Here is another sneak peek behind the scenes. I have definitely discussed what is involved in designing the 1758 Fort Carillon, but here are the dirty details! I use lot of applications or sources for various things, and they all are used for a purpose!
A whole lot of updated files, in this case, graphical elements for the rulebook. I use GitHub to store the data. This way I can always work with the latest versions on my computers (I have a few). Also backups are kept automatically… tried and tested 🙂
Creating graphics, art, maps, etc. – in this particular case with Affinity Designer. I use the Affinity product family, MS Paint, and Adobe’s suite such as Illustrator. Oh, let’s not forget Inkscape!
Using MS Word to manage the British Landing pattern (had to “brush away” some of the images!).
I have a 75 page word file where I collected interesting information about “everything” related to the battle: Details from a lot of sources, “what was it like”, related history, etc..
One of my Adobe Illustrator files!
And, of course, the main rulebook!
MS Visual Studio Code for a lot of the raw data. Doesn’t really work well with Illustrator, but oh well…
Inkscape for the my home-made counters (mounted on blank GMT counters!)
My bookshelf? It’s all over the place! Books, PDF files, etc. Stuff in OneDrive, local disk, here and there! Emails, word documents, whatever…
Books…!!! A lot of them! (Hobbit is not relevant here!)
Google Maps and OpenStreetMap!
Youtube videos!
What else?!?! There’s gotta be more! Weather…? How much daylight?
My random travels in the past year or so brought me to literally a few points away from the next level of airline status meaning I “had to” to fly once before early March. While searching for cheap flights that would help me take that one step over to the “gold card”, I thought “what if I asked the guys in Oulu, northern Finland, if I could pop in with the game and we would check out our projects”? One of the guys has been posting about his personal developments in FB, so why not do a day trip there?
The response was very positive and last weekend after a short flight I found myself at the Oulu airport, 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. As I know, he is very active in our small fb-group, and also has multiple game designs under development. What a perfect opportunity to check our projects out!
While waiting for the other guys to show up, we went through his three game projects:
Finlandization 1946-1991
A game of the turbulent years of political balancing between east and west, commonly known as Finlandization. You can look it up in Google 🙂
I found an instant like in this game, if it becomes a product, highly recommended! This is not the type of game that I typically go for, but I have to say, it sounded really interesting. Btw, I saw a newer version of the board than this – but of course failed to take a picture.
What really hit home were the familiar characters for my generation, especially the Finnish “elite” – well-known figures from my childhood. They play a part in the game and in addition to these people, you’ll have the CIA and KGB wrestling over the influence of our politicians and the president. It was funny how many presidents the superpowers had versus us over the many decades covered by the game.
Sissit! (guerillas, special forces – although they weren’t really that, sort of SAS/LRDG, rangers, whatever)
Another title of our turbulent past. When I was young, I used to read these books about the “sissit” – they were plentiful in my dad’s bookshelf. There are probably hundreds of books on the subject (mostly in Finnish), but it’s one of many small things that helped us to remain free from you-know-who.
The game is played on a small map with various scenarios where the Finnish guerilla unit has a task to complete and the Russians will obviously try to prevent that from happening. You can be airlifted in or out, get resupplied, use pervitin as a last measure – but then the game will end shortly.
I am looking forward to these games, good, sound mechanisms and a topic not really ever covered by a boardgame, or probably any game anywhere.
Cilicia
This is a game about the end of the Armenian Cilicia in the 14th century after the Mamluk invasion. Of course, in the game, you can try to alter history and save Cilicia from occupation! A bit of an odd topic comparing to the other two, but I must say, I LOVE TO LEARN about history!
It uses a card-driven system with point to point movement and the map is drawn by an Armenian. A very simple, yet powerful system – let’s see if this will hit the shelves at some point!
1758 Fort Carillon
Well, for some reason, this interests me quite a bit 🙂 We spent a good deal of time checking out what Carillon is all about and took a good test run until I ran out of time and had to head back to the airport for my return flight.
