Designing Wargames: Introduction

Preface

The series Studies in Game Design presents analyses of the design and strategy of games. George Phillies, Professor in the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Program in Interactive Media and Game Development, serves as Series Editor. Professional book length contributions are invited.

Titles in this series are

1 - Designing Modern Strategy Games

2 - Modern Perspectives on Game Design

3 - Stalingrad for Beginners (Basic Wargame Tactical Analysis)

4 - Stalingrad Replayed (Basic Wargame Tactical Analysis)

5 - Designing Wargames - Introduction

6 – A Course in Board Game Design (Draft title under consideration)

Author’s Remarks - Read First

I begin with a fair warning: Design is an art, not a science. There is no cookbook scheme that allows you to turn a crank, throw in some novels and some historical data, and have a good wargame come out. If you are looking for that magic cookbook, you are foredoomed to failure, because no such cookbook exists. Indeed, so far as I can tell no such cookbook can exist. For starters, there are many different audiences, just as there are many different tastes. You cannot at the same time please the people who will not eat food containing green peppers (a pepper, so too spicy) and the people who cook with bhut jolokia.

Game design is like painting. If I am teaching painting, I can teach perspective, color, lighting, and media. I can give practice in drawing the human body, perhaps starting with the use of the camera obscura. I can tell a student to study textiles, architecture, ceramics, printing, botany, descriptive biology, glass-blowing, and sign-making. I can give instruction in the various historical schools from Athenian redware to Hudson Valley to French academy to Japanese anime. I can even say to the student that brushstroke copies of great originals are appropriate. At some point, however, the father bird must eject the younglings from the nest. In the end, it is up to the student to synthesize all those parts into a coherent whole. Some syntheses will be better than others. Some students will struggle to produce workmanlike paintings, saleable at amateur art shows for five or ten dollars the square foot. Someplace, the same training is being given to the next John Singer Sargent, the next Sanford Robinson Gifford, and the next Michael Whelan. The teacher, like Moses, may point students at the Promised Land, but entrance into that fabled place is determined by the student, not the teacher.

Game design is also like computer programming. The game rules are a program and set of initial conditions, given to an NI (Natural Intelligence) embodied in a set of wetware. The game itself is a special-purpose CPU and memory device. Playtesting occupies the function of the debugging and testing process. Just as there are many users who want very different things from their software, so also are there many players who want very different features in their games.

By analogy with the teaching of painting, Part I of this book discusses what properties games have. It’s a historical discussion, a distant analogy of an art history course. Part II introduces the play of the historic board wargame Stalingrad, offering enough of an introduction that you can (and should) play it. Part III comes as close as I can to a ‘how to" discussion of designing a game, though perhaps I give you only the names of the major steps, not the steps themselves. Part III also goes into some detail on a detailed playtesting (debugging) operation. In painting terms, this Part is an introduction to art criticism. Part IV is a first pass at some of those individual elements that the game designer must merge into the final design. Parts V and VI introduce two more classic board wargames, 1914 and Panzerblitz. Parts II, V, and VI are the analogy of a highly detailed dissection of the artistic techniques used in three great paintings, following which you are told to make a brushstroke copy, so to speak, first by playing the games, and then by playing the games after changing the rules a bit. Part VII returns to the rules elements found in board wargames. The objective is to look at a series of rules mechanics, such as the zone of control, and examine different instantiations of the same general mechanic. The three classic games considered earlier in the book provide examples of those rules. We now try to be more thorough. Readers may imagine a cookbook: We have studied recipes in which beef is flavored with oregano, or with paprika, or with cinnamon. Now that we have seen examples of spices for meat, we discuss the spice rack. Part VIII dissects, paragraph by paragraph, the complete rules for the less-well-known board wargame Fall of Manjukuo, whose rules structures are from the Stalingrad family. Part IX considers two topics, luck and technology, and their roles in war and in board wargame design. Part X closes the work. Appendices discuss the author and a few of his other books.

Needless to say, I have not said everything that might be said about designing board wargames. This volume is simply an introduction. My target audience is the group of people who have some contact with designing other sorts of games, but who have had little or no contact with legitimate board wargames. Indeed, the major pedagogical and authorial challenge in preparing this introductory work is that most game designers, for example designers of computer games, have had no contact at all with orthodox (‘hex and counter’) board wargames. How should I then advance? I considered the possibility of sorting through my board wargame and wargaming magazine collections to generate an Encyclopedia of Board Wargame Mechanisms, but the work involved would be very great, while the audience interest would be less clear. I instead prepared this introductory volume.

