WAR ROOM - New Larry Harris Game

@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? :)

Thanks Lozmoid.
Not talked in a while. I hope all is well.

Well, after test-playing War Room with Larry Harris and Tom I believe they are really onto something special here my fellow gamers! There are such neat little tidbits to this game I am so excited about playing it again! The simultaneous movement fixes the griping about waiting a while for your turn to come around. The turn order is random unless of course you bid oil which is the most precious of them all. Everyone bids if they want and who bids the most goes first and on down the line. Whomever doesn’t bid they are pulled at random to finish out the turn order. Then comes writing your orders down secretly with your partners and then whomever goes first like Germany, they hand over their clipboard and the enemy reads off your 9 moves in order. Any conflicting orders cancel movement of the stack or single unit. Then the next and so on until all orders are revealed and moved. Then it goes back to Germany to pick the battles in any order he wishes. The battles are really cool due to the fact that there is only 1 round of combat and if the area is left ‘embattled’ the original owner gets reduced production from the area. Battles always start out with air-to-air first if needed, then the person who has the most planes ‘pins’ the lesser players planes and then the player with the bigger air force in the area can either go all in against his opponents air force trying to destroy them or go in to strategic and bomb ground units. Then each player chooses an offensive or defensive stance for each ground unit and them roll a 12 sided die for each piece. No matter how much you have the max you can roll is 30 dice. The dice have colors on them to show what you can hit like yellow is infantry, blue is artillery, green is armor, red is strat bombers and green are fighters. The dice have 4 yellow spots, 3 blue spots, 2 green spots, 1 black spot, 1 white spot and 1 red spot on them. The black roll is a wild card roll. If you have air supremacy it can hit any ground unit and the white roll you can only hit a unit that is damaged and move it to the dead pile. If you roll 4 yellow dice depending on what stance your opponent took you move 1 infantry unit over to damaged in defensive mode or if he was in offensive mode one hit means he goes to the eliminated pile and so on. After the Battle is over if you have damaged units you can spend some of your resources to refit and repair them and ready for the next move. There are convoy zones to hit, and naval battles to fight too! The yellow spots on the die are for submarines, blue for cruisers, green for aircraft carriers and red for battleships. If you go into any battle and you don’t have combined arms the player that has units firing and you don’t of any class then they roll 1 more die for each unit they have. But you have to have no units against them for this advantage like the attacker has artillery and you don’t. The resource areas of the Middle East and Romania and Southern Russia become focal points due to the precious oil now. Everything you build costs at least 1 oil to build except infantry. Each turn has its steps and here they are, 1. Direct National Economy 2. Strategic Planning 3. Movement Operations 4. Combat Operations in stages like set-up on the battle board, the Battle, Raids as Strategic bombing or convoys or starting which can depend on what you roll? Even damaging things being built or infrastructure or units in the area. Really cool hitting and destroying ships being built and placed at the start of the turn or hitting the natural resources of the territory you hit. Then battle debrief which means refit and repairs,  assigning stress and medals, stress in this game stands for morale loss for losing a capital ship or losing important territories, invading neutrals and such. Medals are assigned to the country who caused the stress or morale. Check for lost troop transports which means if you were trying amphibious invasion and lost the sea battle and only have loaded transports they were sunk and lost so be overly protective! Exchange territory card if you won the Battle Place your countries marker to claim your prize! Each battle is marked by a ‘hot-spot’ marker and if the area is still occupied then the marker is flipped over to the embattled side or removed if one side eliminated. 5a. Land planes b. Deploy units that were being built that turn that weren’t lost due to bombing or loss of battle. C. Rearrange command tokens which means each stack or a lone unit will have a command token with a number on it. When you write your orders like 72 token moves from b-3 to b-4 or so on. In the rearrange tokens you can combine units or switch numbers as long as you don’t go over 8 blocks or units under each command token including air! 6. Morale check. The medals you obtain relieve stress which contributes to low morale. Each stress token earned during the turn will cost that country a resource for each stress token removed! 5 civilian resources or 1 medal reduces the stress track by 1. There are levels of stress zone penalties which are as follows, white zone-no penalty, blue threshold-Civil unrest which means you lose resources of your choice up to the value of your capital, yellow zone which means disrupted supply lines and this will cost you 3 of your 9 moves down to only 6 moves each turn till you fix the stress. The orange zone means dysfunctional rails and ports which means that all ports and rails are unusable to you and your allies including captured territories! Red zone means economic collapse which means NO new resources are added to your track until resolved. Gray zone means Mass Desertion which means for every stress token accumulated the controlling player eliminates 1 unit of his choice! 7. Production which means add your current resources to your resource board. You can trade with neutrals that you are physically next to. Purchase units, reveal production and update your resource board. Then transfer new units to industries on the board. Each area that has a factory on it can only produce as many units as the factory has smokestack. When placed in the production areas, yes, even embattled areas put a production marker on top of them and they won’t be deployed until step refit and deploy next turn. And also repair infrastructure during this step too. The game is playable by 2 to 6 players which control the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) and the Allies (United States, British Commonwealth, and USSR). The victory conditions are as follows; the Axis must capture 2 of the Allied capitals and the Allies capture Greater Germany and Japan. There are also smaller scenarios for groups that don’t have the time for the full campaign as just Europe, Pacific, Eastern Front. There are also optional rules when players get better acquainted with the basic game. In case you haven’t seen the board it is round and it is looking down from the north Pole in the middle where the turn order and stress markers are kept. My opinion is that all of us will still play Axis and Allies but everyone SHOULD give this game a try as I can’t wait to play it again! Next play-test of War Room will be Sunday, September. 10th at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Can’t wait! This is the total game for gamers who like chits or figures! It has everything that some of us have complained about for years! Larry said that he has been developing and fine tuning this game for 5 years and it shows my fellow A & A’ers! It is nicely polished! A must-buy on Kickstarter in the fall! There is so much I didn’t cover so if there are any questions please ask? Thanks!

