plan” of defeating the Confederacy by economic strangulation through a naval blockading of all of its ports.
Like their forefathers, the Confederates used the technology of the 19th Century’s Industrial Revolution to even the odds by engineering an up-to-date version of a Revolutionary War weapon, the torpedo.
The term “torpedo” here applies to any explosive device triggered either remotely or by its own internal fuse.
With the Civil War entering its second year, the Confederate government set up two separate bureaus in Richmond, VA to expedite development and deployment of the torpedo on land and sea.
My goal in designing I, Napoleon was not to produce a competitive game since as a solo design the only opponent to beat is the game itself. While it is quite possible to “lose” the game, and there are a wide variety of different potential “wins” that can be achieved, in I, Napoleon the play is the thing. I wanted players to experience the narrative of Napoleon’s extraordinary life, and also the narratives that could have been.
But from the start, I was faced with the question of how far from Napoleon’s actual biography I could go. That Napoleon remains such an object of fascination 200 years after his death has less to do with his achievements or his crimes, than the sheer improbability of an obscure Corsican artillery officer rising to rule over the greatest European empire since Charles V. In a period of only 22 years Napoleon packed in more events than a score of normal lives. Simply including the events that did happen was obviously going to take up the bulk of the game’s 220 cards.
