Chapter 4: Scale

Scale is one of the most consequential decisions you will make as a designer, and one of the least forgiving if you get it wrong. You can recover from a bad combat results table. You can rewrite movement rules. You cannot change the fundamental scale of your game once you have started building around it. Scale determines what your counters represent, what your hexes mean, what a turn of play covers, and what decisions the player is making. Change the scale and you have a different game.

In Chapter 2 I talked about the level of detail mattering more than the size of the conflict. Scale is where that principle turns mechanical. The choices you make here constrain everything that follows.

The Four Scales

Wargames operate at one of four scales: tactical, grand-tactical, operational, and strategic. Plenty of games sit between two or shift during play, but the categories hold up as a framework for understanding what you are building and what it will demand from you.

Tactical games represent engagements at the level of squads, platoons, or companies. Hexes cover tens to hundreds of meters. Turns represent minutes. Individual weapons matter. Line of sight, cover, fire arcs, small-unit maneuver. Advanced Squad Leader is the canonical example and worth studying even if you never design at this scale. You can model the difference between a rifle squad and a machine gun team, between a stone building and a wooden one, between veterans and green troops. But you also have to. At the tactical level, small differences in capability compound fast, and every variable you can model is a variable you probably need to model. Designing a tactical game demands intimate familiarity with how combat worked at the squad and platoon level for your specific conflict, period, and theater. If you are guessing, your players will feel it.

Grand-tactical games sit one level up. Units are battalions or regiments. Hexes cover a few hundred meters to a kilometer. Turns represent one to a few hours. The player commands a corps or army, deciding where to commit formations, when to push an attack, when to pull back. The Imperial Bayonets series works at this scale, covering battles from the post-Napoleonic era through the early twentieth century at roughly 500 to 700 meters per hex with one-hour turns. Grand-tactical design requires broad, thorough research because you are handing the player the same tools and constraints a historical commander had. How far could units march in an hour? How long did orders take to reach a subordinate? How reliable were those subordinates? What happened when an artillery bombardment disrupted a brigade’s cohesion? You are modeling the organizational machinery that made armies function or break down. The research demands are real.

Operational games cover campaigns. Units are divisions or corps. Hexes represent ten to fifty kilometers. Turns cover days or weeks. The player manages the movement of armies across a theater, dealing with supply lines, strategic reserves, the broader arc of a campaign. My Procedural Combat System covers this scale across four titles: 1950 Korea: The Forgotten War, 1973, 1995: Milosevic’s Last Gamble, and 2022: Ukraine. PCS uses an alternating pulse system where players take turns activating individual units in a go-style back and forth. That structure keeps complexity manageable because each pulse is a discrete decision rather than a giant simultaneous movement phase. Operational games need tight scope. Detailed operational simulations will balloon into logistics tracking and variable management if you let them.

Strategic games cover entire wars or major theaters. Units might represent whole armies or army groups. Turns cover months or seasons. The player allocates resources, sets strategic priorities, manages the political and industrial dimensions of a war. Strategic games give you the most freedom to abstract. You do not need to model individual formations, weapons, or terrain features. You need to capture the dynamics that determined outcomes at the level of national strategy and political will.

Scale as Argument

Scale is an argument about what matters in the conflict you are simulating.

When I designed 1916, my first self-published game on Verdun, I chose the strategic level. Most existing games on Verdun were tactical or near-tactical, focused on individual assaults and trench lines. Those games were fine for what they were doing, but they missed why Verdun was interesting. The German plan was to bleed the French army white by attacking a position France could not afford to abandon. The operation was conceived as a strategic attrition trap. A tactical game on Verdun captures the experience of the fighting but not the logic of the battle. I was baffled that nobody had approached it at a strategic level, because the actual argument lived there.

That taught me something I have carried through every design since. Before you choose a scale, figure out what thesis your game is advancing. What are you trying to say about this conflict that existing games have not said, or have not said well? The scale should serve the argument. If your thesis is about command friction at the corps level, you need grand-tactical. If it is about national strategy and resource allocation, you need strategic. Picking a scale because it seems natural for the period, or because other games on the topic use it, risks simulating the wrong thing.

A game without a thesis will lack definition. I am sure exceptions exist, but the games I admire and the games of mine that work best are the ones where the designer knew what they were arguing and built every mechanical element, starting with scale, to support it.

Why I Recommend Starting Large

As I noted in Chapter 2, granularity matters more than physical scope. When I say start large in terms of scale, I mean operational or strategic rather than tactical. You can keep your counter count and geographic extent modest while still working at a scale where the mechanics stay manageable.