You will never understand a field if you just read one book about it. There are a vast number of other books on game design, some with very different perspectives on the important issues. It should not be surprising, given the relative size of the two industries, that far more books treat computer games than treat board wargames. Nonetheless, there are other books on designing board wargames. The great designer James F. Dunnigan has given us his Wargames Handbook, now in its 2000 (third) edition from iUniverse (Lincoln, Nebraska). I would be remiss not to mention Philip Sabin’s Simulating War (Continuum Books, London, 2012), which treats the development of military history games that strive for historical accuracy. Note also Peter Perla’s The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists. Perla’s interest is the history of wargaming, with a considerable interest in professional military wargaming at the Naval War College. Sabin and Perla are primarily interested in board wargames as teaching and study tools, though to two very different audiences. Sabin’s audience is students in university courses in his academic Department of War Studies. The audience of the games that Perla describes is primarily composed of military officers and civilian analysts whose interests lie in developing tactics and in training for command. Sabin and Perla have in common an interest in games that accurately reflect history, technology, and doctrine, the objective of the games being to learn something about warfare. For Sabin’s students, whose familiarity with warfare is relatively limited, the objective is to give the students some understanding of issues that arise in wars and battles. Sabin’s constraint, as he explains at length, is that his classes have a maximum length of two hours. Sabin also presents the hypothetical possibility that a historian might better understand history by using board wargames as analytical tools, but presents no examples where this possibility is realized. For the professionals who play the games that Perla treats, the interest is in large part in developing an understanding of weapons and doctrine. Perla’s games may run for days.

There is an intimate tie between board wargames and roleplaying games. The creators of Dungeons and Dragons, my late friends Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were connected through the International Federation of Wargaming to the board wargaming hobby. Indeed, Gygax designed and published a series of board wargames. A detailed history of this link is found in Jon Peterson’s epic Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012, 720 pages), an enormous work that every serious game designer should read. Readers interested in rolegaming may also find of interest Robert Plamondon’s Through Dungeons Deep (Second Edition, Norton Creek Press, 2008). Board wargames are also linked to Eurogames, as treated in Designing Modern Strategy Games and Modern Perspectives in Game Design by Tom Vasel and myself. However, until recently it had been understood that the shape of Eurogames specifically excludes military topics.

I have used several classical board wargames to provide illustrations and examples of the issues at hand. In-print and out-of-print games remain available through a variety of suppliers. The actual illustrations here were prepared primarily with the ZunTzu (ZunTzu.com) and Vassal (VassalEngine.org) softwares, whose primary purpose is to allow game owners to play games against remote opponents over the internet. Also noteworthy as play-by-mail support softwares as of this writing are the Cyberboard (cyberboard.brainiac.com) and Aide de Camp (hpssims.com/pages/products/adc2/adc2-main.html) programs. Zuntzu, Vassal, Cyberboard, and Aide de Camp are general-purpose game-playing programs, allowing players at remote points to play games via the internet. Associated with each is a stock of data modules for specific games. The game titles available for each program are not the same. These programs are graphics-generating and communication engines. They do not have internal AI software that would permit them to play one side or the other against a human opponent, or that check for the legality of different moves.

In addition to the wargame computer modules, as of the time of writing it is possible to buy reworked game maps and unit counters, notably from Camelot Games (CamelotGameStore.Com). The Cooper rework of the Stalingrad map and counters is a work of art.

In writing this volume, I have tried to adhere to the rigorous American Chemical Society style guide, rather than less rigorous literary style guides, on one important issue: If it is within quotation marks, it is in the original source. Punctuation marks not in the original source are placed outside the neighboring quotation marks. For simplicity in electronic formats, bibliographic information is usually placed in the text, not as a footnote.

Part I Board Wargames in the Gaming Continuum

Chapter 1 - Introduction

This book tries to teach you how to design board war games. Designing Wargames - Introduction could be used as textbook in a college course. The book is also meant to introduce individual computer game designers and others to rules structures and design techniques used in board wargames. I have largely stayed with land war games, skipping air, naval, and space games. I’ve tried to write the volume so it will be as useful for individual readers as for groups of students. That effort cannot be completely successful. For some activities, notably playing and playtesting, there is no real alternative to having the assistance of other players. In particular, designers of other types of strategy games will really need to learn how to play, adequately well, at least a few games, in order to have a clearer comprehension of the rules discussions.

