Chapter 3: Research

Research for wargame design falls into two phases that serve different purposes, and understanding the difference early will save you a lot of wasted effort.

The first phase is secondary sources. Books written by historians, campaign studies, analytical works that give you the big picture. This is where you develop a feel for the conflict. How were armies organized? What was the prevailing doctrine? How effective were the commanders and how did their leadership style affect operations? What role did terrain, weather, logistics, and politics play in the outcome? You are not looking for specific unit strengths at this stage. You are building a mental model of the conflict that will inform every design decision you make later.

The second phase is primary sources. Staff records, after-action reports, official histories compiled from original documents. This is where you get the granular data that turns into game content: orders of battle, unit compositions, tables of equipment, march rates, supply situations, casualty figures. These details drive concrete decisions like strength ratings, movement factors, and combat mechanics. You cannot fake this phase. A game with made-up unit values might play fine as an abstract strategy game, but it will not be a simulation, and the people who buy wargames will notice.

The two phases overlap. You will find OOB details in secondary sources and strategic insights in primary documents. But keeping the distinction in your head helps you know what you are reading for at any given point. When you pick up a campaign history, you are absorbing context. When you open a volume of staff records, you are mining data.

Where to Find Sources

The obvious starting point is books, and the best cheat code for finding them is Anna’s Archive, which has an effectively endless library of digitized texts available for anyone who needs them. I mention this without further comment except to say that I have found it invaluable for research and that access to sources should not depend on how much money you can spend at Amazon.

Beyond that, here are the source types I have found most useful across nearly thirty published designs:

Secondary sources for the big picture. Campaign histories, biographies of commanders, analytical military histories. These give you the feel. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August is the kind of book where a determined person could read it and design a strategic WWI game based on that single volume. You would need more sources for a detailed operational game, but for a strategic treatment it might be enough. The point is not a specific number of books. It is reading until you feel confident you could pass a pop quiz on the subject. If you have chosen a topic you actually care about, this part should not feel like homework.

Staff records and official histories for orders of battle and detailed operational data. These are the gold standard for unit-level information. Government and military archives have published multi-volume official histories for most major conflicts, and many of them have been digitized. The German staff records for the Franco-Prussian War, for example, gave me Prussian artillery ranges and rates of fire that became the Krupp Steel rule in We Were Not Cowards: +1 DRM within 2 hexes, with a 6-hex range against the French 4-hex. That single data point from a staff record shaped how the entire artillery asymmetry works in the game.

Nafziger orders of battle are sometimes an acceptable starting point for OOB research, but use them with caution. I have found them inaccurate about half the time, with errors in both unit strengths and organizational details. Formations get listed that were not actually present, strengths get recorded incorrectly, and the sourcing is not always transparent enough to check. They can point you in the right direction, but treat them as a first draft to be verified against better sources, not as gospel.

Miniatures rules and scenario books are an underrated research resource. The authors of miniatures scenarios tend to do extensive historical research to get unit compositions and strengths right, often citing sources that wargame designers overlook. If someone has published a detailed miniatures scenario on the battle you are designing, their OOB work is worth examining.

Other published wargames on the same subject. This is not cheating. Wargaming is eighty percent plagiarization anyway, unless you are Volko Ruhnke or Mark Herman. You do not even need to buy or play the games. Most publishers and designers put their rules online for free, and you can examine counter manifests and component lists on Board Game Geek. Looking at how another designer synthesized the same dataset is essential context. You will not know exactly what their sources were, but you can see the choices they made and evaluate whether those choices seem right based on your own research. Sometimes you will disagree with their interpretation, and that disagreement will clarify your own design thinking.

Digital wargames can also be surprisingly useful reference material. After buying a game from Wargame Design Studio, for instance, you can look through their scenario data for OOB information, terrain analysis, and other details that I have found incredibly useful for numerous designs. These games were built by people who did serious research, and the data is right there in the scenario files.

