About WeGoWarGo

Hey! I’m Danis Dedes, the designer of WeGoWarGo, WarGo for short. Let me here tell the story about WarGo, this Homepublished miniature wargame!

Contents

1. About WarGo’s name
2. Motivation
3. Existing WeGo-like miniature wargames
4. About WarGo (aims)
5. Conclusion

About WarGo’s name

The name of “WarGo” was coined at the very start of the project. I intended it to be a paraphrase of the WeGo system of game playing. As its name suggests, WeGo refers to turn-based games in which all players decide simultaneously their actions during each turn’s first phase (decision phase –“Command Phase” in WarGo). Subsequently, all decided actions are executed simultaneously again during the turn’s second phase (execution phase –“Action Phase” in WarGo).

I immediately did some web search of related terms, such as “wargo game”, etc. No results back then… Later, after building quite a lot of material, especially building upon the name itself, I did another search. To my surprise, there was a game called “WarGo: The Card Battle Game”by Andrew Sutherland, who ran an unfortunately unsuccessful Kickstarter for that WarGo.

Despite this discovery, I decided to keep the WarGo name, after checking that Andrew’s “WarGo” has not been protected under a Trademark. Anyway, the name of a game is not intellectual property, especially since my WarGo won’t be commercial. Moreover, I reached Andrew, and he kindly answered that sharing the same name wouldn’t probably harm either of our projects.

Edit (December 2024): the name of the game was changed to WeGoWarGo, to differentiate it more from Andrew’s card game. This is the reason that the website has also moved from the wargowargame.com domain to its new domain of wegowargo.com.

Motivation

You could then guess correctly—by the early conception and origin of the name—that my initial motivation was to create a wargame with which players don’t have to wait passively the active player. In such games, non-active players do nothing but watch helplessly their units getting decimated until it’s their turn.

This is especially pronounced with the IgoUgo system, in which one player activates the whole force while the other players are commonly idle. In order of decreasing idleness, we can also find other systems of wargames:

• Iphase–Uphase (e.g. I play in the Movement phase for all my force, then you do that, then I play in the Firing phase for all my force, then you do that, and so forth).
• Alternating unit activations (I play one Unit for my turn, then it’s your turn to activate any Unit, and so forth).
• Simultaneous phases (we all simultaneously decide and execute a Movement phase, then we do the same for Firing, and so forth).

In the same decreasing order, these types of wargames suffer from the related power imbalance due to the tactical advantage that the player who plays first enjoys. Of course, there are mechanics in wargames that enable more engagement. For example, many wargames allow the non-active players to interrupt the active player, but this is not as when all players are actively involved throughout.

Returning to the amazing hobby of wargaming after many years, I had this clear view and feeling that it is possible to implement simultaneous command and action in a wargame. This is a kind of feeling that I’ve learned to trust during my professional career as a designer of bio-mathematical and computational models for Ecology and Physics (games are mechanistic models, after all!). I’m talking about a pure WeGo system. One in which all types of actions are decided and then executed simultaneously, making it feel even more real-time and realistic than the “simultaneous phases” type in the list above.

Existing WeGo-like miniature wargames

As a proper scholar, then, I initially did a web search, to find out whether such “WeGo” miniature wargames already exist. I found several posts, especially in the active and enthusiastic community about tabletop game design in Reddit. In posts like this, this, this and this, as well as in the comments therein, Reddit users have inquired and informed about miniature wargames with simultaneous/concurrent turns/actions/activation. (Check also this thread in BGG) By reviewing this information, I compiled a list of games with some kind of simultaneous mechanics:

• Wings of Glory WWI (rules PDF 1.9 MB), Wings of Glory WWII (rules PDF 6.7 MB), X-Wing (rules PDF 3.9 MB), Star Trek: Attack Wing (rules PDF 7.6 MB), and Sails of Glory (rules PDF 5.3 MB), which all concern battles with only vehicles.

• Beneath the Lily Banners (nice video overview here, since rulebook is paywalled), which does have infantry units, but only the movement is decided and executed by all players at the same phase.
• Runewars (rules PDF 9.5 MB), which uses secret dials for deciding only the type of action for each unit simultaneously (not the direction or targeting specific unit), but units are activated sequentially in decreasing order of initiative scores, and the decided action is flexible to concern any unit in response to the past sequence of activations (i.e. not truly simultaneous decision and then action).

