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The Guns of Gettysburg Design Diary.
This is a diary covering the design process for the game The Guns of Gettysburg. As was the case with the Napoleon’s Triumph design diary, it picks up after the design has been started (necessary in order to be reasonably confident that the game will eventually be published). I won’t make any promises this time about how often it will be updated, since my promises just proved embarrassing last time and instead will just let the design process determine when the diary will be updated and what the content of the diary will be.
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Napoleon’s Triumph Design Diary.
This is a diary covering the design process for the game
Napoleon’s Triumph. Much of the work on the game was
done long before this diary was written – necessarily so as it was not desirable to announce that the game is going to
be published without a firm idea of what it would be. The diary will therefore be covering a review of work done weeks
or months previously as well as updates on new work completed since the last diary entry. It is generally expected that
the diary will be updated with new articles once or twice a week (generally site updates are done on weekly each
Monday).
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Bonaparte at Marengo Design Notes.
These are the design notes that were published at the back of the rules booklet for
the game Bonaparte at Marengo.
Even though they are available to anyone who buys the game or even just downloads
the rules here,
still it seemed worthwhile to make them available here where they are more accessible
than inside a one megabyte PDF download. Because the game had its origin as a game system,
the notes are almost entirely concerned with the goals of the system and how the rules
were structured to meet those goals. The narrative backbone is (appropriately enough) historical,
except that the history under discussion is not the history of the battle but the history of the game.
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Chance and Wargames.
One of the features of Bonaparte at Marengo that
has excited the most comment is the chance-free method of resolving combat. Although it is not the first
game to resolve combat without dice, cards or other randomizers, it is certainly one of a very small group
of wargames to do so, which is why this aspect of the game has attracted so much attention. The intent
of this essay is not to attack or defend the use of chance in wargames (or its lack of use in Bonaparte
at Marengo), but to explore its role where it is used, the class of problems it is invoked to handle, and
specifically, since wargames are simulations as well as games, what it is called upon to simulate.
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