WAR ROOM - New Larry Harris Game

@CWO:

Congratulations YG on the upcoming participation of Larry and Nightingale Games at these events for a demo of their forthcoming game.  This is great news indeed.  Looking forward to seeing the after-event report that you’ll prepare (if you’re planning to do so) for your Youtube channel.

There will be live streaming on YouTube during the event :)

Well some problems with the design:

1. When you roll dice each unit rolls one die and the color of the spots indicate which unit is destroyed ( obviously the icon for infantry is more prevalent than say fighter) The problem here is your not representing the true power of your units. You cant even calculate the combat odds unless you convert the number of occurrences from the dice and convert into fractions, but how do you account for situations where you got like 4 tanks and 2 fighters, vs. 8 infantry? The dice have far fewer chances to roll a tank or fighter hit, so chances are the 8 infantry get wiped out and perhaps just one loss to the tank force. Or perhaps this is just the opposite of memorizing attack factor and defense factor, putting this all on a 12 sided die? But then again we lose DIFFERENT VALUES FOR ATTACK OR DEFENSE. They are all the same because you always roll the same dice ( no different dice for attack and defense). So you number crunchers will have less fun.

2. All the units have the same icon ( generic infantry, generic battleship) That sucks is is a huge part of what makes AA fun. its like he went backward to the milton bradley days with generic sculpts.

3. French West Africa and Madagascar are both German control, meaning they get the value of these areas and can move in freely. What a farcical idea! These are Vichy and it is true the Germans had limited interaction, but could have never entered these areas or derived any benefit. They should be neutral.

4. AA players like to notate the land areas with three letters (e.g. Italy= Itl)  for whatever reason all the land areas have a number and why?  I understand the sea areas like Atlantic ocean could be notated A-15, but land areas should be known with the same abbreviations as we see in online games ( Ukraine=UKR etc), not S15 or whatever.

5. I mentioned before they need to go with Historical army designations like American 3rd army, British 8th army… not Italian army 189… it makes no sense whatsoever.

6. They kinda borrowed the idea of territory cards from Monopoly and risk, where they have info and you take a physical card .

Not really liking this concept. They went away from AA too far in order to get as far as possible from those designs. Im thinking this is really the design of another, but they brought in Larry to bring interest in the project. It does not seem like a Larry Harris design, but rather the design of a younger man who made Euro games. IMO

Fair point IL, well noted. I must say that I think Artillery should be red and Armour yellow, not the other way around. Say, do you happen to have a copy of the current rulebook that you could post here please? I’m intrigued by the combat system and want to explore your thoughts on the matter but cannot until I’ve seen the rules. Cheers!

@Imperious:

Well some problems with the design:

1. When you roll dice each unit rolls one die and the color of the spots indicate which unit is destroyed ( obviously the icon for infantry is more prevalent than say fighter) The problem here is your not representing the true power of your units. You cant even calculate the combat odds unless you convert the number of occurrences from the dice and convert into fractions, but how do you account for situations where you got like 4 tanks and 2 fighters, vs. 8 infantry? The dice have far fewer chances to roll a tank or fighter hit, so chances are the 8 infantry get wiped out and perhaps just one loss to the tank force. Or perhaps this is just the opposite of memorizing attack factor and defense factor, putting this all on a 12 sided die? But then again we lose DIFFERENT VALUES FOR ATTACK OR DEFENSE. They are all the same because you always roll the same dice ( no different dice for attack and defense). So you number crunchers will have less fun.

Just a two corrections:
It’s not one die per unit, the units roll a different amount of dice.

And sure you can count combat odds, it’s just not as simple anymore. But since there is only one round of combat anyway, you can still count the odds of units you hit and which of yours are hit easily enough.

Example
4 tanks and 2 fighters, vs. 8 infantry (simplifying by assuming max. dice stance, leaving out air supremacy and white side of the dice)
20 dice at 1/3 hit to an inf vs. 16 dice at 1/6 hit to a ftr or tank
-> 6 + 2/3 hits vs. 2 + 4/6 hits
You’d better put the inf in defensive (more hitpoints) stance and generally have some heavy hitters with you at all times

And lastly, true, there is no difference between attack and defense, but now you’ve got different stances.

Is this A&A? no!
Do I like it? Well …  Arm and ftr do cost double the resources and more costly ones, taking the trade value into account, it’s 16 OSR vs. 42,7 OSR, but still, I’m not sure if I like the idea of 4 tanks and 2 fighters steamrolling 8 infs.

Lozmoid, the ruleboook can be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwgi0yhRF9rJeDZtaThTSm9iZ1E/view?ct=t(WAR_ROOM_Bulletin_37_20_2017

Edit:
And this might be a bit early,
but as infantry don’t soak up hits anymore and even worse get shot quickly, why would I bring more than one to negate Force advantage? Chances are quite good that for every hit they take, they also dish out one, even to a more valuable unit, but not having more than one present will negate a lot of enemy hits. So the bang for the buck, taking survivability into account, seems rather low.
I guess they are what you spend your OSR on, which you can’t use for quality units because of lack of oil or iron.

Rules look pretty good, many of the things people have discussed for years, moving away from D6, fog of war, trade, more complex economics, its all in there.

