Tallships: Design Diary
Tallships is the third microgame I've completed, a game of tactical naval warfare in the Napoleonic era. The seed of the idea arrived while I was washing dishes and listening to Age of Napoleon, a good podcast about its namesake era.
The seed was simple: each card is a ship, and you would spin a weather gage card to determine the activation order of the ships. This was very much inspired by how unwieldy and complex ship maneuvers in battle could be, and how so much was driven by weather conditions. Instead of the wind modulating the speed or maneuvers the ships could take, it would metaphorically take importance with activation order. This produces some interesting dynamics that are not realistic but have a believable quality to them, and weighs heavily on the players as they play each turn.
While the initial idea was strong, it didn't immediately present an ideal supporting structure for actions or combat, and this took some iteration to find its shape. Since the ships were on cards it made sense to have combat based on the length of cards and deterministic depending on the ship itself. Movement is also card based, ships moving along patterns printed on a card.
Action selection is where things got interesting. Initially, each player would simply choose an action for the ship when it was that ship's turn to activate. The problem was that while the order was random, it was set once for every ship at the beginning of the turn – as opposed to a bag pulling mechanism where each activation has no knowledge of who might go next. This considerably flattened the action space, with each ship having a pretty obvious action to take given its circumstances.
After some iteration, the orders system arrived, where the player would assign one order card to a ship, without seeing what their opponent would do. Dialing up the uncertainty more, the orders were assigned before the weather gage card was spun. This greatly increases the thematic feeling of delayed and imprecise messaging between ships. It amusingly also reproduces the effect of ships being somewhat lost or adrift of the battle, despite the obvious decisions their captain should have been making.
It seems obvious in hindsight, but that was the big lesson for me with Tallships – not just good and thematic uncertainty, but especially sharp uncertainty between players. You probably could remove the weather gage activation method for a deterministic activation order and the uncertainty of moves would provide enough to keep the game interesting.