Last week, we started off with by talking about the design principles and scale behind Solitaire TacOps: Ortona. This week we will be talking about the design behind the series system.

The Solitaire TacOps system, as a design idea, entered the formative stage while considering the map of the 1977 SPI game Cityfight by Joe Balkoski and Stephen Donaldson. It is clearly the work of Redmond Simonsen.  A cluttered Simonsen but a Simonsen nonetheless. Standard white for clear terrain, gray roads, multiple greens for different clusters of trees and even some water features. The buildings are mostly nondescript rectangles in a range of colors, which the map key explains refers to height. A standard hex grid is overlaid to manage movement, with the hexes grouped into megahexes (a central hex and its six surrounding hexes). Small triangles dot the map providing directional cues. Each of these details building a language that unfolds the physicality that gives its fictional city a real shape. Seen through this lens one begins to appreciate the complexities the urban landscape offers. 

Two of these maps came in the Cityfight box, one for each of its mandatory two players. The mechanic that holds the thesis of Cityfight together is that it is two-player, double blind. The maps are setup on the table separated by a screen. Then, similar to Battleship, certain actions allow each player to ask the other about the potential disposition of their units on the map. Unlike Battleship, Cityfight is can get a bit rules heavy. Perhaps too heavy for its own good. 

Cityfight was released a few years after the Vietnam War, there was a lot of interest around non-conventional or irregular warfare. Militaries across the globe were developing new tactics for the future battlefield and urban warfare was emblematic of it. 

The decision space gives players abstractions of real equipment and processes in order to model their potential effects. The fidelity of the model is meant to allow for exploration of the practical application of doctrine. Design notes mention a couple of rules which were specifically requested by consultants from the US Army Infantry school, to refine the model as a training tool. This emphasis on details builds complexity barriers to the experience that raises questions on how effective it was for such purposes. 

What makes Cityfight work however, is that it understands its scale. Even though the whole city is before the player, at any moment, for any unit, the perspective is quite narrow. Even if there is a clear objective two blocks away, getting there means traversing any number of angles and blindspots where the opposition may be waiting. The fog of war of the double blind setup means a significant amount of time is spent getting a sense of where enemy forces might be within the terrain. It requires constant search and sight actions, which are more effective with a proper deployment of forces. Since the opponent can move, it is also important to manage command across units and coordinate maneuvers between them. 

The tension these decisions create is amazing. But the thing that makes for such great experiences also holds the game back—the double blind mechanic. While the actions are straightforward, their procedures often require you to walk through steps which may or may not have to be confirmed by the opposing player with whom you’re trying to share as little information as the rules require. Each double blind check brings in this cat and mouse aspect that increases the play time exponentially. Yet, the game is better the more checks you’re doing . . . you can see the circular issue here.

Many design ideas were born during my plays of Cityfight. It captured a lot of the maneuver aspirations I had in mind for my own system, but was a little too zoomed in for the broader effectiveness picture. Even more though, the double blind mechanic just felt unnecessary in a modern context. Surely there was a way to represent the type of fog of war tension the game created without going full double blind.

That in particular as a design challenge led to the seeds of what would become another system that I call Tactics to Doctrine. It sat a bit further up in scale than Cityfight. It became its own system because it is a bit too far up, though it took me a while to realize it. 

While I was working on Tactics to Doctrine I decided to test it with the Battle of Ortona, because I wanted an urban battle which could exemplify what I was trying to model. Ortona stood out for its days of fighting where offensive and defensive maneuvers had to be employed by both sides. Tactical challenges arose from an urban terrain constantly reshaped through combat. Operational support for the combined arms was essential and dependent upon well managed logistics. Together these make for a campaign where every engagement is a contest of effectiveness.   

I drew up some maps for Ortona and started testing urban combat using the Tactics to Doctrine system. It was fun, but completely missed the mark on maneuver. Chaining actions at the higher scale abstracted away what was happening in ways that simply missed the point. Abstractions can lead to a desired impact but run the risk of not asking the right questions to understand the why. In order for the tactical decisions to feel discrete from the operational choices some things could not be abstracted away. 

So I pulled out Cityfight, set it up and started playing a hybrid version of that game with the Tactics to Doctrine system to see where I lost the thread. It was in the middle of this play that the lightbulb went on. 

I was trying to set up an ambush, but the opposition ended up on the wrong side of the building. I needed to predict where they might be next so that my units did not end up exposed and could potentially still catch the opposition unaware. 

Playing multi-hand solo, I knew exactly where the opposition “might be”, but I realized then how not knowing and still having to pivot, created the tension. With limited information, everything the player knows about the disposition of the opposition was mostly of their own projection.

That is when it clicked – you don’t need another player. A solitaire game could provide the fog of war tension of Cityfight without the hassle of double blind so long as the system could build and sustain a robust internal narrative for the player. Once I stopped worrying about how to model fog of war between two players, everything started falling into place. 

Solitaire TacOps is about committing to action with limited information and resources. Operationally you have to build a plan to complete missions. Your operational commitment is the force deployment that goes with that plan. Tactically you commit to the actions taken to achieve the objective. At both scales, the game system challenges your commitments. Have you deployed the right combination of forces with the support needed to achieve the objective? Can those forces be effective in a tactical situation? To answer, players deploy those forces to the scenario maps and play the engagements out against a solitaire system designed to contest their effectiveness every step of the way.

In the next part of this series we’ll start looking at how the maps and components help build the effectiveness picture in Solitaire TacOps: Ortona.

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