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| Steve Raszewski |
Steve Raszewski pictured to the left won the third annual Battlegroup™
Championship at the World Boardgaming Championships. Always in the finals of
the competition, this year Steve prevailed against previous year's champions
and finalists alike. During the 2009 WBC we are changing the format to full
game single elimination play. We expect the change in game format to increase
the fleet management required to make join the finalist in 2009.
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| Patrick Mirk |
The 2008 Brawling Battleships Steel™
championship game saw Pat Mirk – the only tournament recipient of the legendary
curse of Mata Hari – win the championship. In 2007, Patrick Mirk -- a veteran
WBC player – was tapped by an almost impossible play by Andrew Chitwood pulled
three event cards, both Mata Hari cards (a spy card that lets you draw two
cards from an opponent's hand) and the Radio Intercept card that lets you draw
two cards from the discard pile. Andrew Chitwood the youngest player ever to
make the Final decided to steal two of Pat Mirk's cards, who was sitting
immediately to his left, normally the play is better against players to the
right, but since he needed a ride home he decided not to play Mata Hari on his
stepfather Stephen Shedden, who had also qualified for the Final in a separate
heat. Everyone at the table was surprised though when Andrew played the second
Mata Hari on Mirk reducing him to two cards.
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| Debbie at NashCon |
When Andrew then played the Radio Intercept card and picked up both Mata Hari
cards from the discard pile everyone at the table immediately encouraged him to
play the third spy on Mirk to let him have the distinct honor of being the sole
recipient of Mata Hari's curse. For his trouble Pat received a nice prize to
commemorate the notoriety.
We even made our usual appearance at NashCon in 2008. If you
host a regional convention and would like us to exhibit and run events please
contact us at, sales@lostbattalion.com and we will
be quite likely to say yes in 2009. For example, Cold Wars and Little Wars will
both see us in attendance and that is just the start. We will also attend
NashCon, Historicon, the World Boardgame Championship and Fall In. First on the
list is Little Wars where we will host a 12 player Napoleon's Battles™, third
edition event Friday night and a "Task Forces at War" Tournament on Sunday
morning.
By S. Craig Taylor, Jr.
Those who have never augmented their income from panhandling by
working at a game company have no conception of how much game designs and
components can be driven by extraneous factors. What gets published and the
final format in print is often quite different from the original intentions,
even if the underlying game mechanics remain unchanged. As I mentioned in the
earlier article, the new Yaquinto Publications company wanted to get six new
games published in time for the 1979 ORIGINS Gaming Convention that summer.
That was obviously a lot of work and my initial mission was to line up six
promising-looking games.
As an initial lineup, I had Mike Matheny's (who had been hired
as a full-time designer) BEASTLORD, John Fuseler's IRONCLADS
(which won the 1979 Game of the Year), Jim Day's PANZER, Steve
Peek's STARFALL and TIMEWAR and Mike
Hemphill's ULTIMATUM. Since I was the developer on PANZER
and had an oversight hand in almost all the rest, I was not assigned a game to
design – it was felt that I already had enough to do (a state of affairs that
did not last long). One of Yaquinto Publication's standard production processes
was to "gang" the game components. For example, we could "gang" six of our
full-size counter sheets on one sheet of paper- they might all end up being cut
on different dies but they could be printed and laminated (the printed paper
glued to chipboard) at one time which yielded a considerable savings (we did
everything in-house except for die-cutting). Similarly, our outside box maker
didn't care what was printed on the box wraps (we printed them two-up per sheet
of paper in-house), only that they had to set their box-making machine to only
one size and then run through however many covers we sent him – the fewer the
different setup costs and the more boxes made from one setup, the cheaper the
cost per box. Quantity also lowers cost per unit and we typically printed 5,000
each of the boxed games and 10,000 each of the "Album Games" whenever we needed
them. After a period of play testing, working on components and working out our
basic business processes we realized a shortfall. We had so many counter sheets
for the six games that we had an overrun onto a second sheet. As this would
waste paper and chipboard, we needed some additional games that required
additional die-cut units. Also, it was decided that I had to be the one to do
the two extra games (I think this vote happened at a meeting while I made a
trip to the little boy's room).
Quality games that could be finished
quickly were urgently needed. I decided that one of these could be CV.
I had researched the Midway campaign two years earlier when working on the
popular FLATTOP at Battleline but did not use it because it
required a different and equally large mapboard. I knew the basic game
mechanics worked, so the game, once some prototypes were put together, would
require only play testing for balance. Lots of counters there but that second
sheet still had blank spots. I had once read a book about a prototype war game
developed during World War II (sorry I remember no title or author) where the
units were all of one type but their strengths varied with the terrain. I had
done a litle work on the idea but finally put it away as unpromising. Now I
decided to pull it out and dust it off. BATTLE started life at
Yaquinto as MANEUVER and was intended as no more than an
introductory game – sort of a basic TACTICS II-type of game
for newcomers to our line. Actually, all this still left one slot on that
second sheet and we ended up printing an extra copy of PANZER's
movable terrain sheet there. At various conventions I had asked people about
the idea of movable terrain pieces that would fit PANZERBLITZ size
hexes. They all thought it was a great idea but, in the upshoot we only sold
about 400 of those extra sheets (out of 5,000 printed)! Back then, I didn't
care - at least it filled that last slot.
Anyway, to finally start to concentrate on BATTLE,
which is supposedly the subject of this essay, in the ensuing weeks, I made
various changes as play testing progressed and it seemed to be turning into an
excellent game. I was spending a lot of time working up the various units in
the game's many time periods, testing them and devising a system for
determining point values that worked with all the units. It was not unusual for
some minor change to be made with each successive playing. The thing I most
noticed about the game was that it was popular with some of my most hard-core
war gaming play testers – not just the family game crowd I had expected.