Assuredly, I do not tell you everything there is to know about wargame design. Designing Board Wargames – Introduction really is an introduction, as promised in its title. In every journey, your first steps are often the most difficult. My effort here is intended to ease you on your way toward becoming a wargame designer. For some designers, board wargames will be a resource to be mined for its supply of clever and novel rules mechanics. For these designers, the important step is to learn that the resource exists.

Designing Wargames - Introduction really is only an introduction to the art of board wargame design. Many of my students have never played a real board wargame, so this book really does start out at ground zero by teaching readers how to play a simple but classical title, the 1963 Avalon Hill game Stalingrad. To demonstrate how one can make small rule changes and have dramatic effects on play, I then introduce the almost equally classical Avalon Hill title 1914. A radically different game design is then presented, the classical title Panzerblitz. These titles are intended to introduce players to some of the sorts of different rules that have been used in board wargames. Rules for board wargames fall into various classes dealing with movement, combat, command and control, supply, and so forth. I give systematic discussions of several rules classes, and examples of particularly creative or complex rules. I also treat playtesting, the key element of the development process.

The discussion below falls into ten segments. This segment, Part I of the book, discusses various sorts of games of strategy. I ask ‘what are the major traits that define different types of game?’, and examine how board war games are similar to (but also quite different from) other sorts of game. I also discuss how this book might be used as a text for an academic course.

Every student should know how to play at least a few board wargames before trying to understand my more general discussion on game design. Many readers will never have played a board war game before. You may have played a light board war game like Risk, or an abstract strategic game like Chess, but orthodox hex and counter games are encountered less often. I walk you through the play of several classic board war games. Along the way I discuss generalizations of the representative rules that readers will encounter in these games. For example, many board wargames are played on a hexagonal grid, but there are a variety of other dissections of the plane that have or could be employed.

Three further segments of the book, Parts II, V, and VI, therefore present three board wargames, namely the classical Avalon Hill titles Stalingrad, 1914, and Panzerblitz. The discussion of Stalingrad is complete. For 1914 and Panzerblitz, readers will need to avail themselves of additional source material available on the internet or elsewhere, notably tables and scenario cards, before being able to play. These games are all out of print, but the Zuntzu and Vassal modules noted above allow readers to play the games on the computer. For Stalingrad, I present in Part II the complete rules of play, based on my book Stalingrad for Beginners. Part V considers 1914, which at the time it was published represented a radical change from what had gone before. The discussion of 1914 stresses the many small ways in which 1914 differs from Stalingrad. The individual changes are modest, but the combination of changes leads to a game with a playing style very different from the style encountered in Stalingrad. Finally, Panzerblitz is introduced in Part VI as a radically different game in which weapons consistently have ranged effects, so that a unit on one square can attack an enemy unit that is a considerable number of squares away. Panzerblitz units are small groups of vehicles or platoons containing a few tens of men, but similar game styles are credible when the maneuver units are squads of a dozen men, fire teams of 3-4 men, or single individuals.

It is all well and good to say that a designer has a multitude of options for making a game. How, however, does one make a game? The answer is a sound design process, followed by playtesting, as discussed in Section III. What is playtesting? Playtesting is the board game design analog of software alpha testing and beta testing. You put the game in front of people who have played other games, have some idea what the game is supposed to do, and who then try to play the game or components of it. You put the game in front of likely customers. You listen carefully to what they tell you.

A useful perspective is that a set of game rules is much like a computer program with operator controlled inputs. To prepare a computer program, you have some plan as to what the software is supposed to do, follow good design and coding practices, do logic and debugging tests, but at some point there is no better alternative than to run the program and see what happens with real or deliberative perverse inputs. How do you run the program implicit in a game’s design? You do playtesting.

