I have invented a board game. It’s sort of between chess and a wargame. I like the clarity, simplicity and exactitude of chess, but it’s not a very faithful representation of a battle (nor does it claim to be, of course). I like the way wargames represent more closely actual battle, but they are messy and complicated and time-consuming (and I am embarrassed to play with little soldiers). So I have tried to make a game that takes the best of both.

It's a two-player game. There is a board that is divided into squares (2 or 3 hundred of them). Each person has an army made of a number of units and he lines them up, like chess, on his side of the board. It’s a turn-based game. Each player, as in a wargame, moves all his pieces on each turn. The object is to kill the opponent’s general, and you do this, in practice, by killing more of the enemy’s units than the enemy does of yours.

You engage enemy pieces my moving your units onto squares that they are on. Any square can accommodate only a maximum number of pieces. It is decided who kills who during an engagement by totting up the total value of the pieces on that square. The total value of each player’s units on that square is determined by the number of pieces, the kind of pieces that they are, and the direction of attack (if you move one of your units onto a square that an enemy unit is on from its rear, then the value of your attacking piece increases). The player whose pieces have the higher total value kills some or all of the enemy units, depending on the difference in value.

It’s a Napoleonic era game (though it could possibly be tweaked to fit other eras). There are five kinds of unit. There are infantry units, cavalry, artillery, scouts and a general. These pieces have different values and may move different distances. All pieces can (as in most wargames) move in any of the 8 directions, though some can move further than others.

The other big feature of the game is a fog-of-war feature (which means it probably can’t be an actual boardgame). The terrain and the enemy units that might or might not be on it, is only visible to you in the area where your own units are, and a determined area around them. Thus at the beginning of the game you can only see your own units and a determined area around them. On successive moves, as you advance your units, more and more of the board becomes visible (though if you advance them too far, then the area behind them becomes invisible to you).

The guns either fire or move (during a move). If you choose to fire a gun, you nominate a square within its range and if there are enemy units in that square they suffer accordingly.

There are a few other rules, but that is the gist.

What I tried to achieve in the design of the game is a tension between putting more units on fewer squares, which increases the value of those squares, when engaging the enemy, but which increases the likelihood of flank and rear attack, and increases gunfire losses if hit, and spreading them more thinly, which makes them less vulnerable to flank and rear attacks, and gunfire, but weaker when engaging enemy units.

My problem is this however: I can’t tell if it’s any good or even if it works at all, without testing it (more than I have), and I can’t test it because, in its current form, it is too fiddly to manipulate. As I say, it has to be done on a computer because of the fog-of-war aspect. (The two players’ views of the board must be different. Player A can only see his pieces and the areas around them (and Player B’s pieces if they in those areas), and Player B can only see his pieces and the areas around them.) But I don’t know how to program. And I am pretty thick. The way I did it was on Microsoft Excel. It sort of works, but in a laborious way.

My questions are these:

1. Is there such a game already? — I have had a look around but only a brief one.

2. What would be a good tool (programme) to make this game? And by “good” I mean as simple as possible (for someone who has no idea of how to programme).

The rules you describe are quite commonplace, although often without facing-based bonuses (which traditionally make sense in personal scale tactical combat)
Usually, this kind of setup results in strategies with gapless front lines that enemy units cannot penetrate due to touching zones of control, adjacent units, exploited obstacles, etc. often resulting in static positions.

It can be a desirable feature (if, for example, skill lies in engaging the right opponents, like in Battle for Wesnoth, superior reinforcements, limited use tricks, etc.) or it can be avoided, for example with sparse units and fast movement, like in Bloodbowl, ensuring that if units pile up somewhere vast parts of the map are empty.

Thank you for that very useful information.

That sounds like a solid and well thought out game design. I am a fan of turn based strategy games, and I haven't seen a game similar to that design. It sounds like it might be engaging to play as well.

I immediately thought of “risk” which is a game based on stacking strategy - where to stack, spread thin and concentrate your attack.

Stacky games are less engaging than more tactical rich game designs, but you cover off on that with different units, flank attacks, guns and I hope a few more tactical considerations to move it from being focused on the stacking aspect.

It is hard to know how much fun it will be to play from design, without having the game finished to playtest and pass around to a few people for reviews. But I suppose all games are like that.

That being said, It sounds reasonably easy to get a working version up and running with place holder graphics and leaving the polish and lipstick out so you can concentrate on testing the actual game design aspect.

I am also a non professional strategy game enthusiast, and I have designed and programmed my own strategy game, and went through the process of design, art and programming to produce a rough working game.

I recommend a basic language something you can open a screen and blit simple graphics on to. I used Delphi 10.3 (free for hobby) but I just started looking at “pure basic”

I find Unity and the like so geared for 3D and graphic games that they are cumbersome to work in for a strategy game (simple graphics). I looked at Godot, and its “scenes" paradigm is counter productive to a simple game we are trying to produce. The absence of global variables in godot just made things unnecessarily hard when it came to coding my map and units etc.

you can check out my project at http://ratbyte.org/a-homepage-section/seer/​ which I used Delphi to produce.