After all these years, I don't remember exactly when MANEUVER
became BATTLE or why. In fact, if you have a first edition of
the game, there are some typos where the game is actually called MANEUVER
– I can't believe I missed these mistakes and suspect somebody in the art
department just didn't feel like making some marked changes. The name change
just sort of happened as we entered May or June of 1979. At first it was BATTLE:
The Game of Maneuver and then, all of a sudden we were officially
calling it BATTLE: The Game of Generals and had taken out some
preliminary print advertisements on all eight of the games.
Sometime later, after we had printed a lot of the components,
Steve got a call from a Milton Bradley lawyer. Even though we were weeks ahead
of them in the production cycle and the Game of Generals was
only a subtitle, he announced that they were doing something called THE
GAME OF GENERALS due out that fall (I admit that from that day to
this, I have never seen one of these games) and demanded that we change the
title or get tied up in court forever. At that point, the title and subtitle
was already printed on most of the BATTLE components and I
think that Bob Yaquinto, who had the resources, might have been willing to
fight them in court if they had maintained their demands. They agreed we could
sell through the first printing and change the title after that, so it wasn't
too bad, just a pain in the neck and I shed no tears when Milton Bradley later
went under and became part of Hasbro. All later printings call it BATTLE:
The Game of Strategy but, to be honest, there are times when I
didn't know what to call it.
So, what was the upshoot of all this hard work and long hours
to get an eighth game into print? What we had on our hands was the worst seller
of our original eight games. By the time we sold out of the last boxed game, I
had modified the game to fit into our new "Album Game" concept and it was
officially BATTLE: The Game of Strategy, an "Album Game", for
the rest of its sales life at Yaquinto. BATTLE sold more in the new format in
1980 than the boxed version had in 1979 but still got little respect. I ran a
BATTLE tournament at LITTLE WARS in Chicago in 1980 and only one contestant
appeared. He asked, "Does this mean I automatically win the prize?" I growled
back, "Only after you beat me." It took him four tries but I made him earn it.
You get your fun where you find it!
The turning point for BATTLE came after we
hired Bud Dunhauer to tour the country putting on shows for Yaquinto Games at
various hobby shops and conventions along the way. It turned out that BATTLE
was Bud's favorite game and he started issuing a challenge: "Anyone who can
beat me gets one each of every game in the Yaquinto line." This was many
hundreds of dollars worth of games in early 1980s dollars. No one ever
collected and Bud had a record of something like 800-0 when playing BATTLE for
these stakes (to be honest, I don't know if he ever lost – he certainly used to
wipe up the floor with this poor, put-upon designer).
And, so it came to be, that BATTLE, unlike any
other game I have ever worked on, sold more every year than it had the previous
year until Yaquinto closed its doors in 1984. The conventional wisdom then was
that "It's easy to learn but hard to master". At least, we never again
sponsered any one player tournaments.
Since nothing had happened with BATTLE since
1984, that pretty much brings the story up to 2006. I acquired the rights to my
old Yaquinto titles. BATTLE: The American Civil War was the first Yaquinto game
republished at Lost Battalion Games. Originally, we had decided to concentrate
on just the Civil War period as we wished to use sharp-looking wooden pieces
specific to the period and I was going to include a number of different card
stock battlefield maps instead of the blank map with movable terrain pieces
included in the original Yaquinto version. Jeff Billings suggested we could use
some of the same technology used to produce the LOST
BATTALION TERRAIN TILES™ and came up with the
idea of the innovative "battlefield tiles". After some experimentation and play
tests, we went to print with the whole system. Since then, I sold my position
with Lost Battalion Games in early 2007 and had little further contact with the
company for about nine months while I worked as a contract designer at a
computer game company on a training game for the United States Air Force. I
have since linked back up with LBG as an independent outside designer, working
especially hard on a revision of the
NAPOLEON'S BATTLES™ miniatures rules. I've also
been requested as a pen for hire to provide historical articles for the
company, so, once again, you'll be seeing quite a bit of me at LBG. Also, there
was enough interest in the BATTLE system to allow me to expand
my favorite diceless game system into the Napoleonic era.
Compared to BATTLE™: The American
Civil War, BATTLE™:
The Napoleonic Wars is larger and more expensive
(oh, my), primarily because of the many more wooden pieces required to
represent the five different major power Napoleonic armies (Austria, Britain,
France, Prussia and Russia) in all their glorious uniforms and the need for
twice as many battlefield tiles requred to assemble the game's many different
battlefields. In the original, Yaquinto version, the various armies were more
generic. The units assigned to the various armies is a new feature with the
Lost Battalion Games version; much more specific than in the original Yaquinto
version. As in the American Civil War version, some units may be moved at
various speeds depending on their being adjacent or not to enemy units during
the move. Infantry units also use varying combat values if attacked only by a
cavalry unit or units to reflect the ability of the historical infantry to form
"square formations". Combat values also vary if units are attacked by artillery
and cavalry and/or infantry units to reflect the "combined arms" aspect of
Napoleonic tactics. New features in the Napoleonic Wars version that were not
in the Yaquinto version or in the LBG American Civil War version of BATTLE
include an ability to balance games on battlefields that are not "mirror
images", six historical battle scenarios (Austerlitz, Eylau, Ligny, Marengo,
Salamaca and Waterloo) and a campaign game that can be used to link together
individual battles.
Publisher's Corner
