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.
