Chapter 2: Choosing Your Subject

It is hard to say where game ideas come from. Before I was a game designer I was a musician, and the impulses that drove me to write music work in much the same way for game design. If I had to articulate it honestly, it comes down to something uncomfortable: I am going to die at some point, and I need to make sure I leave something behind that matters. I am childless except for a cat and nearly forty, so art it is. That might sound dramatic for a chapter about choosing which battle to simulate, but I think it matters. The best wargames come from designers who have something they genuinely want to say, explore, or argue about a historical event. If you are designing a game because you think it will sell or because the topic seems popular, you are going to run into a wall the first time the project gets tedious. And every project gets tedious. You need to care enough about the subject to push through the monotonous parts, because there are a lot of them.

That said, almost any situation can be made into a game. Jim Dunnigan proved this decades ago when he turned Outdoor Survival into a commercial success. The question is not whether a conflict can be gamed but how much work the designer has to do to make it interesting.

Easy Subjects and Hard Subjects

Some conflicts are naturally easier to turn into games than others. 1916, my first self-published game on Verdun, was an easy subject because at the strategic level it was basically a slugfest of attrition. Back and forth across a relatively static front line with limited attempts to maneuver. The parameters were clear. Two sides grinding each other down in a confined space with well-documented forces. The design decisions almost made themselves: attrition-based combat, positional play, limited movement options. The historical situation already had built-in game tension because both sides believed they could break through if they just committed one more corps.

We Were Not Cowards, my game on Sedan 1870, was much harder and took years to develop. It was one of my earliest ideas but probably far too complex for a first attempt. The fundamental problem was that the battle was basically a foregone conclusion before it started. The French army was already encircled by the time the fighting began in earnest. Where is the game in a situation where one side has already lost? Nobody wants to play the French player if the answer is “you lose, historically.” I ended up adding an approach-to-battle variant, a what-if scenario that gives the French player a chance to react before they are encircled. That created the decision space the historical battle lacked. But getting there took years of iteration on a subject I thought I understood from the start.

The lesson is not that you should avoid hard subjects. The lesson is that you should understand what you are getting into. A battle where both sides had genuine strategic options and the outcome was uncertain is going to be easier to design than one where the result was predetermined. That does not mean predetermined battles are off limits. It means you need to know going in that you will probably have to introduce counterfactual elements or find tension in places the history does not obviously provide. If nobody else has made a game on a topic, sometimes there is a reason. And sometimes the reason is just that nobody thought to try, which was the case with Sedan. I designed it partly because no one else had, and the battle still had interesting elements worth exploring between the cavalry charges and the initial envelopment. But I would not recommend it as a first project.

Scope: The Most Important Decision You Will Make Early

The most important thing an amateur designer needs to consider before anything else is scope. This connects directly to scale, which we will cover in Chapter 4, but scope is the broader question: what are you trying to represent and how much of it?

A game about all of World War II is a fundamentally different project from a game about one day at Gettysburg. Both are valid. But the WWII game requires you to abstract entire campaigns into single die rolls, while the Gettysburg game lets you model individual brigade movements across specific terrain. The smaller the scope, the less legwork is required to get the simulation working. Scales with less counter density and more abstraction are inherently easier to represent with less effort. This does not make them lesser games. Some of the best wargames ever published are small, tightly scoped designs that do one thing well.

Design that follows good principles tends to produce better systems, and having a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what you need to represent in order to achieve it is critical. Without that clarity, you will find yourself adding mechanics to cover situations that do not matter, building chrome that nobody will use, and losing track of what your game is actually about. Scope is the fence that keeps you from wandering off into the wilderness.

For my early games, I deliberately limited myself to 140 counters and a 22 by 17 inch map. This was partly to emulate the old GDW 120 series, which I admired, but it was also a production constraint. I could save on counter costs and only needed half a countersheet per game. Whatever the original motivation, the constraint turned out to be one of the best decisions I made as a young designer. With only 140 counters I could not attempt massive grand-tactical or tactical simulations. The constraint inherently limited scope and kept my early designs within reason. I had to make hard choices about what to include and what to leave out, and those choices forced me to think about what actually mattered in the conflict I was simulating.

I called this the 2140 series. The name was a reminder to myself: two hours of play, 140 counters. That framework produced some of my best early work because it demanded efficiency. When you only have 140 counters to represent an entire campaign, every counter has to justify its existence. Every mechanic has to earn its place in the rules.