The analogy between playtesting and computer program testing was not obvious to early game designers, in fair part because computers at that time were few and far between. The first (corporate, as it happens) purchase of a computer dedicated to home entertainment purposes, a Raytheon 704 purchased by Flying Buffalo, Incorporated, was not until 1971. However, empirical rules for improving game playtesting are very much like empirical rules for testing computer programs. A traditional warning is ‘test the extreme options’. The matching cartoon from decades ago went approximately you stopped the airline hijackers? By throwing an atomic hand grenade at them? While they were standing in the cockpit? How did the rules handle your brilliant move? Another warning is ‘find playtesters with very different skill levels’.

If you are lucky, you have playtesters who have an eye for finding rules features that do not work. At the lowest level, you have the people who notice that point costs specified in the tables and charts are inconsistent with the point costs specified in the rules. At the highest level, you have the people who can identify rules features that disrupt game play, even before they have played the game. If your units cannot move out of supply, and the range of your supply lines increases at one square per turn, you can immediately determine what your army will not be moving on turns 1, 5, 15, or 50. Persons who are good play testers are often extremely good program debuggers, and vice versa. The wonder code readers who can be presented with ten thousand lines of program and identify in a weekend all the points where the software will break are often the same people who can look at a 30 page rule book and identify all the game features that can be exploited in order to obtain anomalous results.

Two segments of the book, Parts IV and VII, discuss a broader range of possible rules in game design. Part IV discusses relatively straightforward issues and alternatives, using as a reference point the game system introduced in Part II. Part VII discusses more complex sets of rules designed to obtain particular effects. Part VIII gives a complete set of rules to a single, not extremely complicated board wargame, Fall of Manjukuo. Interspersed within the rules segments are short paragraphs of analysis, explaining what each rules section does in terms of the play of the game. Part IX discusses the origins of luck, and the role technology has played in real historical situations. Finally, Part X offers a unifying discussion.

A game that reflects warfare must to some extent reflect the basic elements of real war: movement, combat, weapons, tactics, strategy, supply, intelligence, training and doctrine, morale, command control, research and development and technology, production, resources, and national support base. The relative importance of each of these factors will be quite different in different games. Some factors may be installed in the rules; other factors are under the control of the player. In a game that covers a fifteen minute encounter between two tank companies, the players are presented with their tables of organization and equipment (TO&E), the list of weapons and people they are going to use to fight out their engagement. They might have an option of more artillery or more tanks or an air strike, just as they might be given in a real battle, but the outline is fixed. In a strategic game covering years of warfare, weapons development might be static or there might be opportunities for players to emphasize better aircraft or larger forces.

For each of these basic elements of real warfare, a designer has a menu of choices on styles of rules. I am not proposing that all choices are equally good, or that any combination of elements is as good as any other. However, if a designer has no idea that there is an extensive range of choices available for rules on a particular topic, he is less likely to create his own rules that reflect well the game circumstances he is trying to represent. Parts IV and VII of the book discuss how to represent some of these elements.

In writing Designing Board Wargames - Introduction, I have centered the discussion on the word game. When I discuss game quality, I am asking ‘is this feature giving us a better game?’ An important issue is that ‘better’ is in the eye of the player; different players see different game features as being more important.

There are also people who look at same material objects that I call games and refer to them as conflict simulations or historical simulations rather than calling them wargames, strategic games, strategy games, or just games. The term wargame was the original name used for the games, the hobby being wargaming. In referring to a game as a simulation, speakers often have in mind that the designer is trying to produce a set of components that allow the players to duplicate history, and to see how history might have been changed if different decisions had been made. The adjectives conflict and historical are references to what was being simulated, namely past wars and battles. If one refers to the games as historical, then science fiction and fantasy titles with starships, dragons, magicians, or all of these at the same time must be viewed as being beyond the pale, because their topics are ahistorical. The division between historical titles and science fiction (SF&F) titles is extremely artificial, and if taken seriously impoverishes the designer who believes in it. The ranged weapon may be an antitank gun or a fireball wand, but the ways of representing the effects in the rules, as opposed to the names given to the effects, may be the same. I therefore treat the design of SF&F board games as part of wargame design. Those designers who do not view SF&F games as wargames weaken their ability to design good games.

Describing the games as strategic games and the activity as strategy gaming may be traced back to 1965, at which time games of strategy were indeed almost all games about war. The intent then was to avoid the word war. In retrospect, the name strategy game is seen to be astonishingly farsighted. Only much more recently, with the blossoming of Eurogames, do we see the appearance of games that have shallow or deep strategies but that are not related to warfare. It remains the case that current Eurogames tend to have smaller shapes, as discussed below, than do typical board wargames, but that is a correctible design decision.