We got the British invasion going and they really pushed hard for a historical result around the ford at Bernetz Brook but still didn’t manage to get Howe killed!
As a designer, it was really cool to see what the pain points were – I have taken lots of notes. And of course, the name of the game was to learn and push the system a bit to see how things flow, or don’t flow. I have noticed several commonalities amongst the testers (maybe the term tester is “pushing it” a bit, but for the lack of a better one I will just use it for now). For instance, simple things like differentiating between a leader and a combat unit. I am making some counter updates based on these observations and I really hope they will iron out some of the problems surfaced so far.
There is a lot of French artillery in the fort but here we didn’t set them up properly – each of the four bastions can have only so many cannons and they can fire only to specific directions.
If you read all the way through the post, why not leave a brief comment? Even just a “Hi” is better than a random IP address in the statistics 🙂 It would be really nice to know if people actually find this stuff interesting.
After a long hiatus I had to put the game on the table to test some stuff – like basic combat. A lot of small tweaks had taken place and I wanted to make sure “it feels right”. If “it doesn’t” it goes back to the drawing table. Python scripts or not – I have to be able to reasonably replicate history, no matter how unlikely the die rolls need to be.
So, all the small changes I’ve made on the rules need to be played out. Although the images do not show it, “I had a small breakthrough with the Highlanders” (I want it to be around 20-30% probability for the July 8th big battle). In this case, the luck was not on their side and they were thrown out by a French counterattack.
I only managed to get half the historical casualties meaning combat needs to be more… a lot more bloody.
Having said this, I am also spending a good amount of time playing other games. After stepping in as the North Korean Commander-in-Chief after another player quit, the MMP OCS Korea is closing a final climax – or the last hurrah, and my first attempt at defending the Confederate against the Union in GMT’s US Civil War could go better 🙂 We tried to go for a “Shiloh” but didn’t quite get there!
No Shiloh this time, but we have had plenty of action around Memphis: a Confederate counter-attack liberated the city for some time from “the yoke of the yankees” (I made it up), but Grant’s Grande Armee gathered their… stuff, and pushed those pesky southerners back!
In Instagram, you can follow: https://www.instagram.com/gardencitygamer/ for occasional & random updates (not me!).
Although the title of this post is a little “provocative” considering the battle took place between two lakes and not at sea, the British effort in 1758 was enormous, and included also a Royal Navy presence. To transport those 17 000 men (believe who you believe as this number typically ranges between 15 and 17 thousand), over 1 000 vessels of all sorts were needed: 900 bateaux, 135 whaleboats, many radeaux and some “floating artillery castles” (or “floating gun battery”) to support a potentially contested landing at the north end of Lake George. Once they were on their way, the armada was some six miles long covering a significant part of the lake.
The vessels were built by carpenters at the camp site near the ruins of Fort William Henry or with great effort hauled over from the Hudson river as they were built in “battoe factories” in Schenectady, Albany, and other locations. Many artists have attempted to depict this flotilla as seen below. No matter what these paintings tell us, it must have been a unique and brutal sight of the strength of Great Britain!
Gary Zaboly’s work gives an idea of what it may have looked like (please ignore the clothing of the Canadians)!
Commanding this vast flotilla was Royal Navy’s American-born captain Joshua Loring. In the game he has a small role as he will be able to improve naval bombardment accuracy in addition to improving bateaux (boats) to radeaux (rafts) and even further into small scale artillery castles (artillery-armed rafts). There is still a real 1758 “artillery castle” in existence called the Land Tortoise, lying at the bottom of the Lake George as a National Historic landmark and a State of New York underwater preserve site. For those interested in scuba diving, the site can be visited by experienced divers in the summer.
For some reason, the NY website for the Land Tortoise seems to be blocked at least for me over here in Europe, although it works via a VPN: https://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/55497.html. Anyways, below is an illustration from the website to give an idea of what this particular vessel looks like. It was finished in October 1758 and purposely sunk on Oct 22nd for the winter. However, during this process, it apparently ended up in deep water and was not retrieved in the following spring. The construction was overseen by two officers: Captain Samuel Cobb and Captain Thomas Ord of the Royal Artillery (he is in the game!).
