This is a discussion of how some games include a cycle of converting resources through some means of production such as factories or agricultural facilities into assets that are usable to help succeed in the game.  These assets are often physical things but can be capabilities or even victory points themselves.

In a recent blog post I talked about to kinds of economies in wargames that have economies, “maintenance” economies and “accumulation” economies.  This led to a more general discussion about economic production in games, and I was pointed to a BoardGameGeek post about “means of production” (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/822865/the-means-of-production-and-how-games-innovate ).  The author of that post ("linoleum blownaparte") generalized too far when he or she said that the colored cards in Candyland were a means of production.  I am going to use the term "means of production" to refer to the equipment that is used to convert raw materials into something useful within the game - in other words, factories, agricultural facilities, or the like.  I'll use "the production cycle" to refer to the process that begins with resources and ends with some result of production.  Not all games have a production cycle, of course, or only a rump of one (as in chess and checkers).

The accompanying table lists not only games that use the cycle I'm talking about but some games that do not to provide a comparison and contrast.  Table for this article is at: http://pulsiphergames.com/presentation/productioncycle.htm
The economic production cycle works like this.
1) The source of the resources.  There must be some resource(s) that can be converted into something else, and these must come from somewhere.  The source is listed in the second column of the table, after the name of the game.

2) Resource Collection.  Some resources must be gathered, harvested, mined - collected in some way.  This may be explicit or it may be as simple as possession/ownership of territory, which is really all you need for the agriculture based economies that have dominated most of history - "land = wealth".  Sometimes labor is explicitly involved, as in the workers/peons/peasants in Warcraft II and III and colonists in Puerto Rico.

I have included a separate column to indicate the actual resources that are used up when an asset is produced.  Sometimes resources are not used up.

3) Means of Production.  Some kind of equipment is used to convert the resources into usable items are capabilities.  In the modern age this would be factories.  There is usually labor involved, though that is rarely represented explicitly.  In an agricultural age the means of production was as simple as plows, kilns, scythes, pottery, storage cellars, and grain silos or the equivalent.  (Pottery is one of the great inventions of agriculture because it provides rat-proof storage.)  The means of production often governs where new physical assets may appear, such as Industrial Centers in Axis & Allies, buildings in many real-time-strategy games, cities in computer Civilization.

4) Limits on Production.  There are sometimes limits on production.  The obvious and typical limit on production is the availability of resources; if you don't have enough gold and wood in WarCraft 2 or 3 you can't produce more units even though you have the buildings (factories) with available capacity.  You are also limited by labor: if you don't have enough people to collect lots of gold and wood in Warcraft, then you won't have enough of the resources to "fuel" your factories (buildings).  Another limit is the availability of the means of production such as factories, so you may have lots of resources but nowhere to convert them into assets.

The limit may also be the capacity of the land (overpopulation), pollution, limits of political organization, or other factors that prevent infinite production even when resources and means of production are available.  (In a pure "accumulation" economy there are no such factors; in a "maintenance" economy there will be at least one such factor.) 
A few games have a minimum production, e.g. in Risk you get three armies even if you hold as little as one territory (normally it's one army per three territories).  Monopoly's "Pass Go get $200" is a kind of minimum production, as well.

5) Assets.  I'm going to call the result of production "assets".  This is usually a physical item but may be a capability or even victory points themselves in a game, or it may simply be money.  In agricultural terms production results in edible goods that enable populations to expand without suffering severe famine.  Populations support military units, which in pure agricultural economies amount to little more than armed farmers.  In more modern terms production results in weapons and training for people to use those weapons, that is, it results in military units.  Military units can be used both to destroy or take away an opponent's capabilities and to defend one's own economy and population.
But the cycle may result in some capability, for example greater mobility for one's assets or more Action Points to use each turn.  Sometimes production is devoted to improving technology.  Production can even result directly in victory points, or something that amounts to the equivalent of victory points (money is the victory points in Monopoly for example).

In some games there is only one asset (usually "armies"), in others there may be many assets with very different characteristics, e.g. units or technology research.

In the accompanying table I've listed these production cycle steps and include a column that shows victory conditions for the game in question.  Normally the production cycle is a means to an end, the end being expressed in the victory condition.
Most of the time the assets are a means to an end (I’ve listed victory conditions), sometimes they are an end in itself closely related to the victory condition, such as victory points.
I welcome suggestions to improve the table.

