So, those of you cool and smart and cool enough to pick up a copy of our new book on launch day were lucky enough to get a ‘limited edition’ that had somehow had Gav’s advertised foreword (and Glenn and my heartfelt prefaces) cut. CRC Press has corrected the error and if you buy a copy today, you’ll get the Foreword. For you special people, here’s what you missed.

Foreword

Games are Serious Business.

At the time of writing, I have been working in games design and related employment for just over thirty years. Directly and indirectly, games have put food on the plate and a roof over my head for three decades, which is pretty remarkable for a life spent writing about small metal and plastic toy soldiers, and the (sometimes fictional) worlds they occupy. Over that time tabletop games have both increased in popularity by orders of magnitude, and become a highly lucrative industry that shows no signs of slowing.

Games design is one of those disciplines that traverses the entire spectrum of art to science, depending upon the game and the designer. Understanding the probabilities of something happening and the importance of that occurrence are two different but interwoven necessities when making games. Miniatures specifically demand a kind of interaction from players that spans the creative to the analytical, requiring the designer to understand the woolly but nevertheless real rules of narrative as much as basic principles of mathematics. Blending the two successfully is the alchemy of games design.

So we have here the Principia Ludus for toy soldier games, setting out the foundations of miniatures games design so that we can examine not only our own decisions and processes, but engage with other designers within a similar framework of reference and nomenclature. It is a work that does a job not tackled yet. Previous volumes of games have focused either on high theory of human interaction and psychology, or approach from the bottom-up of writing and presenting a game as a set of rules. This book serves as an excellent study for those that want to not just design a game, but make a career out of designing a lot of games.

I came to this via Mike Hutchinson, who I met years ago when he was first demonstrating his splendid Gaslands game; a game that showcases the best of modern design mechanics to create a tactical experience with plenty of narrative moments. Having worked with Mike on Gaslands and A Billion Suns, Glenn Ford has been busy breaking ground with Man O’ Kent games. Together Mike and Glenn have recorded two hundred episodes of their games design podcast, Rule Of Carnage, and continue to gather knowledge and experience across multiple projects, but remain inquisitive and analytical about some of the decades-old baggage and assumptions that have shaped miniatures games design since the time of luminaries in the 50s to 70s like Donald Featherstone and Charles S Grant, and the rise of the behemoth Games Workshop from the late 80s.

Combining experience and innovation, Mike and Glenn are among the most exciting and relevant creators of the current and next generation of tabletop games. This book should be studied by those that want to join them.

– Gav Thorpe

Glenn‘s Preface

Games are the art of inscription of agency with mechanics as a medium (Thi Nguyen, 2020). I believe that one of the ways that art can be defined is as the inscription of the experience of the artist in one or another form. A painter inscribes the experience of vision, a musician inscribes the experience of hearing, and so on. The game designer inscribes the experience of agency, the experience of having a series of choices, and the results of those choices. That means that while a novel can make a reader feel anger over the betrayal of one character by another, only a game can make a player feel guilt over betrayal, because they were the betrayer. There are certain emotions that can only be engendered by our making decisions ourselves, not via empathy for others being put in the position to make them. As such I believe that games have a unique and important voice within art, a voice that I love and value.

What excites me about games is that despite their being a popular and unique art form, their artistic aspect has been barely brushed upon. Games number among the oldest physical artefacts of various civilisations, play itself is possibly the oldest and most widespread of all aspects of civilisation (Huizinga, 2016), and yet they have little critical examination and are rarely pushed forward in what they can do as a form. It is as though we had invented the film camera and then spent the best part of two thousand years using it to capture the image of a train pulling into a station. That potential excites and drives me in my investigation and designing of games.

On a personal level, I love games. I mean that in a very deep and intense way, increasingly so as years pass and I find that the idea of putting away childish things is a fundamentally and personally destructive activity. Life is, at its best, a search for joy, for the moments that bring happiness, and the magic circle of games is a shared environment for the hunting of fun, where an agreement to engage in savage competition can shape our most aggressive instincts into something mutual and constructive.

On a social level, I love that games offer an intervening mechanism to allow total strangers to engage with each other. I have long been a tournament gamer and, increasingly, a frequenter of tabletop clubs and conventions. I have repeatedly seen people who struggle to hold a conversation with a stranger come alive when the game steps in to offer them a set of frameworks and agreed structures to communicate through. Games are a place where people who struggle to understand the motivations of others can find common ground to interact and find understanding. Games are engines for fun, but they are just as often engines for empathy, channels for connections with others. Alexis Kennedy in The Snare of the Tree, and Other Perilous Seductions (2021) writes that designers should ‘make games that embody an ideal experience of the contact of human souls’. I slightly disagree, I think the word ‘ideal’ should be replaced by the word ‘actual’.

Glenn Ford

References:

Huizinga, J. (2016) Homo Ludens. New York: Angelico Press.
Kennedy, A. (2021) The Snare of the Tree, and Other Perilous Seductions. London: Amazon.
Thi Nguyen, C. (2020) Games: Agency As Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mike‘s Preface

As independent designers, Glenn and I have spent a fair amount of time dragging our games to and from UK games conventions to share our enthusiasm and excitement with others. When we travel together, we spend all of our time dissecting the games we make, discussing other games we feel strongly about and brainstorming how to improve our own current projects.

When lockdown hit in 2020, we lacked a forum to continue our conversations, and so we started Rule of Carnage, a podcast and YouTube channel that initially existed only as an excuse to meet up regularly over video and continue our ceaseless mastication of tabletop miniatures games. We had both been writing on this topic on our own websites for some time, examining our own design processes and sharing the challenges we encountered along the way. These articles had received positive feedback from other designers who found them interesting and useful, and that gave us the confidence to record our conversations and post them online.

About a year later we received an email asking if we might be interested in proposing a book on the topics we were discussing. There was no question in either of our minds. We’d already agreed that there appeared to be no single volume that attempted to define the sort of tabletop miniatures games we have spent most of our lives obsessing over, and if the opportunity had arisen for us to correct that omission, well, we’d give it our best shot.

For me, the creation of miniature games rules has always been inextricably entangled with the hands-on nature of the miniature gaming hobby in general. The freedom to create your own miniature worlds to play in always seemed to me united with the freedom to create the systems governing such play. As a teenager, I designed arcane miniature games to enjoy with my school friends, filling ring-binders with graph-paper incantations for spaceship games, racing games and grandly conceived generic all-purpose miniature game rules to suit all periods and technology levels. As an adult, I have had the opportunity to share my games with a wider audience, and I have found a deep joy in the strange alchemy of writing simple text that yet somehow ignites in other adults a joyous form of imaginative play that is at once structured and free, abstract and tactile, competitive and collaborative. We are playing serious, difficult, complex games, so we can remain confident that we are behaving as adults… yet our inner child’s eyes are aglow with the simple pleasure of playing with toys. I do not take this alchemy lightly.

Glenn and I are passionate and curious practitioners. What you have in your hands is the result of many hundreds of hours of debate, discussion, research and gaming, and we truly hope you find something in it to inspire your own game designs and your own gaming.

Mike Hutchinson

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the hundreds of designers whose work has inspired and informed this book. Thank you to the Rule Of Carnage community for their endless curiosity and enthusiasm about the craft of table miniature games design. Thank you to our friends that have shared in our enthusiasm for toy soldiers and to our families who lovingly support our pursuit of this odd craft. Thank you to Sean Sutter for the cover illustration.

You can pick up a copy of our book The Fundamentals of Tabletop Miniatures Game Design today from CRC Press! Shipping is free globally if you buy direct.