Tag Archives: How to write a wargame

Writing a Sci-Fi Tabletop Wargame – Part 6

Our past posts:

So the results of last weeks votes are as follows:

Factions

Now we’ve got most (if not all) of the basic information in place for our game we can start getting our hands dirty with some of the nitty gritty stuff. Firstly, should we have pre-made ready to go factions or should players have options to construct their own units for their own faction? This would make the game miniature agnostic but it would also require players to take the time to build a faction from the ground up, i.e. this is a leader unit it needs this particular weapon, with this armour and these special rules.

Of course we could always have a mixture of both pre-made and create your own. But what do you think?

Turn Order

This is about how the players determine who goes first. There are many options for this, but I’ve narrowed this down to two or three, but bear 🐻 in mind these can also have vary to some extent. For example, while AoS is a UgoIgo system it also implements the turn priority in terms of a dice roll before each turn.

I Go You Go

This is the first and possibly most common option used. Players use a mechanic to determine who goes first and then play is simply alternated between the players until the end of the game.

Draw

Players use coloured dice or chips to represent their individual units on the table e.g. one players units are represented by red dice while the others are blue, when a red dice is drawn the red player chooses a unit to activate. This system will be familiar to those who have played Warlord Games Bolt Action.

Initiative

This could either be an army wide initiative rating or individual initiative ratings for units to decide what order they act in. For example, elite units may have a much higher initiative than conscripts meaning they’ll always act first.

Bidding

One of my personal favourites is using bidding systems to determine who acts first. This can take various forms such as rolling a number of orders each side can take on two or three dice then giving up a number of those orders to try and claim the priority that turn.

So which is your favourite? Perhaps there’s one I’ve not even thought of, I’d that’s the case why not add a comment below?

Writing a Tabletop Wargame – Part 1

I’ve always enjoyed creating my own rules and scenarios for the games I play, and last year I jumped into writing my own ruleset for Napoleonic Wargaming called ‘Clausewitz’.

But I thought it may be fun to create a ruleset with the community which could then be hosted here on the site for free.

So what should it be? A historical game? Sci-Fi, Fantasy? Should it be Grand Tactical, skirmish level or something in between?

What about measurements? Should they be in inches, centimetres, base widths or something completely different?

As you can see there are a lot of points to consider before getting into the nitty gritty of it all. So let’s tackle the first question.

Genre

What about the genre? What should it be. Well that’s up to you all. Why not vote in the poll below that I’ll keep open until the next article and you can decide here what we work on. Of course there’s always an argument to make the game genre agnostic as well, meaning the ruleset can be used for anything…