North & South designer thoughts

Hey check it out, I just released a game I designed, cool, right?

You can get it here, for the low, low price of nothing at all: https://www.wargamevault.com/product/507447/North–South?affiliate_id=4499523

I thought I’d take the time to write down some thoughts on why I did like I did when designing it, just so I can remember later.

Every year, I demo some kind of miniature war game at GothCon, probably the largest convention in Sweden, but I haven’t kept up with the numbers the last couple of years. Anyway, I always have some idea the day after the con ends, and I have to rush it the day before the con next year because I am nothing if not a master goddamn procrastinator.

With North & South, I wanted to something with few minis (lazy bastard) and really really REALLY quick to learn and play. Ideally, I as a GM would be practically unnecessary after a couple of turns. BUT! At the same time, I also wanted to include meaningful decisions and moving parts, so you don’t get bored during the hour that you play. Also, I wanted to play with something other than D6 because really, that dice is just everywhere.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the old North & South game, and I think the idea popped into my head when I looked through my comics and found some old issues of Les Tuniques Bleues.

Some horseys, some guys with guns and a couple of cannons on each side, and I’d be home! And another practical thing for a person like me is that a flat green playing area is actually good enough, and can claim to just “follow the established lore” of the computer game, because we all know that’s really really important, right?

Now the computer game is old, like it might even be older than some people that read this post (yeah right, I wish), it came out in 1989. Real-time strategy wasn’t that big back then as it later became, and the real time was partly solved by letting activated units just… keep moving until they walked off the board. So I wanted to emulate that in a reasonable way in the game. To create the RTS feel on a board without it feeling to forced, I decided to go with a compulsory move if a unit was active. If e.g. the infantry had moved in a previous turn, and you wanted to activate your cavalry, the infantry would press on. Straight on. Hopefully without walking to their deaths by falling down a ravine. And when they made a compulsory move, they couldn’t attack. And the cannon could not charge for a shot if you elected to select another unit if you’ve started charging it. Instead it would fire it’s shot straight forward, with no guidance from the player, maybe it’d hit something, maybe not.

Another thing I wanted to emulate was how it was pretty hard to kill your opponents troops with shooting, but pretty easy to do it with cavalry in melee. If you managed to get your cavalry that far.

But while I wanted to make the units feel different, I also didn’t want a whole bunch of different target numbers, no need for a table or chart filled with numbers that you needed to roll, so I decided on a straight TN needed for all units.

The separation between troops instead happened in the range of the guns, and the number of dice they attacked with.

For movement, I decided that no movement for infantry or cavalry could be made without going forward at least 1″. And no movement for the cannon could ever be forward, just up and down along the edge.

The restrictions resonated well with the players I had during the con, even though I had the regular min-maxers and cheaters that tried to break stuff, sometimes by just ignoring rules. They seemed like really fun opponents.

Right, a quick and dirty ramble on the thought process that went into creating the game. So far there has not been a need to iterate on the system, but if you, dear reader, have anything to add after checking it out, please reach out and I’ll take your thoughts into consideration. And if you download it and check it out, please leave a review! Thoughts are also more than welcome in the comment section.