Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 137

Finally, you have some oddballs that are still war games, but don't fit
into either of the categories above. One such game is Diplomacy , a game
with no randomness and rather simple gameplay mechanisms that is
played out over a course of many hours. Diplomacy is a strategic/tactical
game—it's played on a grid, but it's less about the mechanical taking of
area and more about forming alliances with other players and breaking
them at the worst possible times. Many have called Diplomacy a friend-
ship-killing game for this reason.
Why isn't chess a war game? Well, it is a game that at least loosely
simulates war, so it wouldn't be incorrect to call it a war game. How-
ever, we'll be addressing chess and other abstract games in the “Abstract
Games� section of this chapter.
Forget Simulation
If you want to learn how to make a better interactive simulation, it should
probably be clear by now that that's not what this topic is about. If you
want to make a game , then you should do everything in your power to
make sure you're doing the best job that you possibly can.
The first thing you have to do is put simulation as a distant second
priority to having great gameplay. The sad fact about reality is that reality
isn't always balanced. Real-life conflicts aren't always interesting to play
out, and real-life weapons and vehicles can be a pain (especially when
you make players deal with stuff like refueling and jammed weapons). At
the beginning of this topic I stated that games can occur naturally. While
this is true, I didn't say that great games occur naturally. Great games
almost always have to be created by a human mind that understands the
fundamentals of what makes a great game.
As I've said before, it seems extremely unlikely to me that you'd be
able to simulate something in a somewhat accurate way and not hurt
your gameplay. Further, even if you aren't hurting your gameplay with
a commitment to realism, you are certainly ignoring any nonrealistic
possibilities that might be interesting and open your game up. For this
reason I generally recommend that you start with an abstract design;
once you have great mechanisms in play, then you can try to fit a specific
theme over it if you like.
Think Outside the Genre
Many war games play out in a very similar way: you move your units, I
move mine, your units attack my units, mine attack yours, you capture
this tile, I capture that one. But there's such a huge range of possibilities
as to how you can express a war; you don't need to follow the patterns
that have been in use since the beginning of the 20th century.