There is a compromise I decided to make at this point: while it is possible to improve a radeaux into an artillery castle, it won’t be “a Land Tortoise”. That would take several weeks to build so the improved vessel is a radeau (raft) on steroids and designed to allow firing artillery from the raft without the defensive protection. For (mostly) the entrepreneurial British player, this enables bringing more heavy weapons against the fort or other entrenchments that may face them around Lake Champlain.
A British flotilla diorama at the Battlefield Park Visitor Center in Lake George, NY.
The Sunken Fleet is another documentary about the British fleet that was sunk on the lake after the failed campaign of 1758 and as Abercromby never got around for another try, the new ships, boats, and rafts were left at the bottom of the lake waiting for another year of war.
It can be tough to get the combat table right so I am using a python script to calculate results. With this, I can adjust different parameters to find the balance I feel is appropriate.
Although I don’t have every single possible combination coded into the script, the most important and frequently-used values can be adjusted, such as leader bonuses, fortification column shifts and so on. There was also an interesting decision I had to make: what happens when the opposing forces are equal (1:1)? I suppose it could go either way in a scenario like this, but keeping the overall campaign in mind, I have decided that for the attacker, this will be a rather risky attempt. For now, I lean more towards the usual 3:1 odds or higher to make it quite probable to win. However, this is something I still need to pay attention to just to make sure the game is ultimately imitating real life results well enough.
By running at least a thousand tests each time, I should get a good overview how the combat table works.
The output shown are from one of my today’s tests and are at best indicative. I am changing the table constantly trying to find the right balance. It’s not an easy task as I have so many variables to take into account.
With the python script, it’s very easy to adjust parameters here and there and see immediate results.
The script was originally created a year ago and just updating it to correspond today’s odds calculation method was a major task. I was hoping to focus on other topics instead of this, but it’s important to have it running accurately as it’s an invaluable tool before extensive playtesting.
I only learned about this game convention a couple of weeks ago, as someone I know mentioned he is going there and there might a table available (hint, hint). So, a couple of emails later I had a space reserved for game demos at Tracon Hitpoint 2023 (https://2023.hitpoint.tracon.fi/). While it may not be a big event, or focusing on wargames, I had a great time through the weekend although I drove back and forth a couple of hours on both days in dreary November weather.
Frankly, I haven’t publicly demoed a game before, so the first day breezed by trying to do the whole set up while explaining various aspects of the game to anyone who happened to walk by 🙂 I was quite pleasantly surprised to have lengthy discussions about the project. There may not have been that many people being interested in the game, but those who took some time really wanted to know how this game functions and what my plans are. This time, quality over quantity (sorry, Stalin)!
The mistake I made on the first day was trying to set up the whole game. It took me most of the day to just get going all the while explaining some aspect of the project. 1758 Fort Carillon is not a small game. It will have a fairly sizable map and quite a few counters (exact amount is still TBD). That is how it is, and that is how I want it to be. Actually, one of the first things that came up was that the over-sized map was really good and well-liked. With potentially a high number of counters on the map, more room means a better play experience which was brought up by several people. The map I laid out was one that was printed at a print shop and came out physically much larger than expected. But, this may have been a blessing after all – it is easier to play and looks really nice (sorry if you don’t have the space!!).
On Saturday, the “game session” didn’t get far. I barely managed to play a full turn as I was demoing small aspects of the game and answering questions. Sadly, that was the busy day and Sunday was very quiet. I did get a few really interested guys to spend some extended time at the table and ask tons of questions about the background of the project, the historical setting, and of course, the game itself.
Big changes are hard to make this late in development but small tweaks definitely are welcome. There could be a good idea here or there that would enhance some aspect by making it smoother, easier, faster, or just … better. Sunday went by swiftly too, and I left with a great deal of notes to finetune the project, one way or the other. First priority, as always, is to ensure the rulebook is clear, complete, and accurate (which it still is not). Once it is good enough, I will upload it to the website.