Producing assets that increase resource collection or means of production, or both.
The key question in the economic production cycle is whether and how much you can produce something that increases your economic production capability, whether resource collection or means of production or both.  In many video games you can produce buildings (factories) that enable you to produce more units, or whatever it is that you mostly produce.  It's less often possible to produce something that increases your access to resources, such as additional mining equipment or the means to discover and colonization new planets, or better collection/extraction technology. 
This is a key question because the more it is possible to increase your production through the assets you have produced, then the more likely the game will result in an "economic snowballing" effect.  That is, the more likely it is that the player who best figures out the most efficient ways to improve their economic production - or who is luckiest in exploration and exploitation - will gradually pull far ahead of other players because of geometric expansion of his economic capability.  In a wargame, sooner or later he turns assets into units that then overwhelm the opposition.  In a 4X space wargame he also produces superior technology that makes both his economy and his military more formidable.  In a purely economic game he simply produces more of whatever it is that causes you to win the game: money, victory points, or something else.

An "economic game" or "engine game" is typically dominated by this economic snowball effect.  Most of the time in these games it is not possible to take production capability from another player, nor to destroy it.  The players who have been less efficient in figuring out the production cycle have no means to arrest their doom.  Yet at the end of the game they can see that they have improved their economic production and their own general situation quite a bit so they can feel positive about what has happened even though they lost the game.  This is the central equation of many (certainly not all) Eurostyle games.

In a wargame on the other hand there is frequently little option to increase your economic production other than by taking it from another player.  This is especially true in board and card wargames.  On the other hand, in video wargames such as real-time strategy games it's possible to significantly outproduce the opponent by building up your resource collection and means of production.  Furthermore, in most RTS you cannot take an opponent's production and use it for yourself, your only option is to destroy it.  In other words some real-time strategy games are both economic snowballing games and wargames.  At the very top class of real-time strategy, the professional sports leagues, all the players understand the economic efficiencies and we are back to wargame, with the caveat that players must be able to perform at 200 actions per minute in order to keep up with other opposition.

An appearance of a production cycle.  Some games involve acquisition of some asset, but the players have no way to alter the sequence.  For me this isn’t a production cycle.  For example, in Go, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Scrabble players acquire pieces, play them onto the board, and then get more.  But they have no way to alter the rules about how many they receive, no way to increase resource collection or production of assets, no way to gain advantage over opponents.

Chess and checkers have a minor production cycle in pawn promotion and kinging.  The player has one way to control what happens, by reaching the far rank of the board.   In both games the acquisition of a new asset can be important.  In chess promotion rarely occurs, in checkers it’s normal for kinging to occur.

"Maintenance" versus "accumulation".  In the many wargames where you're not able to use the assets you produce to increase your economic production, the limits on production make a big difference to how the game works.  I've discussed this in a previous blog post in some detail. http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2012/10/maintenance-based-economies-vs.html    Briefly, in a maintenance economy you must pay upkeep on ("supply") your existing assets before you can produce new assets.  This limits the total number of assets you can have.  In an accumulation economy there are no limits, or very broad limits such as the large number of pieces available, so you can continue to produce units no matter how many you already have.

The maintenance economy is a great discouragement to "turtling".  Turtling is much more common with an accumulation economy.  (In case you're not familiar with the term, a turtle is a player who “sits on the sidelines” and does not participate in conflict, using the production cycle to build up his assets while other players are losing theirs in fighting.) 
In some sense a zero-sum game - a game where the only way to gain something is to cause someone else to lose it - is the extreme of a maintenance economy, as epitomized by the boardgame Diplomacy.  But it is also possible to have a zero-sum game where there is no economic production at all.

Types of in-game economies.  Every game has "an economy", but many don't have a production cycle.  "An economy" refers to assets coming into or going out of the game. The question is, over time is there an increase in assets in the game, a decrease, or stability?  For example, in chess and checkers the number of pieces decreases as the game goes on, that is, it's a "negative economy".  Even though you can gain capability by kinging or by promoting a pawn, the overall outlook is negative.  Monopoly is close to a stable economy except for passing Go and collecting $200, and for the cards which can add or subtract money from the game.  So it is a slightly positive economy.  A great many Eurostyle games have positive economies because the purpose of the game is building up assets.  In many wargames depicting battles that take a few days and consequently don't have economic production, we have negative economies because both sides lose units as time passes.  In more strategic wargames with economic production you could have positive, stable, or negative economies.  Traditional Risk tends to fluctuate, exacerbated by the card turn-ins as they result in more and more armies.  Axis & Allies tends to be more or less stable, or a little positive, but that depends partly on how the players play.  Britannia-like games fluctuate, and a lot depends on how the players play, but there's usually an overpopulation limit on production so that the games cannot have strongly positive economies. 
Not all wargames for more than two sides involve economic production.  The ancestor of Britannia, 4-player Ancient Conquest, is actually a "battle game" with no economic production, just an order of battle.  History of the World is also a battle game, despite its world-wide scope.  The order of battle comes from the empires you end up with.

