Category Archives: Designer Blogs

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Resolving Combat in Bear Trap

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In this InsideGMT article, I’ll walk you through a simple example of combat in Bear Trap. This should give you the flavor of the combat system in Bear Trap – as well as how it’s similar to, yet also quite different from, combat in Sekigahara. Because of the timescale over which Bear Trap is played, “battles” resolved by the players don’t represent singular quick events resolved in hours. Instead, they represent weeks-long campaigns over an area that could span more than 15,000 km2. In this way, the scale of the game is quite different to Sekigahara.

Note: draft playtest art is use for the cards, blocks, and map here.

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The Sequence of Play in Baltic Empires

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A game of Baltic Empires lasts up to 8, 12, or 16 Rounds, chosen before starting the game, but can also end sooner if a player wins a sudden death victory (as described in the previous article). This article will describe what happens during a Round, and how players can manipulate the turn order in each phase, as this is a key element of Baltic Empires. The full details of each phase will only be briefly touched upon here, as they will each be the focus of later articles.

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A Congress of Vienna Option: Adding Tactical Flavor to Battles (A Tactical Battle Matrix) Part 1 of 2

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Introduction by Congress of Vienna Designer – Frank Esparrago: Although Congress of Vienna (CoV) is a game with an enormously robust selection of political and diplomatic decisions and effects with the game’s military aspects omnipresent; you’d think that would be enough. Ha! Some play testers wanted an option to study what could happen if they decided the big tactical choices in a decisive battle to a greater degree of influence than the standard game offers. As CoV’s designer, I could not resist the opportunity to address their desire!

The standard game already includes military units and cards that represent generals and other units such as guard, cavalry, etc. But for a game focusing on grand strategy, how would you arrange different army corps and reserves? This was something the standard game left uncontemplated. It seemed an optional rule the best approach to address this as an optional rule.

David Schoellhamer is one of our play testers who possesses excellent analytical skills and attention to detail. He has significantly contributed to improve Congress of Vienna despite not being a historical expert of the Napoleonic age. Lately, he is involved in the considerable task of making fully operational a scenario that allows playing CoV in a solitary version: the French player versus Bots for the three allied players! This allows the Solitaire Player to experience all the pressures and opportunities for glory that confronted Napoleon during the 1813-1814 period CoV encompasses.

This optional rule is based on the tactical battle matrix of the excellent Avalon Hill games 1776 and War and Peace published in the distant years of 1974 and 1980 respectively. However, playing with this optional rule does slow the amount of time needed for battle resolution. It should only be used by true-to-heart “wargamer” CoV players with enough time and desire to get more involved in the military aspects of this game. What is clear is that the CoV Tactical Battle Matrix does add an additional element of fun, uncertainty, tactical flavor, and “fog of war” to resolving battles. By presenting simple choices regarding the general tactics an army uses; we are sure that to some players it is quite reminiscent of the simple children’s game of rock / paper / scissors / match. But we will further reference this last analogy later during this article.

Additional background regarding Congress of Vienna should help readers best appreciate this optional offering. For that, please reference GMT Games – Congress of Vienna Now to our exposition!

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Almoravid Vassal Module in Action

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Here is a peek into the cutting-edge Vassal module engineered by the great Brian Reynolds for Levy & Campaign Series Volume II, Almoravid, from a solo game that Volko played to test out module operation. Have a look!

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Victory Conditions in Baltic Empires

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How they work and the history behind them.

The victory conditions in Baltic Empires have been constructed to give players multiple paths to victory and to allow for sudden death victories, as it is my experience that this keeps players on their toes and gives a far more exciting game with more intense diplomatic interaction between players. Besides the default victory conditions, players also have the opportunity during play to recruit Dramatis Personae that either replace some of their default victory conditions or offer entirely new ones. In this article I will go through the different victory conditions and explain how they work and what they represent in terms of history.

There are 3 ways of winning a Sudden Death Victory:

The first one is to achieve Cultural Hegemony by being on top of the Mercantile, Production and Military Hegemon Tracks (prototype track pictured to the left). The Hegemon Tracks and how they influence Turn order will be described in detail in the next article in this series, but for victory purposes all you need to know about them is that a Power’s position on each of these tracks is the sum of their controlled infrastructure or units associated with that track (Cities and Customs Houses for the Mercantile Track, Workshops for the Production Track, and units for the Military Track), as well as any modifiers that are specific to that Power, or from Dramatis Personae cards that they may have attached to their Court.

By achieving all three Hegemon positions at once, you have put yourself in a position where you are ahead of the other players financially, economically, and militarily. Such a status would naturally make your power a cultural center and the envy of the other rulers. As such it represents the ultimate goal of every great power in history. A victory of this kind is relatively rare, but it allows for a potentially non-violent way to win, and gives an incentive for the other players to work together to pull down a clear leader.

