Designing World at War

My apologies to my three non-gaming readers. While the following was a blast to write, and will make good reading for my war gaming friends, it’ll probably put you to sleep. Sorry, but here goes.

Designing World at War

A confluence of ideas and events lead to the birthing of World at War (WaW). The spark was no doubt Harold Coyle and his seminal novel, Team Yankee. In the midst of rereading the book for the uncounted time, I decided to design a game that would let me create and fight my own Third World War. I liked Coyle's book, but wanted a different setting. Coyle, like so many people I have met since I designed Eisenbach Gap, tended to minimize the Soviet's combat effectiveness. I wanted to treat them a more fairly. I also wanted a story that didn't completely follow the Third World War universes that had gone before. Hence, England drops out of the war, South Korea invades and conquers the North, Japan threatens to retaliate, Romania secedes from the Warsaw Pact, and the Pope calls the 11th Crusade to eradicate the evil that brews in Wallachia.

Great fun, but critics tend to denigrate my choices as wholly improbable. I ask the denigrators (sic) if two years ago they would have believed America would supply Al Qaeda with small arms to topple an established and stable regime. That's what is happening in Syria.

Of course there is the whole paranormal aspect to the World at War fiction. Some people love it, some don’t. To me it adds a twist that sets the game apart from everything else in the genre. But enough with the universe, what about the system?

I wanted WaW to accurately, but not obsessively, detail the combatants. And I wanted to do that without horrendously tilting combat factors in the favor of NATO. I’m a huge fan of the original Panzer Leader family, but one thing that bugged me about the game system was the combat factors in the Arab Israeli Wars game. For example, the cannon on a Centurion, with its attack factor (AF) of 25, is twice as powerful as a platoon of T-62 tanks, with their 14 AF. That just doesn’t feel right to me. 

Training, in addition to their junior officer’s initiative, makes the NATO forces better than most of their Soviet counterparts. At least that’s what we've been told. I've met Russians who would disagree, but I digress. So I wanted to create a method that would demonstrate that initiative, something that would let NATO move and fight at a faster pace than the Warsaw Pact units.

I guess I could have designed a sequence of play that would have given them that advantage, but I’m a big believer in the chaos surrounding war. I wanted NATO to act more frequently on average, but not always. Those ideas birthed WaW chit draw system.

How about all those numbers on the counters? Well, I have my reasons for them also. Stay tuned and I’ll share them with you.

See you tomorrow.