To the best of my knowledge then, there is no miniature wargame dictated by a genuine WeGo type of simultaneous decision and then execution. Nevertheless, it is a popular system in video wargames. It is something quite new and rare in miniature wargames, and I had a lot of going back to the drawing board to redesign many things from scratch. WarGo is an open project, and I’m willing to update it in ways that will make it more fun and closer to its aims.

Of course, the demand for novelty is not a prerequisite. I’m coming from a Science background, directed conceptually by the demands for novelty by the modern Editorial Boards of scientific journals. I guess, then, that I’m used to think that I deserve to publish only something novel. I’d like to get rid of this notion in WarGo, especially since it is a Hobby, an Art. So, even if WarGo will look like other games that I wasn’t aware of, I don’t really care. I WarGo mainly for the fun of it! And I hope that other people will also share this fun!

About WarGo (aims)

Besides this simultaneous-command-and-action feature which aims to maximise the engagement of players, there are some other desired characteristics that I’d aim to grant to the forthcoming WarGo wargame:

• No 6-sided dice. Go for d10 or d20.
• Do base the rules and terminology on conventional usage from other games.
• Make the rules simple and intuitive in order to recall them easily and to make the game faster, yet allow variation to enhance fun and richness. For example, allow for special abilities and supernatural/magical powers that Overpass the basic rules of the game and the rules of Nature, respectively.
• Don’t overdo it with such special properties, otherwise we can be lead to devastating synergies or combos.
• Try to avoid exceptions in the basic rules!
• Try to use rule explanations: justifying why a rule is the way it is can make it more memorable and attractive, although it can also lead to the other extreme… An Appendix chapter can be devoted to such explanations.
• Incorporate morale mechanics, but don’t allow them to be too decisive.
• Allow the players to fully build and customise their own units, ideally being able to calculate point costs during unit building with a provided app or spreadsheet, but also provide them with ready-to-play template profiles of common types of units.
• Adapt the rules in a way that enhance strategical decision-making, e.g. tactical maneuvering.
• Strategic thinking will be eventually encouraged with the following WarGo mechanics:
  • “The ability to build and customise their own units” means that strategic thinking is encouranged well before the actual battle.
  • Secret and simultaneous deployment with extra markers for bluffing.
  • The separate Command Phase of secretly and simultaneously issuing commands to Units requires foresight about forthcoming decisions of the enemy.
  • Suppressive fire, which if directed properly, can delay or intercept enemy advancement.
  • Line of sight and firing arc coinciding and limited to an Attention Arc of  90° angle, enhancing the strategic advantage of Units maneuvering to the flanks or behind enemy lines.
  • Melee combat will not be a discrete mode of fighting (e.g. interlocking as by a switch in base-to-base contact like in other wargames), but rather a regular closer-range attack in the continuum from projectile attack, consequently bringing forth the strategic advantage of melee weapons with longer reach.
  • Inter-connectedness of friendly Units, e.g. the critical roll mechanic of 1 (perfect) and 20 (fumble) in the d20 which will be heavily related to inter-connectedness. For example, fumbled attacks leading to cross-fire against friendly nearby Units, and getting over the Panic state due to a nearby Unit that performed a perfect Morale test for themselves.
• Don’t rely too much on individuals such as heroes, and try to achieve a balance between infantry/mounted teams/squads versus heroes/vehicles/beasts.
• Enable solo and cooperative play, and append a solid section devoted on scenarios.
• Make a well-structured and navigable rulebook, which has a good index, as well as lots of summarising lists and diagrams. Each piece of information must be only in one place; make the book concise, yet exciting somehow…
• Inform the readers about what’s needed for playing the game.
• Register the game to databases such as Board Game Geek.
• Give your best self by painting the artwork with a characteristic theme, in a way that ideally would be uniquely identifiable as WarGo aesthetics. Better elementary, atmospheric and distinguishing than masterpiece, indifferent and mainstream.
• Colour palettes must be friendly to colourblindness and greyscale printing.
• Create video illustrations of the rules, from the basics, to the more advanced, to full battle reports. Would be cool to have video demonstrations of WarGo’s ability to model real-world situations, such as fire-and-maneuver with suppressive fire at the intra-team or inter-team level, and flanking maneuver. And keep them concise and coming!

This is an open list, and it will coevolve with the WarGo project and your feedback.

Conclusion

So, feel free to communicate your comments such as ideas, thoughts, objections, corrections and suggestions!

Best regards,
Danis, the WarGo designer

Make WarGo, not war..!