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A Good Example of Simplifying Wargame
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I wrote this in 2022, and put it aside thinking I might add to it,
perhaps playing the solo version. I haven’t, and as the game I’m discussing is
going to be reprinted (or already has) I unearthed it.
Kevin Bertram’s wargame The Shores of Tripoli (2020
Fort Circle Games) is the example. It’s about the war between the young United
States and the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, which is part of the origin of
the US Marine song.
There are two parts to making a game simpler. One is to
reduce the number of decisions and choices the player must make. The other is
to reduce the number of exceptions to the rules. That’s because there are
really two parts to “making a game easier”, 1) to make it easier to play and 2)
to make it easier to learn. The first especially involves decisions and the
second especially involves exceptions to the rules.
Reducing the number of decisions involves two things:
getting rid of “unnecessary” or unimportant decisions, and offering fewer
plausible choices for each decision.
In Tripoli this involves reducing the number of
locations on the board, in this case to just 14. Think about that, even simple
games like Chess and Checkers have 64 locations, Risk has 42
locations; on the other hand Tic-Tac-Toe has just nine and Backgammon
just 24.
Another way to simplify is to give the player only a few
assets that can be in some different state, such as in a different location. In
Tripoli this amounts to not much more than a dozen on either side.
Moreover, a player’s pieces often move only as a group,
effectively reducing the number of options. For example, armies move together,
and corsairs from a city move as a group.
But each of the players in Tripoli has 27 cards, although
not all of those cards are available to him or her at one time. The typical
number is 11 or fewer. Moreover, many of the exceptions to the rules are on the
cards, where a player doesn’t need to worry about it until they have that card
in their hand. Cards are a fine way to reduce the number of exceptions a player
needs to learn before they can play the game.
Combine that with simple rules that don’t have a lot of
exceptions and you end up with a game that is both easy to learn and easy to
play, though not necessarily easy to play well. Easy to play means the
mechanics don’t get in the way and it’s easy to know what you can do and what
you can’t do.
Easy to play well is quite different, insofar as what you
need to do could be quite transparent (easy to see/figure out) or deeply buried
in the game. If all the decisions you may need to make are immediately obvious
the game will be easier to play than if many decisions are not revealed until
you’ve made other decisions. In a nutshell that’s a difference between a
shallow game and one that has a lot of depth. It’s quite possible to make a
deep game that is nonetheless easy to play, although it would be more common
that a game that is easy to play will be fairly shallow (the opposite of
depth).
There’s a solo version as well as two player. The
card-driven nature, and the simplicity of the game, makes it easier to make a
solo version. The rules can say what to do with just about every card the
non-player side may turn up.
This kind of simplification might work well with a game for
more than two sides.
I’m not recommending the game one way or the other, because
I haven’t actually played. I’m not into two player games these days (and I do
not personally like card-driven games as games, though they can be good for
learning history).
