Shannon Appelcline: Designer Spotlight: Martin Wallace, Part 1: Interesting Mechanics

Last year I took the opportunity to play through as much of the Martin Wallace catalog of games as I could. Whereas I’d often found Wallace games a bit long and a bit heavy before, playing them more purposefully and more seriously gave me a chance to better appreciate them. It also gave me a chance to better appreciate the unique design elements that Martin Wallace includes in his game, and that’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s column.

Before I go further, I should note that I’ve focused (both in my plays and in this article) on Wallace’s Warfrog & Treefrog designs, which represent his more serious and complex games. Though I did play and enjoy some of his more casual designs like Tyros and La Strada, they’re sufficiently simpler designs that I don’t think they have a lot in common with the games I’m going to be talking about today.

What Makes a Wallace Design?

I’m sometimes surprised, when I look more seriously at a single designer’s ludography, at how many game design elements those games have a common. Some designers have similarities that are just small bits of chrome that repeat from one game to another, but other designers create enough similarities in their games that it’s like they’re all grown from common DNA, which allows you to quickly identify the designer by his ludogenetic fingerprint, sort of like those lads on CSI. Now this sort of similarity could be good or bad, depending on how much real variety a designer creates in his games. In Wallace’s case, I feel that each of his games is quite unique (other than a couple of evolving families of rail design), and beyond that I appreciate the common design elements he uses, so it’s all good.

So what do I think makes up a Wallace design? Most of his serious games seem to draw upon more than one of the following elements:

Serious Simulation. This is both what kept me away from Wallace games for a while, and makes me appreciate them more now. They often feel like they’re doing a very serious job of trying to simulate the setting that they represent. The resulting design can be somewhat sharp-edged, as you usually have to remember special cases for several rules, but on the other hand the games are often more immersive as a result.

Waterloo surely shows off this idea the most, as it’s filled with special cases about how each of the sorts of troops (infantry, cavalry, and artillery) work and even has some differentiation between troops of different nationalities. I also always remember Brass and its one special rule about the “virtual path” into Birkenhead (though it’s possible that was a game balance thing). Even beyond that, I think Brass is really built on simulation, as the way each of the industries works is very different, from their value to what you can build in either the railway or canals era.

Wallace sets games in a lot of different eras, and it’s obvious that he does real research on them, because it comes out in the mechanics.

Action Point Systems. Wallace uses action point systems so consistently in his more serious games that I almost wish there was more variety. In looking across my bookshelf Wallace games, I saw that After the Flood, Automobile, Brass, Byzantium, Princes of the Renaissance, Tempus, Tinners’ Trail, and Waterloo all had some sort of action-point system. By that I mean, each player tends to take actions one at a time and each action allows him to do something from a menu of several different choices.

I say that I “almost” wish for more variety, because despite the fact that Wallace uses the same structure for many of his games, it’s a good structure, and it doesn’t stop the games from differentiating themselves at the next level up (where structure starts to meet chrome). I also love how fast-paced many Wallace games are, despite their length, and that’s largely because of this structure of threaded actions. Finally, I like how much depth the actions offer, because it implicitly means that there are a lot of different meaningful choices that you can decide among.

Because Wallace uses actions so much, he’s had the time to consider (and use) some interesting variations. In La Strada, you can effectively save some of your action points from one round to another. In Tinners’ Trail, Wallace takes a page out of Thebes‘ book, and allows actions to take variable amounts of time, with additional turns being taken by players who have spent the least time thus far. Waterloo plays an even better trick, with each player getting a number of actions before his opponent goes--but you never know how many actions that’s going to be, and when you might get interrupted in the middle of your plans.

Variable End Games. Just as there can be a variety of tactics that you might undertake in any individual turn of a Martin Wallace game, there are also a variety of strategies that you can use to try and win such a game--and that’s made even more variable by the fact that some of his games have multiple ways to score the game.

Sometimes this is due to a quick way to end the game. Perikles offers a fine example of such: if Athens or Sparta falls, then the game ends at the finish of that round of play. This doesn’t determine the winner, but lets a potential winner try to end the gameon his own terms, and hopefully do better as a result. (The one time I pushed a game of Perikles via this means, I won by 1 point when all of the scoring was done; whether that means I made a good choice or a bad choice, I don’t know, but I appreciate the extra strategy that such a choice allows.)

Some of Wallace’s games also allow a quick win condition. Liberte has such an example, where the Royalists can immediately win if they control enough provinces, while Mordred has an instant win if some manages to take Mordred’s castle.

But my favorite Wallace games are those which have a slew of end scoring conditions. I’ll admit that they’re not the easiest games to get into, but they sure allow a lot of strategy as you’re trying to assess which victory conditions the game is headed toward, and then either trying to influence them in the opposite direction or else trying to collect the VPs associated with the current victory condition. Again, Mordred and Liberte shine here. In Mordred you’re either trying to build up the best civilization points or trying to earn the least Mordred points, but Mordred points make you more likely to be able to build good civilizations ... and more likely that the anti-Mordred victory condition will ensue. (I won’t try to explain the give-and-take of Liberte, as I’ve only played it once and don’t own a copy, but it balances two sudden-death victory conditions with one regular VP count, if I recall correctly).

Abstracted Control: One final element that some Martin Wallace games share is the idea of abstracted control, by which I mean: you earn points from the doing of certain entities on the board, but they’re not exactly yours. In Liberte the radical, royalist, and moderate factions are independent of the players. In Princes of the Renaissance you can be hired by different cities at different times, and effectively take out shares which increase and decrease in value as the game goes on, making it similar to a railroad game like Steel Driver, where you also can share interest in an entity with other players. This isn’t that far from Perikles where you’re earning interest in cities, but in that game, you also have more control over the important things that controlled entities (cities) undertake. Finally, in Byzantium the Arab and Byzantine forces are somewhat separate from the players.

Around the Corner

If there are other elements that you think are common to numerous Martin Wallace games and that help to define him as a designer, I’d love to hear about them below. However, there are two elements that I’ve purposefully left out: Wallace’s focuses on economies and on warfare, because I think those rise above individual mechanics, to instead represent the broad categories of games that he designs. I’ll talk about those in the second part of this series, and I’ll also start looking through his ludography. That’ll be up either 2 or 4 weeks from now.

In the meantime, I’ll again point you to the discussion of my Wallace-a-thon that I wrote in my journal as I played his games last year (and have continued to play this year): part 1, part 2. For those of you interested in my alea-thon this year, I’ve written a new article on Puerto Rico.

Finally, I just reviewed one new board game these last two weeks, Bird on a Wire. But, if you like RPGs, you should read my continuing series on Traveller Fiction (which is actually covering SF classics from the 1950s and 1960s at the moment) and Traveller’s Spinward Marches as well as I one-off review I wrote on 1248 Sourcebook 1: Out of the Darkness (yes, also for Traveller).

Oh, and if you were impressed by Endgame Oakland when I wrote about them (and local game stores in general) a few years ago, you could support great local game stores generally by voting for them. Pretty please?

See you in 14. 

Comments:

< Back Home