Kickstarter news!

Wow! Just check out that layout for Ogre! Steve Jackson Games is planning to ship Ogre on Oct. 21.

Meanwhile The Guns of Gettysburg is shipping this week!  Yes, that's right. This fantastic game is not only going to be out well before the 150th anniversary of the battle, it's going to be in hand before another seven days is out. To my surprise it even looks like it's going to beat Columbia's 4th Edition Napoleon to my mailbox.

Guns of Gettysburg heads for a Kickstart

Evidently the long-awaited Guns of Gettysburg is going to be published by an outfit by the name of Mercury Games instead of under Bowen Simmons' own Simmons Games imprint and it's going to be financed via Kickstarter, probably in January or February.

This is good news for those of us waiting for the game, of course, although on a personal note, it implies that the health problems that have delayed Bowen Simmons from getting the game published (it's apparently been basically finished for more than a year) are not expected to get better any time soon.

Some people don't like the new cover, shown above, preferring the old one, at right. I don't have a strong opinion. I think the old one is a little more period evoking and classy, but it was really geared towards the existing fan base. Kickstarter means exposing the project to a larger audience that is unfamiliar with Simmons' groundbreaking earlier work with Bonaparte at Marengo and Napoleon's Triumph and therefore the cover will have to "sell" the game more than it did before.

On the other hand, I think this means that the initial print run for the game will be much larger than what we saw for BaM and NT.

The game, itself, is the sort of groundbreaking, paradigm shattering work we've come to expect from Simmons. The basic fact about Simmons is that unlike nearly every other wargame designer out there, he doesn't work off one of the existing wargame models, whether hex-based or area-based, whether CRT or bucket of dice, whether counters or figures, etc. He starts from first principles of terrain, order of battle and combat effects and designs a system from the ground up, as it were. So far this has resulted in a couple of elegant and outstanding games that are often pretty hard for the traditional hex-and-CRT-familiar wargamer to wrap his head around. Once you do, however, you're well rewarded. Both games really make you think as a player, intensely and deeply. Guns of Gettysburg looks to be much the same. Can't wait.

Catching up on Simmons

A very long, but interesting design diary for Bowen Simmons' Gettysburg game was posted on Aug. 4. He goes through an extended attack example.

As I was saying ...

Bowen Simmons' latest design entry demonstrates that his Gettysburg game will definitely not be rehashing the same ground as his Napoleonic designs.

This Gettysburg game has me salivating

Bowen Simmons has a series of "design entries" at his Web site on his new Gettysburg game, and it's looking intriguing.

Here's a sample:

Check out the entry here

What I think is fascinating about Simmons as a designer is his ability to break with his own past. Most game designers who develop successful mechanics use them over and over again in their new designs, to the point that those techniques can become synonomous with their names. I think everyone knows what to expect in a Richard Borg, Larry Harris or Jim Dunnigan design.

Simmons, on the other hand, isn't afraid to start from first principles each time. This can be a little confusing, because the one constant is his devotion to the "look" first pioneered in Bonaparte at Marengo. But anyone who mistook its surface resemblance with BaM for how Napoleon's Triumph would play were in for a surprise. I think many BaM players found that NT was a lot more different than they expected.

Likewise, I expect to see the design entries for Guns at Gettysbrug revealing something very different from either of the Napoloenic games.