Creative math

On the weekend someone asked on Facebook (a place where I am spending too much time, I’ll admit) about designers’ favourite methods of managing workflow or design projects generally.

I answered that I suppose if it were more of a business for me, like Ty Bomba and Joe Miranda who are Living The Dream, I’d be more businesslike about it. As it is, progress on my projects flows according to the equation

Pr = sqrt (TA – DG) x (IN – MWD)

Where Pr is Progress, TA is Time Available, DG is Daily Grind, IN is Inspiration, and MWD is Middle of the night Wakefulness Doubts.

Note that it is possible for Pr to have a negative value, where IN < MWD. This is where I go back and rip things apart because of something I thought at oh-dark-thirty.
Also note that where TA < DG, the square root will involve imaginary numbers, and any progress on the project will also be imaginary.

Interview with Harold Buchanan – part 2

 

https://soundcloud.com/harold-buchanan/podcast-22-an-interview-with-designer-brian-train-and-his-top-5-list-part-2-of-2

Continuing on from a week or two ago, part 2 of my long interview with Harold Buchanan when we were at Consimworld Expo 2019.

For some reason he starts off with me explaining and singing the Smarties song….

Also, the tale of the Pantzooka!

Games (inspirational and not) referenced in the interview:

• Central America
• Minuteman: Second American Revolution
• National Liberation Front
• Nicaragua
• Plot to Assassinate Hitler
• South Africa
• Tito
• Vietnam 1965-75

 

Obligatory end-of-year-review, 2018

Can you mansplain convincingly while wearing breeches, stockings and buckle shoes?

Well, another year has zipped by. Maybe a bit early for year-end post-mortems, but I have been busy:

Game publishing

• February: the Kickstarter launch for Nights of Fire. We made the first, most important target in 12 or 13 hours, and ended up with $87,821 pledged over 30 days. Nights of Fire: Kickstarter day at last!
• February also saw Tupamaro come out, in folio format from One Small Step. Tupamaro is out!
• March saw the release of Chile ’73 from Tiny Battle Publishing. I was pleased that this came out, but there were a number of unfortunate changes/additions of art, physical components and rules that lessened the “bang” for me. Chile ’73: errata file
• May, and out came Strike for Berlin in #11 of Yaah! magazine. Very nice art and production, a really great overhaul of Freikorps. I was quite pleased with it, but it doesn’t seem to have garnered a lot of attention on BGG and other places. Strike for Berlin has struck
• July: I posted District Commander: Maracas, for free print-and-play. This is presented as an example of how the District Commander system works (this and three other modules will be published by Hollandspiele over the next couple of years) and as an introductory essay of mine into operational level urban combat against irregular forces in a large city. New free game: Maracas
• September: a second edition of Summer Lightning came out, from Lock n Load Games. This is a physically enlarged (one might say engorged) edition, the rules are the same – just all of the components are bigger. Pretty spiffy looking though! Summer Lightning: Second Edition!

Game design work and future publication

Work and or testing continued throughout the year on some of the following, while others have likely publishing dates in 2019 or later:

• Thunder out of China (now renamed China’s War, at least until an even better title comes along): testing testing, and hoping to have this ready for GMT P500 by Consimworld Expo time.
• Strongman, an extensive rework of Caudillo that may be a while coming, and publisher not completely confirmed.
• Brief Border Wars Quad, from Compass Games – I handed this over to the guys at Consimworld Expo and understand that it will be up for pre-order in the next couple of months. Will be published all four in one box.
• District Commander series, from Hollandspiele – I handed over four modules (Algeria 1959, Vietnam 1969, Afghanistan 2009, and Maracas 2019) to Hollandspiele at Consimworld Expo and they will be publishing these as separate single titles over the next two years.
• We Are Coming Nineveh: This very clever game on contemporary urban combat (Mosul 2017) was designed by two of Rex Brynen’s students in a trial course he ran in getting students to design games. Rex and I have done a considerable amount of development on it, without changing its basic concepts, and I’m quite pleased at how this came out. Will likely be published in 2019 or early 2020.
• Nights of Fire: Pretty sure this will be out in March 2019 or so. I think people will be pleased.

Conferences and conventions

Another busy year on this front, a week or more away at each of these events:

• June: Consimworld Expo at Tempe, AZ. Back from CSWExpo 2018
• July: Connections-US at National Defense University. Off again, off again, jiggety-jig…
• September: Connections-UK at King’s College London. Back from Connections-UK 2018
• November: I did not go to BottosCon as I usually do, as Akito had had surgery the day before and it was a bit more involved than he thought it would be.