Audiobooks are a helpful timesaver for the secondary source phase. Leave one on while you are at work, exercising, commuting, or doing anything else that keeps your hands busy but your mind free. You are not going to absorb detailed OOB data this way. Audiobooks are for building familiarity with the subject, getting a feel for the conflict, and absorbing the narrative context that will inform your design instincts. They are expensive if you are buying them outright, but library apps like Libby provide free access to a large catalog, and the time you save is real. An audiobook playing during a commute is research hours you would not otherwise have.

When Sources Disagree

This will happen. Historians disagree with each other constantly, especially about unit strengths, casualty figures, and the effectiveness of particular commanders. Two reputable sources on the same battle will give you different numbers for the same formation.

Good. When sources conflict, you have flexibility to use whatever figure best serves your system. If one source says a division had 8,000 men and another says 6,500, you can choose the number that produces the right gameplay effect for the scale you are working at. You are not writing a history paper. You are building a simulation that needs to function as a game while respecting the historical record. Disagreement among historians gives you room to make design-driven decisions without being dishonest about the history.

When sources conflict dramatically, note it. You may want to mention it in your designer’s notes, and it may point to a genuine uncertainty in the historical record that your game could explore through variant setups or optional rules.

Matching Research to Scope

Research should match the scope of your design. A strategic game on an entire war does not need battalion-level OOB data. An operational game covering a single campaign does. A grand-tactical game on a specific battle might need individual regiment compositions, artillery battery assignments, and the names of brigade commanders. Where designers get stuck is researching at a level of detail that exceeds what their game actually needs, which feels productive but does not move the design forward.

For a tightly scoped strategic game, a handful of good secondary sources might be all you need. One strong campaign history, a couple of analytical works, and whatever OOB reference gives you army and corps-level compositions. You could design a playable strategic game from that. The Great Northern War uses leader discs and a trick-taking card system with no unit counters at all, so I needed political and diplomatic sources more than orders of battle. Marathon needed the opposite: specific unit compositions and ancient tactical doctrine down to how much it costs a phalanx to wheel left versus right.

For an operational game, the research demands increase significantly. You need concrete sourcing for orders of battle and tables of equipment. Logistics become relevant, supply lines need to be at least roughly understood, and you need to know how far units could actually move in the time frame of your turn scale. Primary sources become necessary rather than optional. This is where the staff records, official histories, and detailed order of battle references earn their keep.

Most of this, honestly, comes from a natural familiarity with the subject after absorbing enough material. It is less about hitting a specific number of sources and more about reaching a point where the conflict makes sense to you as a system. You understand why things happened the way they did, and you can start to see how those dynamics would translate into game mechanics. That understanding is the real product of your research, and it arrives at different speeds depending on how much you already knew going in.

Pick something you give a shit about and the research takes care of itself. Pick something you think would be a cool game but that you have no genuine interest in studying, and you will burn out before you have enough material to design anything worth playing. I know because I have done both.

Organizing Your Research

Once you start accumulating sources, keep them organized. Build a group of books, articles, and essays that you can easily reference or pull notes from. Digital files are easier to search than physical books, but I have used both. Some designers keep detailed research binders. Others highlight and tab their books. I tend to take notes in bursts when something seems relevant to a specific design decision, but much of what I absorb ends up in my head rather than on paper, surfacing later when I am working through a mechanical problem and realize I already know the answer from something I read weeks ago.

There is no single right method. The goal is to be able to find a specific piece of information when you need it during development, because you will need it. Someone will ask during playtesting why a particular unit has a strength of 4 instead of 3, and you need to be able to point to something more convincing than “it felt right.”

There is probably no such a thing as too much research unless it starts to burn you out or delay the design indefinitely. But to keep things manageable, let the scope of the game set the ceiling for how deep you go. Read enough to be confident in your understanding of the conflict. Read more where the design demands specific data. And stop reading when you catch yourself researching details that your game’s scale will never represent.