Appendix A: Recommended Reading

A list of the books, articles, and resources that shaped how I think about wargame design, military history, and the relationship between games and the conflicts they model. Some are easy to find. Some are out of print. One is a holy grail.

For research methodology and sources specific to wargame design, see also Chapter 3.

On Wargame Design

The Complete Wargames Handbook — James F. Dunnigan. The closest thing the hobby has to a foundational textbook. Revised and expanded as Wargames Handbook in later editions. Covers the design process from concept through production, written by the person who industrialized wargame design at SPI. Some of the specific advice is dated. The design philosophy is not.

SPI Special Study #2: Wargame Design — SPI staff. If you can find a copy, this is the single most valuable document on wargame design methodology ever produced. A detailed internal study of how SPI designed games, covering research methods, system design, playtesting procedures, and production. Out of print, rare, and expensive when it surfaces. Worth the hunt.

Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming — Pat Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum, eds. MIT Press. A collection of essays from designers, historians, and academics on wargaming as a medium. Broad in scope, covering hobby games, professional wargaming, and digital simulations. Individual essays vary in quality but the collection as a whole is the best single-volume overview of the field.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems — Amabel Holland. CRC Press. Holland’s argument for games as an expressive medium, grounded in her own design work at Hollandspiele. Read this if you are interested in what games can say beyond simulating combat.

Mark Herman on Wargame Design — Mark Herman. Herman invented the card-driven game with We the People and has been producing influential designs for decades. This book covers his design philosophy and methodology.

OSG Design Dispatches and Newsletters — Operational Studies Group (Kevin Zucker). Design dispatches and newsletters covering operational game design philosophy, the Napoleonic series, and Zucker’s approach to simulation. If you are designing at the operational scale, read these. Available through OSG’s website and archives.

Ted Raicer’s Design Writing — Raicer has written on wargame design across multiple publications. His perspective as the designer of Paths of Glory and the Dark series provides insight into both card-driven and traditional hex-and-counter design at the operational level.

Al Nofi’s Historical and Design Writing — Nofi’s contributions to establishing research standards in wargame design are discussed in Appendix E. His published works on military history reflect the same rigor he brought to game research at SPI.

On Military History

The books below are not design books. They are the kind of sources you will use when researching a game. I include them because they represent the standard of historical scholarship that good wargame design demands.

Imperial Bayonets: Tactics of the Napoleonic Battery, Battalion and Brigade as Found in Contemporary Regulations — George Nafziger. The reference for Napoleonic wargame designers. Nafziger compiled and translated tactical regulations from multiple armies, providing the primary-source data that informs unit ratings, movement values, and combat mechanics for the period.

Numbers, Predictions and War — Trevor N. Dupuy. Dupuy developed quantitative methods for analyzing combat effectiveness across historical periods. His Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (TNDM) attempted to reduce combat outcomes to measurable variables. Whether you agree with his methodology or not, the data tables on historical advance rates, casualty ratios, and force multipliers are reference material for any designer calibrating movement values or CRT results. Appendix D of this book draws on his work.

Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton — Martin van Creveld. Cambridge University Press. The single best book on military logistics as a historical force. Van Creveld argues that logistics, not strategy or tactics, determined the outcome of most campaigns. If you are designing a game where supply matters (and Chapter 11 argues it should), read this first.

Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army — Donald W. Engels. University of California Press. Engels reconstructed the logistical requirements of Alexander’s army using ancient sources and modern calculations of food, water, and fodder consumption. His methodology for converting historical data into usable numbers is directly applicable to wargame design. Appendix D references his work on ancient march rates.

The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870-1871 — Michael Howard. Routledge. The standard English-language account of the war. Howard’s treatment of Prussian staff planning, French command dysfunction, and the operational dynamics of the campaign is essential reading for anyone designing a game on this period. His analysis of why the French lost goes far beyond “the Prussians had better guns.”

The Campaigns of Napoleon — David G. Chandler. Macmillan. The comprehensive operational history of Napoleon’s campaigns. Over a thousand pages covering every major campaign from Toulon to Waterloo. Chandler’s maps and his analysis of Napoleon’s operational methods are reference material for Napoleonic game designers. Kevin Zucker’s Library of Napoleonic Battles draws on Chandler extensively.

David Glantz’s Eastern Front Library — Glantz is the most important English-language historian of the Soviet-German war. When Titans Clashed (with Jonathan House) is the single-volume overview. Colossus Reborn covers Soviet force reconstitution. Stumbling Colossus examines the Red Army in 1941. To the Gates of Stalingrad, Armageddon in Stalingrad, and Endgame at Stalingrad form the definitive trilogy on that battle. If you are designing an Eastern Front game, Glantz is where you start and where you return when something does not add up.

On Games, Media, and Simulation

Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord. Zone Books. Debord’s critique of mediated experience has direct relevance to simulation design. His argument that representations of reality replace direct experience maps onto the relationship between a wargame and the conflict it models. Debord was also a wargame designer himself. His Game of War (Kriegspiel) is a two-player abstract strategy game modeling Napoleonic-era warfare, and his interest in the strategic and spatial dimensions of conflict informed both his theoretical work and his game design.

Finding Sources

Many of the best references for wargame design are out of print, published in limited runs, or scattered across magazine articles, convention presentations, and designer blogs. BGG designer diaries, InsideGMT articles, and C3i magazine contain design insights that no one has collected into book form. The wargaming community’s design knowledge lives as much in forums and newsletters as in published books. Search for it. Chapter 3 discusses methodology for finding and evaluating historical sources. The same discipline applies to design sources.