Re: Making my own WW1 game…
Hey, y’all. I was wondering how y’all made games, like this one. Please reply if you have an answer!
My idea for an Axis and Allies Game
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I won’t go too in-depth with my idea, however I had a cool idea for a Global War 1936 sized Axis and Allies game.
I name it, “Fall of the 20th Century”.
What is it you may be wondering? Fall of the 20th Century would be an Axis and Allies like game that is NOT intended to be completed in a day, let alone a few hours. Fall of the 20th Century would encompass the entire 20th Century (Duh) and would begin in the year 1900. The game will last 200 turns until the year 2000 (1 year for every 2 turns) or until only 1 alliance is left. YOU shape how history crumbles. In turn 1, ALL independent countries that existed will be a political power. All alliances that existed will be an entire team, however you’re able to recruit powers into your team (or even make your own faction). Fall of the 20th Century (FotTC) will let you make even more decisions than even Global War 1936. If you have any questions, I would be MORE than willing to answer them.
This is NOT an actual game being in production, its just an idea.
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This sounds interesting. How far along with this idea are you? Do you have a map? How many players are you designing around? Since this is designed to be a long-term project kind of game, how do you plan to account for tear-down and re-set-up. There were a lot of countries in 2000 that were colonies under someone else’s thumb in 1901, how do you plan to account for the decolonization process that happened after World War II?
Just a couple questions… :evil:
-Midnight_Reaper
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Just a couple of questions I would DELIGHTED to answer.
-It was a new idea that sparked into my head not even a week ago.
-There is no map, as that would require weeks to create with stupid amounts tweaking a balancing
-There would be a maximum of as many countries that existed in the year 1900
-Its not clear how setting up and cleaning would work as I don’t have the slightest idea as to what the game would look like
-Yes while in OUR timeline many colonies became independent, this game doesn’t follow any historical path unless you manually choose to. Just because India is a country now, that doesn’t mean it HAS to be in FotTC. Nothing is required, it is not just a power you control. It is YOUR country. You aren’t Woodrow Wilson or FDR, you are the head of state. -
Just a couple of questions I would DELIGHTED to answer.
-It was a new idea that sparked into my head not even a week ago.Cool. Thanks for sharing, then.
-There is no map, as that would require weeks to create with stupid amounts tweaking a balancing
Creating your own take on world geography as a playing surface isn’t a bad place to start. But this is just one man’s opinion.
-There would be a maximum of as many countries that existed in the year 1900
Wikipedia says that on January 1, 1900, there were 78 independent nations in the world. While not all 78 were still independent on December 31, 1900, most were. I suspect that you plan to go for the bigger fish out of that 78, which is fine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_1900
-Its not clear how setting up and cleaning would work as I don’t have the slightest idea as to what the game would look like
Fair enough. While perhaps you might put that on your “to-do” list for planning your variant, that is again just my opinion.
-Yes while in OUR timeline many colonies became independent, this game doesn’t follow any historical path unless you manually choose to. Just because India is a country now, that doesn’t mean it HAS to be in FotTC. Nothing is required, it is not just a power you control. It is YOUR country. You aren’t Woodrow Wilson or FDR, you are the head of state.
You do realize that both Wilson and Roosevelt were the heads of state for the United States of America, during the time periods when they were the President of the United States, do you not? I suspect that you are trying to tell me that you would be playing an Emperor of (pick your country), with unlimited power to decide the fate of your nation. Which is usually how these types of games go.
As for decolonization, the majority of decolonization started as insurgencies / freedom fighter actions taken by the locals in order to reclaim their sovereignty from their colonial masters. India, Ireland, Algeria, Malaysia, almost all of South America, and many other nations - the reason they are independent nations today is because they revolted and overthrew their masters. Even the United States of America is in the boat of having had a successful colonial revolt.
