Above the Trenches
Design Essays

Design Parameters

There is a paradox facing a designer tackling a relatively obscure topic. Because the topic itself isn't a big draw (or it wouldn't be obscure), the only people that you can get immediately interested in your game are the topic's true fans. But since they are fans, they've studied it thoroughly, and often they know so much about it that they reject abstractions of the details that interested them in the subject in the first place.

"You're doing a game on the War of Jenkins' Ear? I hope you're going to include swordfighting subgame so that Jenkins' ear begins with varying levels of damage, and also a political system to vary Britain's commitment to the war commensurate with that level of damage together with the subsequent pickling."

So a designer can think short term ("I'll design a detailed game for the aficionados, but which is probably too involved for the general gamer") or long term ("I'll design a simple game which risks alienating the experts, but it will attract people to the game despite the obscure topic").

Now I long ago lost the patience for games with 64 page rule books or that take too long to play, so from the outset I'm setting some constraints:

• 8 pages of rules

• 4 hours to play

Less in either or both cases would be fine, of course. This puts me firmly in the "long term" design approach. I have to hope the experts will hold their nose, accept the abstractions, and enjoy the game anyway.

The severity of those two restrictions have some important repercussions:

Time scale: To keep playing time down, there have to be a small number of turns. Making them represent three months each corresponds nicely to the seasons and also to the pace of offensive activity on the western front. The Verdun campaign was really the first where the air forces were large enough to make much difference, so AtT begins in Feb 1916 and extends until Oct 1918, making eleven turns in all.

(Thinking ahead a bit, four hours playing time divided by 11 turns gives a per-turn limit of about 20 minutes. I'll have to keep that in mind when designing the combat mechanics.)

Map scale: I will ignore fronts other than the West entirely. Interesting action did occur elsewhere, but its scale was dwarfed by the size of the forces in France and Belgium. For instance, Germany organized 81 fighter squadrons over the course of the war; of these, 77 were committed full-time to the west. Trying to handle multiple scales on different fronts might be interesting but would certainly cause unacceptable rules ballooning, so with regret I bid the other fronts adieu.

One of the Bombs Away! elements that I liked most was the area movement (or, more properly, area placement, because your forces were just deploy directly where you wanted them). Detail folks want systems as in Luftwaffe, where you route bombers over a hex map, but that adds to play time drastically. So areas it is.

I can also capitalize on the fact that the western front was so static that a representational map will not look ahistorical until the very last turn, when the Allies finally broke the German army. I'm willing to accept that compromise.

How many areas, though?

It makes sense to divide the front into areas based on the land campaigns, since supporting those was the raison d'être of the air forces. I'll begin with eight, from north to south:

• Ypres
• Arras
• Somme
• Oise
• Chemin des Dames
• Champagne
• Verdun
• Nancy

Actually, air activity in the far south was miniscule compared with the other areas, so it might be better to leave off Nancy. At the very least I'll want to lower the rewards for commitment there.

I also need to show the strategic bombing campaign, so that adds London, Paris, and the Saar as areas to bomb. So that's 11 places on the map needing combat resolution, which better take less than 2 minutes per area if turns are going to fit into 20 minutes.

It might be worth dropping another area or two just for time constraints.

Unit scale: I love the way the Bombs Away! design got across the basic elements of the WW2 strategic bombing campaign. But its air forces are purely abstract (with aircraft names pinned on for flavor) rather than trying for any real representation of the underlying order of battle.

I want a bit more fidelity to history in AtT. At first blush you might think to use squadrons as the basic unit, as they were in reality. But the resulting number of units will be unwieldy, the French alone fielding 300+ squadrons by the end of the war.

Since the Germans organized their fighters and bombers into 4-squadron geschwaders, and the French likewise, it makes sense to do so also in the game. The gives each unit on the order of 40-80 aeroplanes. That ought to be manageable, just.

Despite the game's intentional emphasis on the reconnaissance craft, I am going to include several individual aces. I'll admit that this is somewhat pandering to the fighter crowd, but given the unit scale it is not unjust. After all, Manfred von Richthofen -- a.k.a. The Red Baron -- shot down eighty enemy aeroplanes, or an enemy unit or two, all by himself!