Divisions, corps, and armies are less complicated to work with than smaller units. At the strategic level you represent an entire corps with a single counter and a couple of numbers. Movement is straightforward. Combat resolves on a simple odds-based table. The game can focus on big decisions without getting buried in how individual battalions interact with terrain.

Tactical games look simpler than they are. You can picture individual soldiers. You can imagine a squad moving through a village. That concreteness feels intuitive, which is why it trips people up. Tactical design demands the most mechanical precision of any scale. You need to differentiate weapons. Cover needs to matter in specific, quantifiable ways. Fire and movement need to interact realistically. Line of sight needs rules. Morale has to function at the individual unit level. You end up with a dense web of interlocking mechanics that all need calibration against each other. A first-time designer can do this, but only if they know their subject well enough to recreate action at a small scale with confidence. Most first-time designers do not have that depth yet, and a strategic or operational game gives you room to learn the craft without drowning.

Operational sits in between, and it is doable as a first design with tight scope. The PCS system taught me where it goes wrong. Even with the alternating pulse structure keeping ground combat manageable, complexity crept in. The air combat rules are a case in point. One player on Board Game Geek drew a flowchart for the air rules in 2022: Ukraine and demonstrated that the whole system was redundant. I was impressed by the effort, and he was right. That bloat happened because I was less familiar with modern combat than with the 19th century conflicts I usually design, and I compensated by adding detail where I should have been looking for cleaner abstractions. If your scope keeps expanding during an operational design, you are probably adding mechanics that belong in a different game.

Research and Scale

Scale and research are tied together, and thinking about them as a pair will save you time.

A strategic game needs breadth. You need to understand the war at the level of national strategy, major campaigns, political and economic pressures. You do not need battalion-level orders of battle. You need to know which armies existed, roughly how strong they were, what strategic options each side had. A few good secondary sources will get you there.

A grand-tactical game needs depth. You are seating the player in a commander’s chair and handing them that commander’s information and constraints. March rates, artillery ranges, command structures, officer competence, organizational details. For Imperial Bayonets, I adapted Kevin Zucker’s Library of Napoleonic Battles for the age of rifles. The combat results table had to change. Artillery ranges and effects had to change. The way command and officer initiative interact had to change, because the armies of 1866 and 1870 did not fight the way armies fought at Austerlitz. Those changes came from research into post-Napoleonic warfare. Without that research the system would have been a Napoleonic game with different labels on the counters.

A tactical game needs precision. You are modeling weapons, terrain, and small-unit behavior at a level where approximation shows. If your machine gun has the same range as a rifle, anyone who knows the period will spot it. Tactical research means technical manuals, weapons specifications, accounts of combat at the squad and platoon level.

Operational sits in the middle. You need enough depth to model campaign-level operations credibly, enough restraint to keep tactical-level detail from creeping in. The scope discipline I talked about in Chapter 2 matters here more than anywhere.

Case Study: Scale Across the Catalog

My catalog shows how scale serves different design goals across one designer’s work.

The 2140 series games, with their 140-counter constraint, pushed me toward strategic and low-density operational treatments. The constraint determined the scale as much as the subject did. With 140 counters you cannot do a grand-tactical simulation of a major battle. You can do a strategic overview of a war or a tightly focused operational game. That pushed me toward strategic designs early on, and the training was valuable. I had to identify the essential dynamics of each conflict and build mechanics around those dynamics, not around unit-level detail.

One 2140 game ended up grand-tactical. At Villers Cotterets: Mons 1914 worked at that scale because the battle was small enough that battalion-level representation fit within 140 counters. A compact force in a confined area. Not every grand-tactical subject would have fit the format, but that one did.

Imperial Bayonets required a different design approach from the 2140 games. The research was heavier. The mechanical complexity was higher. The player had to feel like a corps commander managing formation commitment, artillery placement, and a command hierarchy. Building those systems meant understanding how the armies that fought these battles functioned as organizations, not just what happened during the fighting. That kind of research takes longer and goes deeper than what a strategic game asks of you.

The PCS games taught me about overreach. The alternating pulse structure was sound for the ground war, but layering a detailed air combat system on top of an operational framework produced something more complex than it needed to be. I was trying to do justice to a subject I was less familiar with, and the result was mechanics that added complexity without adding proportional insight. Operational design demands that you know where to stop. Not everything that exists in reality needs to exist in your game, and figuring out what to leave on the cutting room floor is half the job.