Chapter 23: Go Design Something

I am not widely regarded as a great or consistent designer. My BGG ratings would confirm that. I have shipped games before they were ready, written rulebooks with errors I should have caught, made business decisions that cost me relationships and money, and burned through goodwill I spent years building. I have laid all of that out across the previous chapters because I think the mistakes are more useful to you than the successes.

Three of my games were nominated for Charles S. Roberts Awards. I do not mention this to brag. I mention it because the same designer who shipped rough products and ran a publishing company into the ground also produced work that the hobby considered worth recognizing. Both things are true at the same time. You do not need to be perfect to make something good. You do not need to get everything right. You need to care enough about the work to keep doing it after you have gotten things wrong.

The Drive

I talked earlier in this book about the subconscious drive toward creation, the pull toward making something that did not exist before. I want to be more specific about what that looks like in practice, because it is not the romantic process people imagine.

I am manic about creative work. When an idea takes hold, it becomes all-consuming. I will spend days inside a subject, reading sources, sketching maps, building OOBs, running numbers in spreadsheets, sleeping poorly because my brain will not stop solving design problems. The period of obsession produces real output. Games get built during those bursts. But the intensity is not sustainable, and it is not always healthy.

I do myself no favors with how hard I focus. The manic burst is validating. You feel productive, you feel like the work matters, you can see the game taking shape in front of you. Then the burst ends and you are exhausted and behind on everything else in your life. The body keeps a tab. The mind keeps a tab. I am approaching forty and I have become more familiar with those tabs than I would like.

I used to think that pressure made better art. Financial pressure, deadline pressure, the pressure of needing a project to succeed because the alternative was worse. I am no longer sure that is true. What pressure does is force honest outcomes. When you are under pressure, you do not have the luxury of overthinking. You make decisions and live with them. Sometimes those decisions are good because the pressure stripped away the hesitation that would have diluted them. Sometimes they are bad because you did not have the time or energy to think them through. Pressure does not improve art. It forces the designer to come to terms with the other factors at play: health, finances, relationships, mental state. You design the game with whatever version of yourself shows up that day.

My own experience has proven this. I have designed games during financial crises, through depression and anxiety disorders, through problems in my personal and professional life that I will not detail here because they are not the point. The drive was there through all of it. The drive does not care about your circumstances. It shows up whether you are ready for it or not, and it demands that you make something.

Recently I had two oral biopsies for suspected oral cancer. I am thirty-eight years old. I have smoked since I was thirteen, so the situation was not a surprise, but sitting in a waiting room for an hour past your appointment time knowing what the doctor is about to do recalibrates your priorities faster than any self-help book. As of this writing, the results have not come back yet. But the experience has already left a mark regardless of what they say. The urgency I feel about creative work, the sense that there is not enough time to make everything I want to make, got louder. That urgency is useful in small doses. It gets you out of bed and in front of the computer. In large doses it feeds the same manic cycle that burns you out.

I do not have a solution to this. I am not going to pretend that I have figured out how to balance creative obsession with physical and mental health, because I have not. What I can tell you is that the work survives the chaos. The games I designed during the worst periods of my life are published. People play them. Some of those games are among my best. Others show the cracks of the circumstances that produced them. Both kinds taught me something about design that I could not have learned any other way.

What the Work Gives Back

Writing this book forced me to look at my own career more honestly than I had before. Every chapter sent me back through decisions I made and outcomes I produced, and the picture that emerged is a messy one. I would do most of it differently with the brain I have now. But I would still do it. The games I designed, the ones that work, give players an experience I could not have given them any other way. A simulation of a battle they read about. A decision space that puts them inside a commander’s problem. A system that makes them feel the weight of choices that real people made under real constraints. That is worth doing, even when the person doing it is imperfect.

There is something about wargame design specifically that rewards this kind of intensity. The historical research pulls you into a subject until you understand it at a level most people never reach. The mechanical design forces you to translate that understanding into a system that another person can interact with. The playtesting shows you where your understanding was wrong. The whole process is a cycle of learning, building, and correcting that mirrors the scientific method more closely than most creative disciplines. Pressure, for all its costs, tends to force honest outcomes from that cycle. A wargame built under pressure will show you truths about its subject that a more leisurely design process might have papered over. The same dynamic explains why wargames built to simulate historical conflicts can reveal patterns that modern organizations recognize hundreds of years later. The simulation does not care about your comfort. It cares about whether the model is honest.

To You

You have read twenty-three chapters about how to do this work. You have more information now than I had when I started. You have better tools, better reference material, and a community of designers more willing to share what they know than at any point in the hobby’s history.

Pick a conflict that interests you enough to spend months inside it. Read about it until you understand what happened and why. Ask yourself what question your game will answer, what argument it will make, what experience it will create for the player. Then start building. Your map will be rough. Your first CRT will produce strange results. Your rules will have gaps you cannot see. Your playtesters will find problems you missed. All of this is normal. All of this is the process.

Scope small. A single map and a hundred counters will teach you the same design skills as a monster game, and you can finish it, test it, and learn from it in a fraction of the time. Finish the game. Then design another one.

The hobby is small, but it is persistent. People have been designing and playing these games for over half a century, and the community has survived format changes, market contractions, the rise of digital gaming, and predictions of its own death that have been wrong for decades. It survived because the people in it care about the work. They care about history, about systems, about the challenge of modeling something complex and making it playable. They will care about your game too, if you give them something worth their time.

Go design something.