I've been working a lot of Split Second lately. It's a solitaire card-driven wargame played using a clock to add pressure to players, meant to emulate action like the Air France 8969 raid, the Munich Crisis, or the Rainbow Six games (the early ones, anyway). Playing this game at all requires scenarios that give the player a layout of challenges that are presented to them, and each scenario presents different mechanical obstacles the player has to overcome with planning before and during the game. There's going to be twenty scenarios in the game. It's been a lot of work to test them, but also rewarding. It's also made me think back on some wargaming I've done, both design-wise and as a player, and made me reflect on the fact that scenario design is an under-discussed aspect of wargames but is, in fact, the beating heart that drives the whole experience. It also separates good games from bad games, and a quality scenario is responsible for the the highest points of my wargaming career in all instances.
In a sense, I think that designing scenarios is probably one of the best ways to get into game design altogether. Last week's goals:
Split Second
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