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Dresden 20 Design - Phase 1: Research
By Lance McMillan, August 2009
This is the first of a series of articles covering the course of design and development of my Dresden 20 game design. My intent in writing these articles is as much to provide a set of “how to” guideposts for other gamers who are considering submitting game designs to VPG, as it is a teaser for those of you anxiously awaiting this next installment in the Napoleonic 20 series.
The genesis of the idea for a game on the Battle of Dresden came about almost by accident. In the early summer of 2008, Alan Emrich, Kim Meints, and I were discussing possible new titles for the Napoleonic 20 game series which, back then, included just three games: Waterloo 20, Jena 20, and the still completely untested (at that time) Smolensk 20. Kim was suggesting things like Eckmuhl and La Rothiere, battles which, at that point, I’d never even heard of. I replied that perhaps we should consider doing games on battles with a little more name recognition – battles that had already had a game done on them by someone else. As an example, I said “what about Dresden and Eylau, the two battles that were covered back in S&T issue #75, back in the late ‘70s?” And from that offhand comment, those two battles ended up being “assigned” to me on the master Napoleonic 20 list.
Now, to be honest, I’d never even punched out the pieces for my copy of the S&T Dresden game, much less actually played it. I’d looked at it and thought, “Oh goody, a city fight slugfest,” and put it on the shelf where it gathered dust for many years. And now, here I was, signed up to do a game on a battle that I had virtually no knowledge about. I had a lot of reading to do…
Marching Through the Research Steps
The first thing I did was go back and re-read that Strategy & Tactics article that came with that unplayed game. Next, I did a quick web search and read a bit more, including finding out there was another game on the battle by New England Simulations (The Battle for Dresden, 1813), which got me to read up on that game on the BoardGameGeeks website.
Armed then with a general familiarity of the situation surrounding the battle, I started looking for more in-depth material and began to focus my research on what I felt were aspects of the battle that hadn’t been covered (or at least not covered adequately) by previous games on the subject. I realized that the fighting which occurred around the city wasn’t the most interesting facet of this campaign; rather, it was the overall operational situation which was the most fascinating. The fact that the Allies botched their best chance of taking Dresden by not moving aggressively enough the day prior to the battle (when the city was held by just a single French corps), and the fact that Napoleon’s first choice of how he wanted to prosecute the engagement wasn’t the one he eventually employed – those were the interesting pieces of ‘the big picture.’
This, to my thinking, is one of the biggest failings in our hobby. There are literally dozens of games on most of the more famous battles (like Waterloo, Gettysburg or Stalingrad). Most famous battles have been covered multiple times, and even the obscure ones often have two or three games on them. But many don’t offer players any new or innovative insight into the battle – instead, you often get a rehash of the previous game(s) with slightly different mechanics and fancier graphics. To me, that’s boring. When I design a game, I try to bring out some aspect of that battle that hasn’t been covered before in an effort to help players learn something new about that bit history.
The Brilliance of Books
Thus, the main thrust of my research became trying to find an important aspect of the Dresden campaign that had been largely ignored or overlooked by the other games on the subject – what unique elements made this battle special? In this, I was help immensely by F.L. Petre’s “Napoleon’s Last Campaign in Germany – 1813.” Petre was a serving British officer when he wrote the book, just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. While the work is perhaps a bit dated and a few of his facts may be questionable, it was his running dialogue with the reader, in which he analyzes the decisions made by the commanders (principally Napoleon) during the campaign that were of the greatest use to me in identifying the key aspects of the battle that I wanted to emphasize.
The gist of my preliminary reading indicated there were three factors on which the battle seemed to hang: the weather, the confused and unwieldy Allied command structure, and ultimately Napoleon’s overall battle plan. So, first, I knew players would want to be able to play the game using the weather that actually occurred, but I also wanted to offer them the opportunity of seeing how significantly the unpredictable conditions shaped the course of the battle – I would be sure to design that into my game.
Second, to be realistic, it must be difficult for the Allies to bring the full brunt of their powerful army to bear, but I didn’t want to totally hamstring the Allied Player with heavy-handed “idiocy” rules that forced him to adopt a clearly non-viable strategy. This needed to be included in the game and would require some judicious design decisions.
But to my thinking, the third point and central crux of this battle would be allowing the French player to choose how he would attempt to approach and fight the battle: defend Dresden or risk losing the city in an effort to crush the Allied army itself. In other words, the game would not be a straight ‘city fight,’ but a mini-campaign of maneuver-to-approach followed by a decisive battle (in much the way Waterloo 20 was envisioned).