From a total mess to something that makes sense.
Like a box full of screws, gears, springs and that is just a pile of stuff the previous attempts were not something useful. That how the entire project felt after so many iterations after it started back in 2019 and every now and then, with a refreshed mind of staying away, I would pull it out and try again, but there was a moment, which honestly I cannot say when and how, that everything, or at least part of the whole, started to make sense if aligned in a different form.
Thus, it is with great sense of pride that I am finally assembling the rules book to deliver to the good folk that volunteered as play testers ( I left calls for help in three places and I am honoured to have received fabulous and notable individuals plea to help ).
It is only a cover but it is the cover for my first attempt at designing a wargame, thus I really like it.
As of today, and still putting everything together to the play testers have as few doubts as possible when playing on their own tables, the book already features, without any illustrations, over 16 pages of rules, which is not much but still 2/3 of the rules left to assemble regarding crew actions and combat, so I’ll guess say it will be some 26 – 32 pages of rules including Reference Sheets.
Scenarios and additional content will come later as it is not necessary for this phase play testing.
The project started with me wanting to model a game that I want to play and having played a ton of different age of sail games and every single one is awesome, so i must be nuts to be wanting one more, right ?!
Sort of. All games are excellent in different forms and fit different feels and some are “good for Saturdays and another is better on Sundays” kind of thing.
All the notes from all the iterations are not lost and may well fit another project in the future but for now I picked the ones that did make sense and removed the ones that didn’t.
One of them was the Ship cards idea I was tinkering with and the real-time sequencing. It is not that it will never work, is just that it won’t work now.
Game is to be played on a square grid and this conforms to absolutely everyone in the easiest of forms and any type of game piece representation can be used, so is not a miniatures game, not a cardboard game, not a blocks game, but rather a wargame.
I feel very confident that it won’t be long until a complete fully tested and a final edit ready to be released into the savage lands of wargaming and be ripped apart by power gamers and salty grognards…
Okay, back to the typewriter…
wargamer.coffee.break 