My first larger game was We Were Not Cowards, which I released about two years after starting the company. The jump in scope was significant and I would not have been ready for it without the discipline the 2140 constraint had taught me. Even Barbarossa Deluxe, my Destroy All Monsters trilogy, was technically part of the 2140 series. It featured three individual games, one for each army group, that could be combined into a single larger simulation. Breaking the project up that way helped limit the scope of each individual design and kept the whole thing manageable. Instead of designing one enormous Eastern Front game, I designed three focused games that happened to be compatible with each other. That is a useful trick for ambitious projects: break them into modules, get each module working on its own, and then worry about integration.

When to Walk Away from a Subject

Not every idea deserves to become a finished game. I have discontinued two of my published designs because they simply did not work. 1987: On to Kaliningrad was a hypothetical World War III scenario, and 1968: Tet covered the Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Both failed for the same basic reason: I did not know the subjects well enough to make good design decisions.

The assumptions I had about how combat worked, based on my general range of interests in 19th century and World War era conflicts, simply did not apply to Cold War mechanized warfare or the insurgent dynamics of Vietnam. The games ended up being more fantasy than simulation. The combat systems did not reflect how those wars actually worked, the force structures did not behave realistically, and the games were broken in ways that playtesting could not fix because the problems were foundational. You cannot playtest your way out of a flawed understanding of your subject.

Part of this was my own fault for trying to design too many games at once, which I was doing at the time to try to make a living from the company. Spreading myself across too many projects meant I was not doing the research depth any of them required. The 1987 game needed me to understand NATO and Warsaw Pact doctrine, force ratios in mechanized warfare, and the specific geography of the Baltic region in ways I had not internalized. The Tet game needed me to understand counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and the political dimensions of the conflict in Vietnam, none of which I had spent serious time studying.

The lesson for the aspiring designer is twofold. First, you need to know your subject well enough that your design decisions are grounded in something real. If you are guessing at how a conflict worked, your game will feel like guesswork. Second, do not try to design five games at once. Each design deserves your full attention during the research and initial prototyping phase. There will be time to run multiple projects later, once you have more experience and a better sense of how much attention each stage of development actually requires.

This is not meant to scare you away from unfamiliar topics. Half the fun of wargame design is learning about conflicts you knew nothing about before you started. But there is a difference between learning a subject as you design and designing before you have learned enough. The research has to lead the design, not chase it.

Finding Your First Subject

If you have never designed a wargame before, here is my practical advice on choosing a subject:

Pick a conflict you already know well. Not one you want to learn about, one you already have opinions about. You should be able to explain without looking anything up why one side won and the other lost, what the key decisions were, and what would have happened if those decisions had gone differently. That level of familiarity gives you a head start on every design decision you will face.

Pick the right level of granularity. This is more important than picking a small conflict. A common piece of advice is to start with a single battle rather than a whole war, but I actually think that can steer new designers wrong. My own mistake with We Were Not Cowards was not that I picked a battle. It was that I picked a battle and tried to represent it at too granular a level. Had I instead covered the first year of the Franco-Prussian War at an operational or strategic scale, as I did with a later design, it would have been far easier.

A whole war can absolutely be a first project if you approach it at the right scale. Unconditional Surrender covers all of World War II in Europe with extremely low counter density. It is basically a far more playable and enjoyable version of Totaler Krieg, the game that intimidated me off my shelf when I was starting out. The old SPI World War I games managed to cover the entire Great War in tight, manageable packages. A strategic game on the Russo-Japanese War or one of the Balkan Wars would be perfectly doable for a first-time designer. What would not be doable is trying to cover the full Crimean War across all four theaters, the Baltic, the Crimea, Moldavia, and the Caucasus, at operational scale. That is a multi-year project for an experienced designer, not a starting point. The issue is not the size of the war. It is the level of detail you are trying to represent. This ties directly into scale, which we will cover in Chapter 4.

Pick something where both sides had real choices. The best wargame subjects are situations where the outcome was uncertain and the decisions of commanders mattered. A battle where one side was doomed from the start can be made into a game, as I learned with Sedan, but it takes experience to find the tension in a predetermined situation. For your first game, make it easy on yourself. Pick a fight where either side could plausibly win.

And pick something you care about. You are going to spend months with this subject. You are going to read the same accounts multiple times, count the same regiments, argue with yourself about movement rates and combat modifiers. If the subject does not hold your interest through all of that, you will abandon the project. That is not a failure of willpower. It is a subject selection problem, and it is avoidable.