Writing

• Only one formally published piece, the foreword to a book of wargames rules on irregular war situations published by History of Wargaming Project, John Curry’s imprint. New book out – Small Wars

Near-meaningless digest of site statistics:

• I seem to be cruising still at just below 2,000 views per month, a bit higher than the preceding two years. The five most curious countries were: US (by a very wide margin), UK, Canada, Spain and Italy. One guy clicked in from Venezuela!
• Besides the then-current post, popular pages or posts included the BTR Games and Free Games pages, and the post containing the corrected Tutorial and errata for Colonial Twilight. Also popular was a new page of Scenarios and Variants I added in July, incorporating material lugged over from my old website as well as some new pieces (e.g. the 4-player variant for Colonial Twilight and the historical scenario for Operation Whirlwind).
• The most clicked-on documents were the rules, corrected tutorial and playbook for Colonial Twilight, followed by the free PnP files for Ukrainian Crisis, Third Lebanon War and Desert Leader.

New free game: Maracas

      

[EDITED 9 SEPTEMBER 2019:  Now that Hollandspiele has formally published the Maracas module, I am pulling this one off the free print-and-play wagon. But I want people to try the system if they want to, so I will substitute another of the three remaining modules, and keep it up until such time as it is also published by Hollandspiele.  Check the Free Games page: Free Games!]

Maracas is one of the four games I’ve designed so far that uses the District Commander diceless, operational-level counterinsurgency system.

It takes place in Maracas, the fictional megacity capital of the equally fictitious nation of Virtualia (which was also the locale for my game Caudillo).

I am making it available for free print-and-play download as an example of

a) the District Commander system itself; and

b) an introductory game on asymmetrical warfare in a modern large city.

I intend to do more of this kind of thing. I’ve been interested in urban combat for a long time (Tupamaro was one of my first game designs) and I think this is a crucially important topic for present-day and near-future wargame work. There’s certainly going to be a certain amount of the real thing soon enough.

Game components consist of:

• System rules (a bit long and chatty but they introduce concepts and many variations) DC RB
• Exclusive rules (a lot shorter but they introduce some changes and extra units)
• Player aids and charts
• Set of standard counters (176 x 5/8″): infrastructure, chance chits, intelligence chits, insurgent units and assets DC system counters 4july
• Set of exclusive counters (88 x 5/8″): Government/Foreign units and assets, extra insurgent, intelligence pieces
• Area movement map (made to be printed out at 17×22″)

The counters are made to be printed out at 5/8″ and the map at 17×22″, but if your eyes are young and strong and your fingers nimble go ahead and print them out smaller. Or if you’re half-blind and near-palsied like me, print them out on 1″ foamcore and as big a map as you can find.

Permission is granted to downloaders to make a copy for their own personal use, under the usual Creative Commons Licence adopted for this website.

NOTICE:

All material on this website, including all its subsidiary pages, that is written by me is made available through a Creative Commons license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

This game, and up to three or more other modules in the system (so far Algeria 1959, Vietnam 1969, Afghanistan 2009, Maracas 2019), will be released over the next year or two by Hollandspiele.

I hope you will give it a try.

Thanks!

Obligatory end-of-year review

So, that was 2017.

This year I published these games, or got them down the slipway:

• March: Ukrainian Crisis and The Little War, a two-fer from Hollandspiele
  • Over at Hollandspiele: Designer’s Remarks on Ukrainian Crisis
  •  Interview at The Players Aid blog: UACR/TLW
• Also, Tupamaro went on pre-order with One Small Step, and it will be produced in early 2018.
  • Interview at The Players Aid blog: Tupamaro
• April: Nestorgames of Spain brought out a nice version of Guerrilla Checkers with a vinyl board and plastic pieces, that rolls up into a small zip bag.
  • Guerrilla Checkers now available through Nestorgames!
• June: Colonial Twilight began charging, and people got their copies soon afterward, but then there was the card misprint issue which held up retail sales for a couple of months. All praise to GMT for handling the problem quickly and effectively. The game has had a number of print and video reviews and they have all been great! This is a great capper to nearly three years of work.
  • Colonial Twilight is 1500, and charging!
  • Colonial Twilight rules, final version
  • Colonial Twilight playbook, final version.
  • Colonial Twilight: corrected tutorial, errata, clarifications
• August: A Distant Plain went into P500 for its third printing. I didn’t think there would even be a second! Anyway, it is now at only 80 pre-orders so it will be a long time yet.
  • A Distant Plain: P500 on 3rd printing launched!
• Also, Red Horde 1920 came out, a drastic revision of my 2007 game Konarmiya, 10 years later. And its predecessor Freikorps, from 1998, will have its own revised version out in early 2018, as Strike For Berlin.
  • YPPA! YPPA! Red Horde 1920 is out now!
  • Red Horde 1920: interview at The Players Aid blog
• Also also, Nights of Fire was far enough along it could be announced on Boardgamegeek as coming in 2018. We had been working on this all year and I can say this is going to be a pretty impressive game, that is if you are at all capable of being impressed by games… and even if you aren’t, the components are beautiful.
  • Nights of Fire, prototype components
• November: I made a few more copies of Balkan Gamble, still a couple left if anyone wants.
  • The (brief) return of Balkan Gamble

