Chris Crawford on Game Design

Explain the History

Since this was a “wargame for the rest of us,” I had to assume that many of its players would be non-wargamers who probably weren't familiar with the details of the Battle of the Bulge. I wanted to take the opportunity to teach these people about the realities of the battle, and I wanted to cover every aspect of it: the technical factors, the strategy and tactics, and the human side as well. I came up with a system using some 50 different topics. Each topic had two aspects: a story from the battle and a discussion of some aspect of military matters highlighted by the story. Most of the stories were taken straight from the history books; some were fictionalized versions of real events that had taken place elsewhere during World ...