Behind all the names is a practical question: Why are people playing a particular game? Different answers lead to different choices as to what makes a good game. Some people play as a leisure activity, a way to spend time. Others play for the challenge of testing strategy or the joy of victory. Some people use wargames as a path to studying historical events, or as an alternative to the written word employed to watch history unfolding. Viewing board wargames as simulations, board wargames are widely employed to develop military theory and doctrine. Perla’s Art of Wargaming asserts that most U.S. Navy operations in the WW2 Pacific Theater arose from actions that had already been intensively gamed in peacetime. Details of battles of course differed. Sabin’s Simulating War proposes the use of wargames as a means of teaching and studying history. Sabin provides excellent examples of the use of wargames to teach history. Examples of historical studies that substantially benefitted from gaming analyses would be interesting supporting evidence. The applications of games treated by Perla and Sabin stand well apart from the game aspects of the military exercises that they present.

Chapter 2 - Fundamental Elements of Game Design

I begin with a few general questions. What is a game? What are the fundamental elements that go into a game’s design? How do we describe classes – representations -- of games? Where do we place board wargames with respect to these elements and classes?

What is a game?

Readers may wish to consult Greg Costikyan’s two wonderful essays, one each in Designing Modern Strategy Games and Contemporary Perspectives in Game Design. To summarize Costikyan’s thoughts, there are real games, and there are things that look like games but are really not games. I will amplify on the features he raises, and suggest some thematic variations.

First, to be a game, the object under consideration must offer meaningful player participation. If the players only sit and watch, the way you watch a television show or motion picture, there is no game. One could imagine a game in which the players at the start of the game each choose a strategy, and then have no influence on what happens for the next day of playing time, so the participation is very limited, and all occurs in the opening moments of play. Such a balance of player initiative and game control is more than a mite odd, but we are still discussing a game. To be a game, the players must participate. Those players did participate. Games also require other features.

A game requires decision making. If the player activity consists of rolling a die and moving a single pawn, there may be player involvement, but the player is making no decisions. A real game must be arranged so that a player has meaningful choices, and that the player’s choices have a significant effect on the game. If there are no decisions, or if the decisions actually have no effect on the outcome, then the play activity is not a game.

Real games supply goals for the players. The players must have objectives, positions they are trying to reach or tasks that they are trying to perform. If there are no goals -- in board wargames, the goals are called victory conditions -- then the player decisions are meaningless. By making different decisions, players will see different things happen on the map board, but the player activity will be meaningless.

A game must supply a challenge to the players. If there is no opposition, so that the players make moves, and an outcome is generated, but the game and other players supply no push-back, in some sense there is no game. If victory is certain, what is then the point of playing?

To be a board game, there must be a playing board, typically a map of the area that the players are fighting over. There will also in general be playing pieces, objects that are moved across the board during play. There will certainly be rules. There may be auxiliary tables, charts, or other player support objects.

Costikyan suggests a variety of game features that may add to the interest in playing the game. In particular, many games create challenge via resource management. A player has a certain number of options, a certain number of tasks to perform, but actually cannot perform all of them. The player must decide which tasks are to be attempted, and what resources are to be allocated to each effort. Information influences a player’s decision. A player may have a series of options between which a decision must be made, but the available information may be incomplete. Each player must also distinguish between an opponent’s capabilities -- the things the opposing player might do -- and intent -- the things that the opposing player has decided to do. In a discussion of game play, the distinction between capability and intent goes back to the tactical discussion in Charles Roberts’ Tactics II. Variety of encounter, the effect of random chance, can be used to create an interest in game play. A game such as Go or Chess is purely calculational. There are no unknown factors, victory belonging to the person who best identifies the pattern seen on the mapboard, or best calculates ahead to determine what is to be done. A typical board war game has random events, so that a player may choose actions, but factors not within the player’s control also have effects, so that consequences of a particular move are partly determined by random chance. In principal, random events pointing to a list of possible outcomes leave the player with a purely calculational game, because all outcomes are known. However, each possible outcome for a particular event creates a new branch in the calculation. When the number of branches becomes very large, the detailed calculational effort becomes impractical.

