Archives for design - Page 6
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Inspiration
Image via Wikipedia Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc. Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice. The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel 'Yesterday' about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I've done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret…
Preparing For War – Onside Report
British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I had a design session titled 'Preparing for War' at the CLWG November meeting. Preparing for War was about training an infantry company in the UK after Dunkirk. Rather than a conversational design session I decided to try and do something that was playable. I'd been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could have been played. I'd felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real. Preparing for War I ran a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me). So I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I'd decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map…
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CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports
Onside Report - WW2 Mechanisms I lead a discussion on whether an operational research article could be used to produce some mechanisms for running a WW2 wargame with resolution ( smallest unit represented) at somewhere between platoon and battalion. The article1 in question was first published back in 1987, so quite venerable. I came across a photocopy of it tucked into an old copy of British Army Training News from the saem time period. I have subsequently found PDFs of a slightly different version of it, along with a follow-up article looking at urban combat. Offside Report - Come One Come Eorl Andrew Hadley brought back the Scottish component of this game for another try having modified some of the mechanisms from the previous playtest. We didn't really play the game as we spent a lot of time talking about…
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CLWG Games Weekend 2007 Reports
Siege of Yendor Tryout Jim put on a session to try out the mechanisms for the upcoming megagame. We spent some time trying to bring down a section of wall, and also seeing whether or not it was possible to directly assault the wall without first undermining or demolishing it. Jim's Breeding Idea This was a design session rather than a game, but we gave it a good go none the less. Jim had come away from the Light of the Trees megagame with an idea that it ought to be possible to do a sub-component of a game about breeding heroes using some real genetics theory. The main aim was that, like in real life, the players managing the breeding programme wouldn't actually know what the actual genetic make up of their characters were. Over time those players that were keeping an eye on things…
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CLWG Offside Report – November 2006
There were three sessions at the British end of the November '06 meeting of CLWG; no doubt Daniel and Nick will enlighten us separately on what we missed at the continental meeting. In order of appearance the attendance was Trevor, Mukul, Jim, Brian, John, Peter Howland and myself. The sessions were: Torchwood. A Victorian roleplaying game run by Brian Cameron Starship Marine. A classic figure game run by Jim Remember, Remember. An old favourite re-run by both Jim and Brian covering the gunpowder plot of 1605. Torchwood (Brian) Brian started this off with a short clip from the end of the Doctor Who episode that had inspired the game. The episode (titled Torchwood) involved the Doctor saving Queen Victoria from a werewolf in the Highlands in 1879. At the end of the episode (after QV has knighted and then immediately…