It's been a while & plans for the future

 I'm writing this post because it's been many years since my last entry in this blog.

After my last post I went to my local wargaming club to playtest the rules but it went so badly that it completely discouraged me from continuing this project. It was the first time I really tried to build a ruleset from nothing and I made several mistakes.

After that event life took  over and distracted me, I got married, got promoted and acquired more responsibilities at work and now I'm planning on moving to a new country.

I've continued playing games in the meantime and reading more rulesets, both for fun and to learn new ideas and approaches to rule writing.

Since then I've learned that I love smaller scales like 2 and 3mm and that playing on a grid is a very smart way of controlling movement rules and gameplay while still providing an interesting decision space. One of my favorite rulesets is Strength and Honor , it aims to model wars in the ancient period (from the Hellenistic to the later imperial roman era) with only a dozen units per side and a simplified and streamlined set of rules. The idea is to somewhat limit the decision space and focus it on fewer, but more impactful, decision moments. The system uses quite a significant amount of abstraction but still is full of flavor and giving you the feeling of being a general of an army.

Other rulesets I've quite enjoyed are Tenka Fubu and Rolling Thunder. 

I've also designed my own wargame (might be more appropriate to call it a boardgame wargame along the lines of GMT or Compass games) about the Alpine war on the Italian front in World War I.

Below are some pictures of it and some of the player aids and cards I designed.

Reddit post is here 

I feel like I've learned a lot through the process of creating this game over the last year and a half and this has given me the confidence to starting to think about tackling the Legend of the Galactic Heroes game.

Now, there are some things from the old design that I did like but I believe the best at this point would be to start fresh.

As a first step I'd like to list the main core ideas and focuses I want in the ruleset:

• Commanders and leaders need to be the main focus, the anime portrays battles more as a conflict of wits between commanders and I want it to feel this way. Also I want sub-commanders to be able to behave according to their nature and possibly sometimes be hard to control.
• No micromanaging of formations or individual ships. Ships will be grouped into squadrons with a single stat block. Each squadron will use between 1 and 4? miniatures.
• Less decisions but more impactful ones. 
• Possibly on a square or hex grid
• Random turn activation sequence based on cards or drawing chits from a bag (love this mechanic)

Next post I'll probably be discussing  and expanding one one of these bullet points, maybe listing some possible design choices and the pros and cons of each.

Thank for everyone that read this update and is interested in reading more about this.