All of that to say: you don’t have to have a peaceful process of decolonization in your game. But if you don’t account for the various insurgencies and revolts that took place from 1900 to 2000, then your game will not be very historically accurate. And if your goal is not historical accuracy and is instead just Winner-Take-All on a global stage with a 1900 start date and technology set, that’s fine as well.
Just expect others to pick up what I’m laying down and complain about it if you don’t mention it in your rule book.
My 2 IPCs,
-Midnight_Reaper
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I guess I should elaborate a bit on the “Head of State” bit. Its borderline role-play. Lets say my name is John Smith. If I play as the U.S during WW1 (Or whatever war is created), I would be “John Smith POTUS” and not “Woodrow Wilson POTUS”. If I’m playing as Germany in WW1, I would be “Kaiser John Smith the I” and not “Kaiser Wilhelm II”. Its my fault for not explaining enough. Of course such a thing doesn’t make sense realistically as 1: A POTUS can only serve for 8 years and 2: Someone would likely not live that long, however its just a game, an expansive board game where you role play as the head of state.
I have plenty more of ideas that could clear up a few questions if you’d like to read. I’ve been meaning to bounce these ideas off of someone for a while. -
For whatever it’s worth, here are a few thoughts on the game concept that’s being proposed.
The concept is ambitious, and it would no doubt appeal to players who enjoy free-for-all A&A variants in which all the players play against each other; such variants don’t appeal to me personally, but that’s just my own taste, and the free-for-all idea has certainly been mentioned enough in previous threads on this forum to indicate that some people do indeed find such variations enjoyable.
My main comments aren’t about the free-for-all element but about something else. I initially didn’t know how best to explain those points, but I eventually thought of doing so by making reference to two works of science-fiction which provide useful parallels: Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 future-history novel “Last and First Men”, and the various mirror-universe episodes of the Star Trek franchise.
The game, as described in AandAClassicDude’s posts, would start in the year 1900 and would run until the year 2000. If I understand the concept correctly, the world depicted at the start of the game would correspond to the world as it existed in 1900 in terms of its borders, in terms of the major and minor powers of the time, in terms (presumably) of its background rulers and politicians, and in terms of its military technology. As a starting point, this is fine. What I’m wondering is: as the game progresses over the course of a century, to what extent do these things remain the same and to what extent do they change? And as far as the changes go, to what extent do they deviate from the course of real history and to what extent do they correspond to what actually happened in the real world? And if they do correspond to what actually happened in the real world, what makes them (in terms of the game’s fictional scenario) correspond to it?
To expand on that last point, here’s one specific example. WWII happened (at least in its recognizable form) to a large extent because of the outcome of WWI, which among other things led to rise of the Nazi party during the interwar years. If, let’s say, a game which is played starting in 1900 happens to result in a WWI whose outcome is different from the historical one, or happens to result in WWI not happening at all, how does WWII end up happening in a recognizable form? Does WWII happen at all? Does it happen in a radically different form? What causes it to happen?
As far as I can tell, there are two basic possible answers to the above questions, and in my opinion each one is problematic in its own way. The first possible answer is that the game makes no attempt to replicate real history – meaning that the further away it gets from its 1900 starting date, the more it veers into the realm of historical fantasy. Personally, I wouldn’t find that appealing…and this is where Olaf Stapledon’s novel comes in. I read it a long time ago, and as I recall it starts out in a recognizable version of the late 1920s. From that point onward, however, the first chapter or so provides a future history of how a series of political and military crises plunge the world into a global war then ends up destroying most of civilization. Reading it from the perspective of the 1990s (of thereabouts), I found this part of the novel to be ridiculously unconvincing, antiquated and naive. It probably didn’t sound that way in 1930, but my point is that I was reading it from a late-20th-century perspective, not a mid-20th-century one. So I’d probably have trouble relating to a fictional game history of the 20th century extrapolated from the world as it existed in 1900.