At least from my point of view, the rules and ideas seem pretty similar to AxA, but reducing the flavor and role of combat a little in order to add that complexity back in the non-battle parts of the game.

Writing in your orders seems very similar to Pandemic’s expansion, it seems like a good way to implement fog of war, but I personally don’t think this method is very fun from a playability point of view.  It requires a lot of abstraction and prediction, its much more realistic, definitely looks like this part of the record-keeping and planning is at the heart of the game (more so than combat…)

I would have picked a different name than OSR, some other abstraction like Coal/Food/Cash are very familiar to gamers, but just calling a game resource OSR feels like not picking a name or committing to one abstraction or another…“I’ll be sure to win this game when I reach my OSR/Payback Ratio Threshold”

There is a ton of information on the board, the stacks required are printed right on there.  Since you only need this information once, I wonder if there is another way to set the game up without having that information remain as visual clutter on the board itself?

Hope its lots of fun, ready to hear more feedback/comments

@taamvan:

Writing in your orders seems very similar to Pandemic’s expansion, it seems like a good way to implement fog of war,

The secret orders part also sounds a bit like the classic WWI board game Diplomacy, in which players write secret orders using territorial identification codes to say which of their units take what action in which direction.

Just found out about this game today.  Super excited to see how it looks in the Kickstarter!

Is there an estimation on how long a game is supposed to take?  Should I be expecting Global 1940 levels?

Anyone know where you can have custom Lazy Susans made?  I need a special War Room lazy susan for this SKU!!  Also does anyone know if those are 10 sided or 12 sided dice?  Haven’t ran my Ranger/Cleric in like 23 years.

@Paper_IPC:

Anyone know where you can have custom Lazy Susans made?  I need a special War Room lazy susan for this SKU!!  Also does anyone know if those are 10 sided or 12 sided dice?  Haven’t ran my Ranger/Cleric in like 23 years.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Shepherd-9548-6-Lazy-Susan-Turntables/23224079

You can then take a 3/4" ply wood and cut it in a round shape of the size of your choice :)

@Young:

Awesome gadget… our first WAR ROOM customization  8-)

Well… The game is going to go kickstarter this fall, we have the opportunity to talk with Larry at the convention… why not suggesting that lazy susan thing as a stretch goal for his campaign?  or maybe a “deluxe edition” package…

With my experience with Kickstarters… It is unlikely that the game will be delivered before mid 2018 maybe even 3rd or 4th quarter… depending of the amount of pieces that needs to be manufactured. :)

You can then take a 3/4" ply wood and cut it in a round shape of the size of your choice :)

Instead of flipping the board when you get angry….SPIN THE BOARD!  Let your opponent(s) eat a spray of centrifugal chits instead of the traditional shower!

Ya ya - when you War Room Rage Quit its a spin of some nature, we gotta coin a term:

Rage Spin
War Room Rage Spin
Rage Quit Spin
War Room Quit Spin

Re the Lazy Susan issue, I may have discovered the answer to all our War Room dreams, its an antique leather top rotating/lazy susan drum table!

https://bid.auctionbymayo.com/m/lot-details/index/catalog/12485/lot/1621153/

Here is another option for War Roomery - when playing on this old girl there will be no #Rage_Spins or #Chit_Sprays as she might not be able to take the rage fueled RPMs.
Drawers have plenty of space for all the chits, D12s and pencils.  Think there are 6 drawers, wait how many players is War Room anyhoo?

I’m quite surprised that Larry has not contacted me. Last time he considered a Kickstarter, I got on the phone with him and somebody who consults for Kickstarter campaigns. We have the traffic and audience to blow away any Kickstarter goals but like any Kickstarter you have to start months in advance.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I’ve reached out.

For whatever reason, Larry was initially hesitant to reach out to us about this game. I think he incorrectly thinks that we’re closely associated with Wizards.

I’ve reached out to him and Thomas Gale, hopefully we’ll be getting a lot more information about the game here.

Just found this snippet of news on BG. This is a post from Thomas Gale:

"Hello,

I’m working with Larry on War Room.

Mid-October is a very good guess for the KS launch. (not to be too cryptic)

To reiterate why there aren’t sculpts: The gameplay is designed entirely around the concept of Command Stacks. For example, various amounts of Infantry (yellow), Artillery (Blue), and Armor (green) are stacked and capped with an identifying command token. The command token has a flag and a number such as the 82nd. During play all nations secretly and simultaneously write down the ID of up to 9 commands and the chosen destination ID codes during the Strategic Planning phase. Air units are disks and Naval units are capsules.

The entire rules are available in a link if you sign up for the news Bulletin. I think someone posted them here on BGG too. They are slightly out of date but I will be uploading a revision soon.

As far as component materials, we considered the nice heft of wood, but we are currently are leaning heavily to custom plastic molded pieces so they stack nicely. They will be thicker than cardboard chits and units types can be identified by looking at the edge color. Also there are occasionally broken or malformations with wood pieces, which concerns me. Larry’s first prototype used stacked coins which was nice but metal is not really an option given there are many hundreds of units. Maybe someday we’ll offer the “Solid Gold” version.

Thomas Gale
Nightingale Games LLC"

Pretty cool, huh? :)