Smaller tutorials or even full scenarios were requested due to the sheer size of the campaign – I had considered one as a tutorial but this could be expanded to ensure there are faster scenarios and not just the big campaign which will take more than an evening. Now I am starting to see the logic behind the Strategy & Tactics game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113369/ticonderoga-battles-lake-george-1755-1758) which came with several small scenarios as well.
I have now some samples for the almost “final” counter art – everything I have used so far has been, well, my “own creation” using whatever tools I have been able to use. Applications range from simple Microsoft Paint to Inkscape with its amazing countersheet extension. Recently, I also started to use the Adobe Illustrator because that’s what the pros use… The artist is slowly working on getting the production-quality art created for manufacturing – not really a small task.
Here I have a few examples of what they would look like. Just a small note: I have not looked at the colors of the uniforms and units closely, thus they may be a bit off still.
Good things are worth waiting for! Amazing day behind, got several art updates which I am sampling here. Things will change and blahblah, but the art-side of the project is definitely starting to shape up.
Cover art sample
It’s just beautiful! Everything I was thinking of, and even more!
Counter art sample
I am starting to think I need bigger counters to enjoy these properly!
The highway between two colonial empires, the Hudson River – Lake George – Lake Champlain corridor, was a hugely important waterway during the French and Indian War. It essentially connected two superpowers to each other in the time and place where the most practical means of transportation was by water.
Some seven years later in 1749, the Finnish (*) naturalist, Peter (Pehr) Kalm, traveled on the same ship with the captain St. Onge himself. Starting 1756, Saintonge also started to travel down to Fort Carillon to carry supplies to the French garrison busy building the new fort designed to block the British advance towards north and Canada (New France).
* We can have an endless debate about Finland being part of Sweden at the time, but for us Finns, Turku is and was Finland.
As the ship was showing its age and lacking in capacity, a new ship was finished in 1757. Vigilante – a sixty-ton topsail schooner armed with ten four pound cannon – took over most of the duties of Saintonge, commanded by Joseph Payant. As far as I have seen, there are no pictures remaining of these vessels, but we can draw some conclusions from other known ships in the same time period.
A model of a contemporary schooner at Fort Ticonderoga today.
A diorama at the fort depicting ships in the 18th century, but post the 1758 battle.
The game, 1758 Fort Carillon, will have some optional French vessels available, ranging from “Jacaubites” gunboats, known also as “Jacobs”. These were bateaux with cannon. There will be two ships, Saintonge and Vigilante, of which the latter may be of great importance to the French. Vigilante has some serious firepower and can disrupt the British advance across the lake to encircle the French positions. Neither ship is mentioned in historical records of the battle, but they definitely were on Lake Champlain at the time, thus can be included.
Today I had a chance to meet new people and spend some three hours walking through the current design of “1758 Fort Carillon” with Hannu from U&P Games (a small local game studio backed by some serious gamers). His game designs include Helsinki 1918 and W1815.
Essentially, I introduced my project and explained the basic setting and the key rules. French and Indian War really is not a big topic over here in Finland, but I am doing my best to change that, so we went through some basics of the period in history. Next we proceeded to discuss in detail the basic game mechanics and features. Three hours went by quite quickly.
The session gave me once again some great ideas how make this project better: what could be improved or implemented slightly differently (better). There are generally two objectives that I have in this project: 1) historical accuracy and 2) smooth game play. I assume these are the guiding lights for pretty much all designers of historical wargames. Now, these objectives do not indicate this will be a quick game – could be quite the contrary. I haven’t logged any real estimate for the length of the game yet, but we will plan for some group testing with other wargamers.
My homework from today includes testing some small changes to combat – especially when attacking entrenched positions, how to add a bit of fog of war (this really is a tough nut to crack), and how to actually implement some randomness I have had in mind for a long time.