The second possible answer is that the game scenario somehow makes the game stick more or less to the actual course of the 20th century (for example: WWI followed by WWII followed by the Cold War), for the sake of recognisability. That would solve one problem, but it would introduce a new one: providing a credible explanation for how the game manages to stick to the actual course of history, regardless of what the players do. And that’s where Star Trek’s mirror universe comes in. Several Star Trek series have had episodes set in that mirror universe, covering a span of about two centuries. What’s (in my opinion) completely non-credible about those episodes is the fact that, no matter which series is involved, no matter what century it’s set in, and no matter how radically that universe differs from the normal Trek universe in terms of its history, those episodes invariably include characters who are exact (though inverted) counterparts to the ones on the regular show. This perpetual correspondence across the centuries is never explained – or at least not in the shows themselves, though perhaps the novels have tried to rationalize it in some manner. Perhaps such an explanation could be devised for the game scenario in order to make it convincing; offhand, this would suggest a fair amount of game scripting, which actually runs counter to the concept of the game being a free-for-all (unless I’ve completely misunderstood it).
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Heya CWO Marc, thanks for giving me your perspective. I would say FotTC would fall into the first point you made, where at first the year 1900 is recognizable, but some year like 1990 would look drastically different.
I’d like to answer the main question. The ONLY way the game would follow the same path of our history is if all the game’s players manually decide to follow such a route. Just because its the year 1900, that doesn’t mean all consecutive wars that happened in our world will happen exactly, if at all. If the players explore the early 1900’s separate to how the countries really did in our timeline, wars can both be avoided and arise. WW1 will never happen unless the players choose to. WW1 could still happen, but whatever comes after can also be different based upon how player do it. It can also come in many different shapes and forms. The location, time frame, and participating powers can all vary from large to small. This game is meant to be purely customizable and unless you choose to go a certain route with your country, nothing will happen thats the same.
Yes, you are correct in saying that the world depicted at the start of the game would correspond to the world as it existed in 1900 in terms of its borders, in terms of the major and minor powers of the time, in terms (presumably) of its background rulers and politicians, and in terms of its military technology." The game will diverge from history if you choose to, and it will follow history if you choose to. This (in my opinion) is the fun of the game. Imaging “Hey what would happen if x country did y during z?” and being able to formulate some sort of idea. Even writing your own history by playing this game is fun. I understand that the main issue with following this route is both hard to relate, and difficult to imagine, however at the end of the day its just a fun board game. I prioritized how fun the game is over historical accuracy and believability. After all, by allowing any player to do what they want, I’ve already thrown all realism out the window.
I hope I both cleared up some questions, and clarified how I’m imagining it. I’d love for you to read my mind so that you get a full understanding of what I’m trying to say. If you’re still confused, I would be more than willing to continue explaining.
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Thanks for the extra information you provided; it does indeed give me a much clearer picture of what you have in mind, and I can’t think of any additional questions to ask. It sounds to me as if what you have in mind is neither a game that’s designed to replicate the historical course of the 20th century nor designed to automatically produce a fantasy alternate version of the 20th century, but rather a very generic gaming system that offers the players various tools to use but provides little or no structure on how to use them. An analogy would be to compare a “structured” box of Lego plastic bricks (say, for example, all the specific bricks that a kid needs to build a specific object, such as a particular Star Wars spaceship) and an unstructured box that provides a couple of hundred of miscellaneous Lego bricks and leaves it up to the kid to decide what to do with them. This unstructured approach to the game you’re describing has the advantage of maximum flexibility, but it potentially has the drawback of lacking focus; it would probably appeal to players who are comfortable with providing their own game scenario and sustaining it through the 200 rounds of play you’ve mentioned, but it would probably not be of interest to players who prefer games which are specifically themed around the details of a particular war such as WWII.
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This sounds incredibly interesting to me. I am all about flexibility in games as it keeps you interested in them. That is what I am attempting with my Global variant map and house rules with it. Except I am only doing WWII as it is what I have available, and due to limited funds and limited experience I am not willing to undertake something like this on my own… yet. But this sounds incredibly interesting. If there is anything I can do to help out let me know. Assuming this goes beyond an idea