The War Room WWII Strategic Game

Hi, my name is Joe and just joined the main play test group for the new game “The War Room” designed by Larry Harris. The game is great fun to play and already would with a choice of playing a Axis & Allied Game or The War Room Game I would pick the War Room, but I do not loose any of my love for A & A games. The War Room Game is slightly more complicated than a A & A Game but in the same ball park and if you can play a A & A game you would have no problem playing The War Room Game! Below will be paragraphs on different parts of the game.

The game is a great land territory and sea zone strategic level game that basically dose set you up in the historical strategic positing that all the major WWII powers were in at the start of the spring of 1942. Then lets see how good you can do! The economic system is great using major strategic resources of Oil, Iron and Other Resources in different amounts of different types to build the game combat units called tokens, etc… This is all kept track by a simple peg board system and obtaining the resources from simple card system with cards representing each land territory controlled by a power. No complicated charts here!

The Plastic Combat Tokens are great in the game squares for Army, circles for Air Force and ovals for Naval with pictures each type of combat unit on it and each a different color from the other. The same 3 colors used for each Army and Naval and 2 of the colors for Air Force. The play test games tokens only have the combat units pictures on the top with the game production units will also have them on the sides of the tokens so when you look at the stacks you will see what type combat unit it is along with its own color. With the games system of using stacks of combat tokens to move around and conduct combat with, it would be impossible to use A & A type plastic combat units. Just would not work!

Strategic Planning in the game is like all the players of one side being a GHQ and planning the over all strategic planing for that turn in the game then all the players go off and become basically the field commanders of Armies, Navies and Air Forces using a very simple planning sheet with simple commands to try and reach the set up strategic goals of their side. Then there is a simple way of determining the order of combat movement which is different almost every round of play in the game which leads to a joint combat of all nations attacking the other side in a game. The combat movement system in the game with what is call pinning or other option canceling commands really sets up as though a large WWII battle going on and movement of the enemy caused a combat plan to be dropped or to be only partially successful which then leaves your side then having to work out a strategy to the new strategic situation or your side ended up doing this to the other. This is all done without complicated charts and die roll modifiers with the game mechanics just simply stepping you through it. Just can say one word - Great!

When it comes to combat the d12 die combat system works by using a color system with odds that yellow colored tokens would be hit the most followed by blue then red the least which totally makes sense by which type units are what colored tokens instead of using numbers with calculations. It is great works the same as using numbers with the same odds but is much easer and faster to use. Then you use a combat card called a Battle Status Board that you place Combat Tokens on that just by simply following the combat rules per dice rolled steps you through damage losses with at the end of combat possible repairs or possible losses. All of this achieved without having to use charts and die roll modifiers but coming up with basically the same results. Just can say one word - Great!

Strategic Bombing rules are great when you strategic bomb you actually take out Army, Navy and Airforce Combat Tokens being built or in the case of Infantry Tokens being formed. This now puts you into planning what you would like to strategic bomb to hurt the enemy at what he is hurting you with and working on taking out those Combat Tokens that are causing your side problems so they do not reach the front line. All units being built at Land Territories with Factories start Combat Token Production that remains under production for a game turn always leaving it vulnerable to being strategically bombed. To myself it is the best Strategic Bombing System I have ever used in a Land Territory / Sea Zone type game.

I could go on but have only play tested this Great game that Larry Harris has designed once and need to play more and will update all later with more what I believe will be more great descriptions of a great game.

I am a avid A & A war game player but play many other types of war games other more complicated area plus hex games with counters with the ones being counters with pictures on them that I like best and dabble in miniature war games at times. The War Room Game is a game where A & A War Game Players can meet all of those Grognard War Game Players that do not play A & A type games and duke it out and have fun! To the Grognard War Game Players - the standard game has enough in it historically to add with the great game mechanics that I assure you you will enjoy this game! Plus it will set you up for future expansion modules for the game which will bring in even more history with just more easy rules without all those charts and die roll modifiers with basically the same results faster and easier.

Joe