For as long as I have been playing, fans have been asking when the series will move out west. Our wait is over! Playtesting has shown that the scenarios in Battle Above the Clouds are very well balanced and model some of the unique conditions seen in this theater. For example, the Confederate player now has to worry about his leaders becoming insubordinate at critical times. Players who were turned off by the earlier games’ pro-CSA bias will find that the two armies are much more evenly matched in BAC. If you’re a fan of operational-level ACW action and haven’t pre-ordered yet, I suggest you do so.

But I must admit there are a stack of unplayed games for ACW (as well as many other periods), so all must be taken with that caveat.

Most of my friends move no deeper than AHD, but some have become fans of the quintessential games of the genre (FtP, VG’s CW, A5A, etc) and now I always have an opponent to play those great games against.

i’m not a big specialist of the ACW (as a French, i’m more into Nappy wars), but i enjoy FOR THE PEOPLE a lot, though i’m very bad at it

i love strategic CDGs and consider this game to be a real gem, in comparison with THE VG ’s CIVIL WAR that i found boring FOR THE PEOPLE is very tense, the political will mechanic is clever, combat is deadly and the role of the leaders perfectly abstracted !

great game, thanks to Mark Herman !

i’d like to dive into an operational ACW series, but most of them are daunting to me

thanks keep up the great job ! plesase, try to produce MORE podcasts !

I think that weight of the game is a combination of complexity and depth. I think you may have stated this. Complexity is measured by the amount of rules one has to understand and the amount of pieces one has to keep track of. Chess is more complex than Go. Cards affect complexity because, when evaluating your hand the cards become like special pieces with their own specific rules to keep track off. Depth is the number of quality decisions one has to make. I’m not sure I understand your concept of scale here. Quality is critical: one cannot evaluate the depth of game until one is able to discern good moves from bad moves. And ideally there should be several quality moves in most situations. I think it was in this podcast for example where it was said that the Devil’s Cauldron may not be a deep game, and it had to do with the number of quality available.

Chess: medium complexity, great depth Go: not complex, great depth

War of the Ring: heavy complexity, good depth

Hannibal: RvC: medium complexity, good depth

Twilight Struggle: light complexity, good depth

Blokus: very light complexity, average depth

I think the weight of a game is critical to my enjoyment of it. I do not enjoy games of low weight, which I deride as silly games. From the above it should be obvious that I think the most important factor in weight to me is … depth. For many others do it is complexity because for a variety of reasons they will not play games with too many pieces, too many rules, and the associated long time requirements.

I question whether Memoir ‘44 has more depth than Blokus. I have yet to play a game that challenges me mentally as much as Go and Chess. I do not have much experience with PoG, but War of the Ring, Hannibal, and Twilight Struggle seem to me more manageable and forgiving than Chess or Co. Perhaps it has to do with the lack of randomness allowing calculation of reasonable moves far into the future, while in CDGs your overwhelming concern is the immediate cards in your hand. Or perhaps is it the difficulty in evaluating the quality of the many possible moves?

Again, judging by the subjective mental stress levels I feel when playing competitive games, nothing has matched Chess or Go.

Easy stuff first

C&C:A - easily a light wargame PoG - on the light side of medium, easier than GBoH which is my bench mark for medium.

However cards add deceptively to the issue here since really you need to learn all the cards, they just make it easier to learn, since you don’t need to know them to play. I haven’t fully made peace with this in my mind and I’m still not sure how I think this effects complexity.

Definitions of Game weight.

Well I’m really talking about the ease to learn and general complexity of rules. I’m not willing to argue about exact specifics, if the rules are poorly written it appears heavier etc… Sure there is some of this and we need to aware of this as a factor, but drawing lines in the sand will always lead to frustration. Of course we can always think about extreme examples or unclear examples that may be hard to categorize (what weight is field of fire for example). The point is we are talking in reasonable generalities.

Further than this though, to be clear I’m talking about complexity not game play depth. There is often a strong tie between these two things for various reasons, but you correctly point out, heavy rule complexity does not automatically mean more depth.

