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What does a strategy designer think about?Sometimes, they think about how there are dice rolls and then there are dice rolls. Or rather, how there are games that need a simple touch of randomness to keep everything moving, and then there are games that are trying to go a little deeper with the stuff they're trying to model. I'd never considered this in isolation very much until I met strategy designer Ed Beach, and he told me about something that had initially confused him - and eventually delighted him - regarding a rules choice at the centre of the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War games.
"The series was created by Joe Balkowski," says Beach. "What Balkowski did was he set up a really, really detailed Civil War series, where they have the most period-accurate detail, down to every mile on the hex grid. From Washington DC down to Richmond, Virginia, it's all detailed out for you, with exact replicas taken from 1860s-style maps." But the way the units move across these maps? The march rate of every unit is determined by a die roll. Beach laughs. "You think: Wow, you've got this ridiculously detailed game, and why, if I just roll well, does my unit move six miles, and this guy who rolled poorly only moves one? That's just broken, horribly unrealistic."
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