It was also a busy time for conferences, events and conventions.

• April: we went to San Diego for the Popular Cultural Association conference where I made a presentation on “News Paper Games”, about journalism in analog game form. Next year’s conference is in Indianapolis so no way am I going there, but I think I am about done presenting my ideas in this kind of academic venue… not much left to say.
  • Back From San Diego
  • Presentations
• May: I went back to the Army War College to screen The Battle of Algiers for them, and do some guided play of Colonial Twilight with the guys of the Strategic Simulations Division. Also sat in on a very good panel with Peter Perla and Jim Lacey. Then I went up to Ottawa for the Cangames convention, where I played some more Colonial Twilight and met up with Rex Brynen, who was running a zombie game. I also learned The Grizzled from Michel Boucher, and had dinner at his place… I did not know of course that this would be the last time I would see him.
  • Back, then forth
  • Michel Boucher – 2017
• June: Consimworld Expo at Tempe AZ. Hm, I seem not to have written anything about that. Well, it was the usual good time among the hardest-core gamers, and nice as always to meet with publishers and discuss future projects. Lianne and I went to the local art museum and saw a neat exhibition on Frida Kahlo. Unfortunately Tom Russell hurt his back so Hollandspiele could not make the 800 mile drive to get there, but I’ll see them next year.
• September: Back to Kings College London for the 2017 Connections-UK conference, boy that was fun! Also had a couple of extra days to look about in London, so that was great too.
  • Ten Busy Days Away
• November: BottosCon, like always, and it was a great weekend, like always, though I see I have not written anything about it either. I think I like the new hotel.

Near-meaningless digest of site statistics:

• I seem to be cruising at between 1.4 to 2.1 thousand views per month, definitely higher than the preceding two years. Not surprisingly, the five most curious countries were: US, Canada, the UK, France and Australia. One guy clicked in from Jersey (the Channel Island, not the toxic waste dump).
• Besides the then-current post, popular pages or posts included the BTR Games and Free Games pages, and the post about how to use the “horseshoe” in Colonial Twilight to play any four-player COIN system game with two players (this was also published in issue #31 of C3i magazine).
• Even less surprisingly, the most clicked-on documents were the rules, corrected tutorial and playbook for Colonial Twilight, followed by the free PnP files for Ukrainian Crisis, Third Lebanon War and Caudillo. The page for all my presentations and other material got a lot of visits, but very few people downloaded the files. Oh well.

Now on to 2018, and further dumpster fires. Things I am pretty sure will get done in the coming year include:

• Nights of Fire on Kickstarter in February, might be produced in time for Essen but we’ll see
• Tupamaro will come out in 1Q as well, in folio format from One Small Step
• Strike for Berlin will be in the next issue of Yaah! magazine (#11, March (?) 2018)
• Chile ’73, folio game on the coup that put Pinochet in power (Tiny Battle Publishing)
• A quad of mini-games on border wars, using a development of the Little War system (most likely Compass Games)
• Finish off design work on Thunder Out of China (China 1937-41, COIN system, 4 players, different emphases)
• And there will likely be other stuff besides…
• …so get to work, ya bastich!

Another thing underway…

Another thing I’ve been working on. Nearly in its final form. It’s been interesting.

Another thing I’ve been working on….

         

These are just snips but they kind of give away what, and where, and how.

All framed up, and ready for testing.

Soon to be second in the BBW Series.

Snek pek

Roughly as illustrated. Not.

Here is a picture of two people, in an undisclosed location, playtesting my Secret Project of 2017.

What’s going on? What could it be?

Just going to tease you with this, for now!