RESEARCHING A VALIANT DEFENCE

We explore the world of solo gaming one move at a time This month: the research and design process for solitaire wargames

I’m frequently ask by players of my Valiant Defense series of solitaire wargames what books they should read to gain a better understanding of the represented conflicts. To help frame my response, it might be helpful to have a bit of background on my origin as a game designer.

I grew up as an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, not a board gamer. I stuck with

D&D until I got married and had children in the mid-to-late 2000s, which is when I transitioned to playing board games. In 2014, when I moved from the US to Cambridge in the UK, I joined a play-test group that included some fantastic designers. With their guidance and mentorship, I began to see my designs turn into a reality. For the first few years, I really didn’t have a design philosophy. Sometimes I would start with a theme I liked. Other times I would work on joint designs that were based on mechanisms. However, I slowly started narrowing down the concepts I was most passionate about: historical games at the personal scale, preferably on a relatively obscure topic.

My first exploration of solitaire wargame design came in 2015, when I created Castle Itter for a Board Game Geek competition. I felt like the story of the Battle of Castle Itter naturally lent itself to a solitaire game, with the player taking on the role of the castle’s defenders. In the Battle of Castle Itter, Americans, German Wehrmacht, an SS officer, French prisoners who had previously served as generals and heads of state, and Austrian resistance fighters all worked together to defend a castle against SS attackers – you can’t make this stuff up!

Castle Itter was also the first time I

undertook an extensive research effort as part of the game design process. This process has evolved, but the general flow is that once I’ve decided on a topic, I conduct about six months to a year of research, identifying the critical elements of the conflict I want the game to evoke. I then model those specific elements – my goal is not to create a simulation of the conflict, but rather to identify the elements of the conflict, especially at the personal level, that serve as touchstones. Those key elements are what I try to convey in the game design. Once the model is complete, I craft the game’s design in such a way to stress those key elements. In the case of Castle Itter, the key element I wanted to convey was the incredible diversity of the defenders and the pivotal role that a single American tank — Besotten Jenny — played in the defense of the castle.

After Castle Itter was designed, I looked for a follow-up project, which became Pavlov’s House – the defense of an apartment building during the Battle of Stalingrad. Ostensibly this was to be another game about the tactical defense of a strongpoint, but my research proved otherwise. What I discovered was that the successful defense of Pavlov’s House required the coordinated efforts of hundred of people all throughout Stalingrad. These sorts of research discoveries would continue to drive my solitaire historical game designs. For Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms, which is about the defense of a Polish post office in the free city of Danzig on the first day of

WW2, I traveled to Gdansk (modern day Danzig) and met with my partner on the project (Michael Kochman) to conduct the initial research in person.

For By Stealth and Sea, which is about Italian human torpedo operators during the Second World War, I teamed up with Italian military history expert Nicola Saggini. In each of these two instances — Soldiers in Postmen’s Uniforms and By Stealth and Sea — there was a dearth of English language source material, which made it necessary to partner with a native language historical expert for the research process. Most recently, I’ve been working on Lanzerath Ridge, which is about a skirmish on the first morning of the Battle of the Bulge in which an American intelligence and reconnaissance platoon holds out for an entire days against a German paratrooper battalion — 20 men against 500. The design for Lanzerath Ridge, more than any other game I’ve designed, was informed by the topography of the battle, which is why I was so happy to team with Nils Johannson on the design. Nils is not only a brilliant artist and graphic designer, but he is an expert in GIS (or geographic information systems). Through our research, we ensured that the impact of the topography was captured in the game.

While the overarching research process for my historical solitaire games has generally been consistent over the years, each game has brought its own discoveries and challenges. The two things I’ve come to learn is that I should never go into the research process with preconceived notions about the conflicts, and I should always approach them with an immensely talented partner.

I’ve chosen three of my games — Castle Itter, Pavlov’s House, and Lanzerath Ridge — and paired them with my top recommended reading for each game. However, it’s worth noting that I always write companion guides for my games (usually about 40 - 50 pages in length), which provide historical context and design notes. These companion guides include a comprehensive list of sources I consulted during the design process if you’re interested in even more background material.