Particularly in a multiplayer game, there may be room for negotiation or diplomacy. Interactions between the players as people may affect the play of the game, or may be the dominant part of game play. Diplomacy leads eventually toward role playing, in which players in some sense become their characters, and act out what they believe their characters would do as part of their arete, their effort to be the best that they can be. The concept of arete was central to some sorts of ancient Greek moral philosophy. Role playing is seen in first person computer games, in which the player controls a single simulated human being, though in a first person shooter the character has approximately no free will. Overemphasis on first person gaming is a feature of what Costikyan describes as the vidiot approach to game design. Contrary to some authors, there are alternatives to the first person singular point of view, as discussed below under voice.

Role-playing behavior, identifying with a particular character, can readily lead to bad tactical and strategic decisions in game play. Board war game design, as opposed to rolegame design, is generally not based on character identification or role playing. Indeed, the great innovation of Gygax and Arneson, whether intentional or not, was that it is possible to create games in which character identification rather than tactical choice makes the game attractive to play.

Socializing is not a part of game design, but it may well create an attraction leading to play. The game may not be the thing. It may be the excuse needed to bring people together for an afternoon or evening of social interaction, the game serving as the excuse.

Narrative tension is a literary concept. A novel is a real page-turner if the uncertainty in what is about to happen persuades the reader to plow ahead through the narrative and dialogue. There are any number of literary tricks for creating narrative tension. In computer games, one can build narrative tension by creating a succession of ever-more-challenging obstacles. In board games, matters can be quite different. In chess, loss of a major piece without adequate compensation is a disaster. Instead of increasing the narrative tension, piece loss ends tension: One player has lost the game, and except between very weak players the player who has lost a major piece marks the occasion by resigning.

Simulation, creating events that resemble what players believe reality to have been, can be useful for encouraging player identification with characters. Simulation has an alternative entirely opposite use, namely there are games whose purpose it is to duplicate history as accurately as possible. Players are left with strategic and tactical decisions, but so much as possible the consequences of those decisions are the consequences that would have taken place on the real battlefield. A variety of paths to attaining simulation, including design for effect and design for accuracy, have been used successfully.

Serious game simulations represent an exception to Costikyan’s proposals on game design. In serious games, the interest is not in the competition between the players, but in an understanding of what is happening or will happen. The game is employed as a tool to divine the future. For example, one might have several different ideas as to the most effective use of an antisubmarine weapon, so players execute a series of different uses of the weapon, paired against various tactics of the opposing submarine, with multiple repetitions of play being used to ferret out statistical elements in the competition. Here the objective of the players is not to win, but to determine the likely and possible outcomes, so as to better understand the real world.

So much for Costikyan’s very important thoughts on features that make something a game.

Costikyan, however, also identifies things that are not games. A toy is said not to be a game. A jigsaw puzzle is not a game. Sim City or Second Life in their original forms are said not to be games, because there are no objectives or victory conditions, and not necessarily much in the way of opponents. Play objects that do not have victory conditions or opposition are viewed as not being games. However, if we are to believe Jim Dunnigan’s research, most board wargames are played solitaire, with the same person controlling the forces of both sides in the same game. Research simulations run by military forces or by historians for study purposes are not being operated in pursuit of victory, though each side in a simulation may have well-defined objectives. Many classic rolegames do not have victory conditions, though some of their event modules do. There is thus a continuum extending from game aspects to simulation aspects to historical representation aspects, but those aspects affect who is likely to buy or play the game, not what is in the game rules. One might reasonably propose that the game is embodied in the rules and components, not in the minds of the players or their motives for playing. If we examine the hypothetical game Fifth Battle of the Isonzo we are looking at the same game, no matter whether the players are trying to win or are trying to understand what happened.

What are the fundamental elements of a game’s design?

Elements are the fundamental objects that are combined to form real objects. Chemical elements number well over 100. Western medieval alchemy recognized four elements, which we would now call states of matter: earth (solid), water (liquid), vapor (gas), and fire (plasma), to which some schools of Japanese alchemy added ceramics (glasses), wood (composites), and silk (polymers). The ancients proposed there were four fundamental tastes, which we would call sweet, sour, salt, and bitter, the latter being an element of some Chinese cooking using bitter melon. The tastes are basic elements of cooking. The great gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin identified a fifth fundamental taste, savory, now known as umami. Some would note a sixth element of taste, vulcanicity (heat), measured in the quantifiable Scoville unit, culminating -- taking us back through South America and India to the topic of this volume -- in the Trinidad Scorpion Moruga (2 million Scoville units), whose Indian relative the ghost pepper has been weaponized as an elephant repellant.