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When Did WWII Start? Germans in The Bell of Treason

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Let’s begin with a school question: when did WWII start? The generally acknowledged answer is September 1, 1939. But if we define war as a state of actual armed hostilities, regardless of a formal declaration of war, we may find that the answer is not so simple. During the Munich Crisis of 1938 (and here we are talking about the time before the Munich Agreement was signed), paramilitary groups of Sudeten Germans trained and armed in Germany, with headquarters near Bayreuth, were operating within Czechoslovak territory. Small numbers of SS and Wehrmacht personnel (usually company-sized units) even crossed the border to fight there too, carrying out raids and kidnapping hundreds of Czechoslovaks, many of whom would later die in German concentration camps. The Bell of Treason may focus on the conflict of ideas between conceding the Sudetenland or standing up against Germany, but during the same period terror and killing had already started in the Sudetenland. In this article we will look at how the game depicts Germans in two different ways: political and military.

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The Factions of Plum Island (or … What Futility Personified Looks Like)

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As I’ve explained to you all numerous times before (ad nauseum, to be honest), each player involved in The Plum Island Horror will be controlling one of the six available factions. These factions represent groups of people who are associated with one another for one reason or another … work, recreation, favorite bourbons, culinary tastes, blood types – that kind of thing. We’ve done extensive research, analysis of personnel records, combing of social media, hacking of phones and whatever else we could think of to bring as accurate a portrayal of these loosely-bound groups of individuals as possible. The factions each have their own particular personality and flavor, reflecting the general skills, tendencies and behavior of these hapless, cobbled-together groups of individuals who are desperately trying to save their home island – and probably all of humanity as well. No pressure at all. Here is a brief synopsis of what you can expect from each of these factions, which of course will always result in you losing the game regardless. But hey – you will be defeated in uniquely entertaining ways each time, so there’s that to look forward to. 

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Cross Bronx Expressway: Positioning Players in the Bronx

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Asymmetric game design often lives and dies on the way players relate to their positions, frequently expressed through factions. In historical simulations, the faction design provides a framework through which players can execute their strategies. When done well the strategic choices presented to them create a decision space which mirrors the history, or at least the history as presented in the game. This is an important distinction, because any historical game is still the biased presentation of that history from the perspective of the designer. So before getting into the ways in which I have positioned players in Cross Bronx Expressway, it’s probably worth noting what my position is as the designer.

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The British Way: Cyprus

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In this article, we will conclude our coverage of the games in The British Way by overviewing the British emergency in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959. Cyprus is probably the easiest game in the pack to learn for those new to the COIN series, but will offer a drastically different experience for COIN veterans due to the new counter-terrorism systems already briefly outlined in our article on The British Way: Palestine. In Cyprus, the British faced a small but flexible clandestine terrorist organization known as EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, or the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters), led by Georgios Grivas. In sharp contrast to the previous campaign covered in Kenya, the British in Cyprus were under intense international scrutiny due to efforts by the Greek government to keep the issue raised at the United Nations and the work of local activists who raised complaints about British repression to the newly formed European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

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War or Diplomacy? The Struggle Between the Wargamer vs Eurogamer Soul in the Design and Development of Congress of Vienna

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Introduction by Congress of Vienna Assistant Designer & Editor – Fred Schachter:This article is appearing after conclusion of an InsideGMT article series, a Standard Game After-Action-Report (AAR) of one of Congress of Vienna’s Scenarios, “The Clash of Armies”, which starts in August 1813 and runs through the end of that fateful year which encompasses many of the epic battles of a truly epic era. For those four episodes, see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna

One of the Design/Development conundrums the CoV Team confronted during its fun and intriguing journey is how to characterize this wonderful creation of designer Frank Esparrago. Is it a wargame? The hardcore grognard wargamers, of which I number myself, certainly believe so, particularly when playing with all the “Wargamer Flavor Rules (WFR)”… which, as explained below, will be retitled “Optional Historical Rules (OHR)” going forward. That term seems better suited to those rules’ intent, eh?

Then there are the CoV Team’s Eurogamers, who proclaim that Congress of Vienna’s Standard Game is representative of the more involved kind of Eurogames they so enjoy. It’s almost like Designer Frank had two angels perched on his shoulders as he labored on his game creation… one a “Wargamer Angel” and the other a “Eurogamer Angel” each whispering their imprecations into his ears. Whom did he heed? Well, from the reception Congress of Vienna has received to date… it seems to be offering something to gamers of all flavors!

In this article Frank shares some of the design considerations he’s confronted in bringing Congress of Vienna from concept into a GMT P-500 offering. For those interested in learning more of CoV’s genesis, see: Congress of Vienna Designer’s Notes (Part 1 of 2) – Inside GMT blog If you enjoy reading of how a designer deals with complex game elements… this article should strike a chord of interest! With that, take it away Frank!