I’ve explained this elsewhere, but game play depth is a function of two thing generally, scale and quality of decisions. By scale I mean the number of choices and the complexity of relationships. So for example if the consequences of an action have many possible outcomes or there are many possible decisions at any one time. Take Fighting Wings as an example here (great system by the way). In fighting wings you may control a single play, each plane has many, many decisions and can possibly move in many ways. All of these increase the decision tree and make it deeper. Now in FW you may only control 1 plane, this would be a lot less deeper than say a scenario that involves 20 planes per side, as all of a sudden you have thousands (possibly millions) more potential outcomes and movement relations. Scale and size is often a telling factor in depth, the larger in terms of size a game is, often the deeper it is. Heavy rule complexity games often do well on the first of the scale issue (the complexity of interaction) and often if you are playing a monster do well on the second as well. Case Blue for example is mind boggling deep partly because of this. It is worth noting I may be lumping two separate ideas together here depending on your view.

To further elaborate, if there are more possible outcomes from an action, than the decision is more difficult. If there are more possible actions then, there are more possible outcomes and there for there is more depth. Both these are issues of scale to me, whether they be rules complexity or size.

Now having said all this, I would argue that quality of decision making is important here too. This is where light wargames often do well and why they can punch above their weight. You see it is all well and good having hundred and thousands of decisions, but if those decisions are trivial, does it matter? Of course not, in some schools of thought it is better to have 2 infinitely tough decisions than millions of trivial one (and I’d largely agree here). Look at a Euro like Ra, in that game you have on your turn only 2-3 possible decisions, in an auction you might have 3-4 decisions occaisionally. Now Ra isn’t the deepest game ever, but given how few decisions you actually make, the game is pretty engaging. Many light wargames have this feature as well, in fact all good games regardless of complexity utilize this to some extent. What complicates this however is that often things with huge scales can make simple decisions very difficult to tell, so there can be positive feedback here.

Take a look at a game like Go. Go uses scale of decision making and quality of decision making heavily. That is it is hard to tell what yo do and you have many, many options. Chess is more limited on the scale front and generally has less options in terms of moves, but you can see the game uses both of these as well (all games do). One other thing to keep in mind is that while obviously Go and Chess are great games, you could argue that they aren’t as deep as many large wargames. They may be truer tests of skill, since they have no luck (that is up to personal opinion though), but they simply don’t have the same decision trees. I don’t mind either way, but it is something to consider.

My argument is therefore that heavy complexity and size can, but not always indicate more depth of play than lighter counter parts. The truth is that we must asses game individually and frankly game depth IS NOT EVERYTHING. There are so many other factors that contribute, game depth is only a small proportion. For example in Warriors of god you role a dice to see if your leaders die at the end of the term, strictly speaking this makes decision making more complex as you must weigh up the chances of depth of each leader against every move. So this technically adds depth, but you might argue it also makes the game feel arbitrary at times (although it is easy to overstate this). The point is that games have to be viewed wholistically, us discussing one particular facet of game design leads to utter frustration (although interesting discussion perhaps). So bear that in mind, I am arguing very narrowly about the issue. Over all we play games and see if we like them.

I would advise you as well, that while I have more tolerance for heavy wargames with failings, well done light wargames can be equally enjoyable.

So some dimensions of weight are correlated with others but not always. Risk can take a long, long time, but is not weighty in rules. Chess is a light game as far as rules go but not in terms of strategic depth. There are probably complex games with no depth and perhaps even complex games that do not take a long time. It could be helpful to refer to a specific aspect of weight rather than lumping these all together. In your case, I think you guys use weight as sort of a barometer of you likeliness to enjoy a game, e.g. you guys would prefer a longer, more complicated game with lot’s of depth, while others might be more satisfied with strategic depth alone. I enjoy long, long games, even if they are not complex, as long as they are interesting and have some depth to them.

There is also the issue of saying “light game” versus “light wargame”. There will be different scales perhaps and when you guys on the podcast say “light game”, I’d guess you really mean light “wargame”.

I was curious where you’d put “Paths of Glory” and “C&C Ancients” in your weight spectrum? C&C Ancients is touted as a light game often but has many, many exceptions, as does POG. Relatedly, it seems odd to call a game heavy just because the rules are not easily understood! That is certainly one form of weight, but it might just be that the rules are bad.

It would be interesting someday to have an AI that could scan rules and come up with a game weight.

Thanks again for replies,

Mark