So what are the fundamental elements that we combine to form games? I’m going to answer this question several times, with more detail each time.

When I first answered this question, some years ago, I said there were five elements. I now say seven. Perhaps there are more. Nonetheless, seven elements of game design:

Representation

Mechanisms and Styles

Theme

Shape

Components

Voice

Content

Representation is what a game looks like to a naive observer. Mechanisms are the bits and pieces of rules that are combined to form a game. Most Styles are dominant mechanisms during play. Theme answers the question What’s the game about? Shape describes how the game occupies the player’s life. Components are the things that fall out when you empty the box. Voice is the literary notion of voice. Content is the substantive body of facts you insert into a game to supply color or historical accuracy.

Let’s take these at greater length.

Representation describes how a non-gamer tells what sort of game he has in front of him. He may need to watch for a while. Nonetheless, a non-gamer with a bit of effort will say that’s a computer game, those people are playing with toy soldiers, that’s a live re-enactment, and so forth. We often identify a representation by the type of components in use: little square cardboard counters. Little plastic figures. People sitting at a table talking. Painted toy soldiers. Live human beings. Computer gadgets.

Mechanisms and Styles not truly separable. A mechanism is a rules component, a piece of a game in the sense that a gear or a four-bar linkage or a resistor or an interocitor is a component of a machine. Sometimes one or two mechanisms dominate play. A style is a dominant rules mechanism. Mechanisms and Styles are very different from each other. However, a list of known mechanisms has almost all the same elements as a list of known Styles, so I here combine Mechanisms and Styles as two lists having almost exactly the same set of elements., though perhaps someplace in the peripheries there are styles that are not simply dominant mechanisms and mechanisms that cannot be expanded into styles.

Bidding is a game mechanism. Players compete by offering things of value to procure something. However, bidding might be a very small component of a very large game, something that breaks the monotony or that rarely happens. On the other hand, there are auction games in which bidding dominates play. In a classic example, you have a certain amount of play money, and you want to purchase the best art collection for your patron by bidding for individual pieces against your opponents. There may be scoring rules, but the auction dominates play. In an auction game, bidding is the game’s style. If I say that a computer game is a first-person shooter, most readers will hear me as identifying the game’s style. A list of game styles would largely be a typology of game types. Designing Modern Strategy Games identified a long list of game mechanisms, most appropriate to Eurogames, and made a start at establishing a typology for Eurogames. Readers of that volume will note that the effort to separate styles and mechanisms did not work well, because the two lists are almost entirely the same. A board wargame, as we will see, is substantially defined by having a specified list of types of mechanism.

Theme is what the game is about. Many board wargames are about a particular battle, campaign, or war; that’s the game’s theme. Other wargames put more emphasis on production and research, 4X being the boardgame representation of an entire class of computer games of which Space Empires is the canonical form. A few board wargames focus on supply or maintenance, such as SPI Campaign in North Africa or the much rarer Westinghouse Logistics Command. Some authors have used theme to distinguish between wargames, science fiction games, and fantasy games, even though these are all games about warfare in which the individual combatants are variously labeled as tanks, starships, or sorcerers, perhaps with no changes other than spelling in the other rules.

Shape is how much of a player’s life a game occupies. At one end, in scissors-paper-rock each player makes one of three choices, which beat each other cyclically. There are more complex versions of the same game with a half-dozen player choices. Nonetheless, time is called, each player makes one choice, and the game is over. That’s a minimal level of player commitment. On the other end, Campaign for North Africa has thousands of unit counters, detailed rules for everything, hundreds of hours of playing time, and teams of five or more players, several of whom on each side are usefully accountants to manage all the supply issues. Campaign for North Africa has been played to completion, I gather repeatedly, by several monstergaming groups. All games have a shape. Eurogames and live-action re-enactments are defined by their shapes.

Components are the parts and pieces that are assembled to make a game. For a board game, one almost always has a board, though note GDW System Seven Napoleonics and Avalon Hill Jutland. A familiar boardgame like Chess or Go also has playing pieces or stones. A typical board wargame will have a