What, Exactly, Am I Doing Around Here?

I'd like to take a step back from the details of game development in this series on Napoleon, Blown Apart to take a look at the goals of the project. I think a thing that has helped my games turn into something I could be proud of is when there was a guiding vision. Hocus benefited greatly from my co-designer Grant Rodiek's discipline as a game producer, as we was always able to keep us on-track with the game. I wrote up a vision for Fox in the Forest, and while it's kind of amusing to read it now (especially saying how it was destined to be a niche game when it's sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is available in thirteen languages, and has entered its 21st printing in English), I think I did manage to hit the goals I outlined for it. This article is an attempt to capture something of a vision for this project, one I can refer back to and think about. It might not be the endpoint of the game, because I think things are still early, but it's never too early to consider where things are going.

Napoleon was largely inspired by a mechanism, which is kind of an odd starting point for it, at least for how I think about games. But that has helped it accelerate quickly and forced me to think about the direction sooner than usual. As I chip away at it, a few targets have emerged that I'd like to adhere to. Those targets will define both how I approach development and maybe the sorts of players it might appeal to and what the final product is like.

First, I want it to be a card game. I don't want this game to evolve into having a board for tracking state, and I don't want the fight to end up on a map. Partly, this is to avoid comparison to Richard Sivél's masterful Friedrich and Maria, which take trick-taking into a war context in this rough time period and do it fantastically. But even beyond not wanting to make a pale imitation of games I admire greatly, a map would very much be at risk of becoming the focus of play in any kind of wargame. Even one as heavily abstracted as I'm working on here. It's natural - the position of forces within space is of course a critical part of simulating any conflict, and a map would exert an inevitable gravity on the game to become the center of things. And I don't want that. I want the focus of this game to be the hands of cards that get played during the game.

The second goal that I have is that I want there to be some resonance with the subject matter. Not so much that I want this to be a serious simulation of Napoleonic warfare or anything, goodness knows there are plenty of games that have tackled that to varying degree of success. I don't expect that anyone will really learn anything about how battles worked by playing this game. Instead, what I'd like to get is a sort of broad sense of how things worked baked into the design. Roughly, if you know something about how Napoleonic warfare worked, the special rules and interactions in this game should make sense to you and not make you recoil. "Oh, sure, that makes sense," should be what you think as you read these rules.

The third thing I'm keeping in mind is that I really want the player count to work for two or four players, and I really, really want the 4 player game to be a partnership one. I've written before about my love of Bridge, but I've wanted to make a partnership game for forever, and dammit, I'm going to do it here. This is just a design parameter for me, not something that can drift, but if it comes down to a set of rules that works for 2 and doesn't work for 4, I'm not done yet. Note that I've skipped 3 players here. If I need to, I'll sacrifice the 3p game to make the other counts work, but I suspect strongly that I'll be able to get that version to work just fine.

My fourth thing to keep track of is that I want there to be both strategic decisions of significance as well as tactical decisions. In the context of this game, the strategic layer is how you're allocating your resources across hands and the tactical layer is how you're playing the cards in each hand. If you think about card games that take place across multiple hands, mostly there aren't resource allocation decisions you have to make. Your approach to any particular hand might be different based on the current scores in the game, such as bidding differently in Bridge or Spades, but that still is just changing your approach to a particular hand, rather than being a strategy you execute across many hands. In this game, I want there to be decisions you make in a hand that could have impact across many hands. That framework is relatively unusual in card games, particularly card games that hew towards traditional mechanisms, and I think it could be something pretty unique.

So those are my rough parameters, for now, the things I want to keep an eye on as I iterate through the game. Notably, I don't necessarily want this to be a trick-taking game. It can be, and it certainly is right now as of this writing. But that's just a thing that I started with, and there's no guarantee that it'll still be there at the end of development. If I come up with some other core mechanism that will work better, I'll cheerfully use it.

I'll try and check in to this list periodically and evaluate how I'm doing against things, to make sure that I'm keeping myself honest. As for how I'm doing now, there's no map or any kind of positional information (good!), there's very little fidelity to 18th/19th century European warfare (bad!), the player count is frankly unknown right now because I've been exclusively testing 2p (incomplete!), and there's a real sense of strategic decisions now (good!). Not bad! My main task, then, is to improve the impressionistic depiction of warfare that I'm going for, and then to make this thing work for two partnerships (and, I suppose, three players).