How I made a tabletop wargame in about a week

 As a direct result of the actions of the players in my current campaign, the Undying City now has a fairly sizeable strike force (calling them an army might be giving them too much credit) of Chaos-aligned cultists that serve the Chaos Lord known as The Decomposition, along with allies they have managed to rally to their cause. And what is that cause? To disrupt the ritual currently being performed in the Undying City which will transform every living being in the city into undead, and in the process (and of actual concern to these Chaos cultists) will completely cement the city as a stronghold of Law in this plane of existence.

Initially, my plan was to simply have the fighting on the city streets happening either in the background or maybe even having the party directly participating in it. However my players have been reluctant to really pick a direct course of action, their current stance mostly being that they want to wait and see which way the fight will go, and if possible try and stop both forces from actually keeping control of the city. 

So I was left in a bit of a dilemma, where in order to logically progress with the game, the battle for the city had to be resolved at least to some degree. Well, I didn't really want to just come up with a way for it to go, or come up with some broad strokes system to simulate it and then just tell my players how it went. Because, after all, this is a gaming campaign. The point is to game!

That got me thinking - I really enjoy tabletop/boardgame wargames. So couldn't I come up with a quick and dirty one to allow my players to actually play out the battle as the commanders of Chaos and Law, and then let them zoom back in on their characters and have them react to the situation? Well yes. Yes I could. And so I did. 

Concepting and Design

So, first things first I had to figure out what the system for this game was going to be. I personally enjoy card-driven wargames, but that would involve way way too many cards to have to design and make, and I did not feel like that was a productive way of doing it. After some quick and rough brainstorming, I settled on using the main combat system (and from there, unit stats) from Brotherhood and Unity, which I've played a couple of times and quite enjoyed and found to be pretty straightforward and light for a tabletop wargame. 

With that I had to determine how the map of the city will be traversed. Initially I was going to use areas similar to the board game Dual Powers, but after actually trying to draw that as a map it just looked way too cluttered and hard to read. Instead I just went with point to point movement, another staple of tabletop wargames, except the ones that use hexes of course. 

From there, I had figure out how to model the two forces involved. The Chaos incursion were easy, as I had previous already written up their numbers and so just used those as a base for my units. With Law I had to finally sit down and figure out just what forces they actually had in the city. 

An interesting design challenge was how to handle all the damn magic-users running around the place. Between the party, the leaders of the Chaos force and the ruler of the city (an otherworldly being known as the Voice of Stillness, and the individual actually casting the ritual of undeath) there were a lot of magical types around. In the end I took another idea from a game I like - Dragon Pass. In that game magical units have a sort of spirit that they project that can be used to perform attacks on other enemies.

In my game this ended up simulating the combined magical attacks or defenses of a unit of magicians. I also came up with Spell Cards, which players can play and usually require a magical unit to be near the target to actually do the spell. 

This whole thing took about 3 days of on and off writing and rewriting of ideas.

Designing the Game Pieces

Next up came probably the most fun part of the project - designing and drawing all the game elements that I would need for the game. In my case that meant creating unit counters, spell attack counters, a playing board, spell cards, activation cards (which I ended up using to determine play order) and then reference sheets for unit special abilities and general game rules. 

One of 3 counter sheets of units for the game.

The unit art is also a direct inspiration and reference to William Church's wonderful and evocative art on the counters of White Bear and Red Moon/Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods. The units themselves are relatively simple (by wargaming standards) as you can see. They have a name, artwork, and then 3 stats - Attack, Health and Movement (a star over one of those indicates some special rule assocaited with it that is listed on the reference sheet). A white bar indicates that the unit is an Individual (as opposed to a group of similar people or creatures), and on the reverse side the counter has a grey bar across it to show that a unit is of Reduced strength. 

The actual game board, representing the Undying City as a series of locations connected by pathways, all broadly aligned with the map of the city I had already drawn.

The board took a few tries to get it looking right, but I am personally pleased with the final result. The color of the location's artwork indicates which part of town it's in (which doesn't really matter for gameplay purposes, but was just a nice visual element), the bar on the bottom indicates what type of Terrain it counts as, as well as the number of non-Individual units that can be stacked in it at the end of an activation. 

Then I included a turn tracker, a Ritual tracker and a chart for terrain and combat for ease of reference during play, along with supply boxes for both sides. There could have been other elements that are worth including in the map, and I might eventually get those printed and pasted onto it at a later date, but for now it has been quite serviceable. 

Spell cards

The drawing and design of the elements took a couple of days of very intense work, and the kind of work I absolutely adore as an artist. Of being completely in the zone, thinking at any given moment about simply opening photoshop again and doing more art! 

Making the physical components 

And next came the hardest part -actually getting these made. In total I made 160+ unit and special counters, and those took a lot of work to cut, a lot of them ended up kind of crooked (inevitable when cutting by hand), but I am generally pleased with them. The board and tokens are also quite large, in fact almost absurdly so by the standards of most commercial tabletop wargames, however it makes them a lot easier to handle when one considers the game can be played with up to 6 players, and it would be helpful if they could actually see what is going on. 

A slightly blurry photo of the board and counters all set up.

This whole process took 2 and a half, almost 3 days total to actually do, mostly because at one point I had to just force myself to take a break since cutting the counters was giving my left arm a very painful muscle cramp (which took about a week to completely clear off).

Playtesting

The final, and often most important, step of any game design is of course playtesting. I played a couple of games by myself, which helped iron out some of the rougher ideas in the activation system, the actions each band of units takes during their activation, and so on. 

I have so far also done two playtest sessions with a fellow wargamer friend of mine, and while there have been minor tweaks in special abilities here and there, the game more or less works quite well, provides various ways for each side to achieve it's victory conditions and offers several not-so-obvious avenues for strategy. I consider all of that a success of design! 

The true and final test, of course, will be once I actually run the game for the players in my campaign. That will happen this upcoming Sunday, and I absolutely plan on writing up a session report for it, though it will of course be rather different than the usual one. But even after that, I am pleased enough with the game (and have had enough of a positive response from my friend) that I will likely keep playing it as a game in and of itself in the future too.