Thank you for your encouraging words - I shall definitely have a look at your game.

When reading you rules, I first though of the various Avalon Hill board games I played in the late 1970's - early 1980's. You can see several of the games here: https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/tabletop/11532-8-Avalon-Hill-Board-Games-That-Deserve-New-Life​ . Most, if not all of these games are out of print, but you can possibly find the rules online.

You game sounds interesting, and you should be able to get something up and running quickly. Being turn-based, you should be able to get a prototype running just with simple 2D-graphics. Best of luck, and let us know how it goes.

Have you looked at Tabletop Simulator?

Not having used it myself, I don't know how easy to use it might be, or whether your rules are feasible to implement in it, but it might be worth looking into.

Wikipedia link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabletop_Simulator

I think you have a good design, the game sounds interesting already. Probably the first step I would recommend, before creating a digital version, is to mock it up on paper. You can print out pieces on your computer, just squares you can design in Photoshop/GIMP, and then see if the game works or use it to tweak things. I did this for a card game I was prototyping and it definitely helped (I gave up the project for other reasons, but having physical cards definitely helped me think through some things). You can even just print out a template of blank pieces, and then write in the stats or classes with a pen. I would recommend that.

In terms of transferring to the computer, you'll need to decide what platforms you want to support. That could affect your decision. So are you aiming for a PC release? Web based? Mobile? Online? Etc. I would probably say Godot is about the easiest thing out there, compared to the big engines like Unity and Unreal. I'm using Unreal now, but it's massive and complex, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have some experience already. Unity is easier and is a valid choice. But I found Godot to be great for getting started, and the 2D support is very good (3D-wise, the graphics aren't as good and I found some more advanced issues with 3D I couldn't deal with, so I switched to Unreal). That said, for 2D games or basic/retro 3D it works well.

Another idea, maybe you can use this for prototyping, is to use a physical board with a divider. Think like Battleship. Each player only sees their side of the board, and if they move to a space they will tell the other player “I'm on D5” and then they tell each other if they have troops on the square. I do think making a digital game is a better idea (in terms of cost of development and scale) but it might be an option to give you some ideas.

@Thaumaturge Thanks, I shall definitely have a look at it.

@SibylSystem I have already mocked it up. I sort of programmed it in Excel. I say “sort of” because I don't know whether it really counts as proper programming. Anyway, it sort of worked, but didn't work well enough. The problems with my mock-up in Excel are these 1. It's very fiddly and laborious to move the pieces, 2. I wasn't able to program it such that it was impossible to cheat (by shuffling around your own pieces to your advantage) 3. I wasn't able to program a feature that keeps track of your moves.

The key problem of a game in which you can't see what your opponent is doing (because some of his pieces are concealed from you) and he (or she) can't see what you are doing---is that cheating is made possible. You might say, well, surely everyone is honourable enough and grown-up enough not to cheat, but we are not really like that (we lie to ourselves as to where our pieces are, we allow ourselves little cheats when things get tight, and then sometimes we wholly consciously cheat). So we need some third party to prevent this. You could have a third person, an adjudicator, but is one always available? And who would want to do this? You could also write down your moves, as in classical chess, and then each would check the other's documentation after the game. But that would be an awful lot of work. The best third party would be a computer, that prevented you from cheating.

The other requirement is for there to be something that keeps a track on what pieces you move. During a move you might move 20 or 50 pieces. You might invent some system for yourself, such that you start with pieces in the first rank and move all of those in turn, from the leftmost one to the rightmost one. And then go on to the next rank, etc.. But that's not how you would want to move your pieces. You would probably want to move first the ones that you know where you want to move them. And then move the one's whose movement is dependent on these. The best solution is a program that keeps track.

I have certainly thought of making a physical board. In some ways a physical board game is preferable to something mediated by a screen. Boards and pieces are nice things. They have retro appeal. Everyone is sick of looking at screens, etc..

You could do it with a vertical board between the players. Pieces are pegs. As you look at your side of the board, the bottom two ranks (say) of the board have your pieces, as pegs, stuck in. Other squares (on your side, as you see the board) have no pegs in (the parts of the terrain that you can see) or they have, say, grey pegs in, that prevent you seeing through the holes. When you move your pieces forward, you can see more, and so you remove some of those grey pegs and, if there are opposing pieces in those squares, you can see them (the bases of your opponent's pegs). You could keep track of which pegs you have moved, with some kind of toggle switch on each peg.

There are three problems with this. 1. The large number of pieces you and pegs you would have to manipulate during each move. 2. I don't have any friends would would want to play-test this with me! So I would have to find someone online I could do it with. 3. The deal-breaking cheating problem.

As to your thoughts about programs - all I really want is something easy and simple - to mock it up for myself really. I happen to have a Windows PC. I am not intending any “release”! That would be in my wildest dreams!

Thank you very much for your kind comments and interest. I shall definitely have a look at the things you mentioned.