Games with a maintenance economy tend to be stable unless there are lots of ways to acquire new resources, such as colonizing new planets in 4X games or building new cities in computer Civilization.  Games with an accumulation economy tend to be positive.

Where does the production cycle end and something else begins?
That's hard to say.  Games with negative economies are unlikely to have a production cycle, a major reason why they're negative.  Moreover, the production cycle is generally associated with political states/nations/empires, or with corporations.  Games where the player has an avatar that performs most of the action aren't likely to have typical production cycles.   When deconstructing a game I look for the resource collection and means of production, as well as the resulting assets.
Race games and word games rarely have a production cycle.  The same is true for puzzle-like video games such as Tetris and Bejeweled.  Abstract games (such as Blokus) in general are unlikely to have production cycles, but I'm sure there are many exceptions.

Shooters, adventure games, action games, and RPGs have ways to pick up and store new items, but there are no resources or means of production, just assets.  The closest we have to a production cycle in a shooter is the items "dropped" by defeated foes (defeated foe becomes both resource and means of production).  The more you defeat, the more stuff drops.  Some of the drops are money, which can be turned into other usable assets (you purchase weapons).  In RPGs you may have merchants who buy your loot (those "drops") and sell you new stuff, and even help you convert or sacrifice items in order to make better ones.  In some games the player characters can create or convert items, e.g. making potions.  Your loot could be seen as resources you've collected, and the merchants as means of production, with the assets being magic items, weapons, and other personally-usable capabilities (improvements in training, skills, feats), and money if you sell the loot.

Tactical games of all kinds are unlikely to have production cycles, especially those that depict battles.  For example, Gratuitous Space Battles involves designing and “building” a fleet to face a foe, but there are no resources or means of production, rather there's a ship value limit, and a pilot limit, on the size of your fleet, which otherwise magically comes into existence for each battle.  Chess and checkers are quite tactical games, as well, and have only rump production.

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Notes about the table: This is a large spreadsheet table that does not mix well with most blog hosts.  Consequently, it can be accessed through my Web site at http://pulsiphergames.com/presentation/productioncycle.htm .

I am not a Eurostyle game player.  While I once knew how to play the games listed, I’ve forgotten more than I know, so I’ve had to depend on regular players, and on BGG/Wikipedia, for some details of production cycles that can be quite complex.  Such complexity will not be surprising in “economic engine”/economic snowball games, though I don’t want to imply that all the games I’ve listed involve such.  I welcome corrections/additions.

Some of the video games I also have not played or investigated extensively, and others I have not played in many years.

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My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon. (Books-a-Million has an eBook version at http://bit.ly/PQQqh3.)
I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)
Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

This post was precipitated by a question from a reader regarding how often or how persistent he should be in trying to get an email response from a publisher, after initial contact.

What it has become is an attempt to describe, up to the point of my limited knowledge, what tabletop hobby game publishers are like and how they work.  I don’t know all the publishers, of course, and in particular I’ve never had any contact with German publishers.  Yet I think I can tell new game designers some things that might help them understand how the industry works.

I’m going to divide publishers into two groups in several ways, recognizing that whenever we try to do this for any collection of items, people, or groups, there are going to be exceptions and in-betweener’s.  Nonetheless it helps understand the broad outlines.

In a sense, hobby game publishing is almost inevitably a hobby.  The most important thing to say is that many tabletop game publishers in the United States started out as or are still self publishers.  Not many people get into tabletop game publishing to make money because that’s difficult to do, although it does happen.  As with game shops, the joke runs, “how you make a small fortune in the tabletop game publishing industry?”  “Start with a large fortune”.  Even one of the largest publishers, Fantasy Flight Games, began in the game industry as a self publisher; they actually started out in the comic distribution business but when that business imploded nationally they published the owner’s game Twilight Imperium as a way to stay afloat.  Virtually all the little game publishing companies we see began as self publishers.  In some cases, as with Fantasy Flight, they later get into the business of publishing games designed by people outside their company.

Martin Wallace was a teacher for many years, but is now a full-time designer and publisher.  He makes more money when he publishes a successful game himself, rather than license to another publisher, through his company Treefrog (formerly Warfrog if I recall correctly).  The publisher takes the risks, so the publisher reaps the bulk of the benefit of a successful game.

Another way to look at this is that most of the owners of tabletop hobby publishing companies have full-time non-game jobs, that is, they are not depending on the publishing company to provide their living.  I don’t go around asking these folks if they have full-time jobs, but one learns gradually.  Frequently when a publishing company provides a living there is only one full-time employee, the owner.  For example, Zev Schlasinger before he sold nonetheless-prolific Z-man Games.  Yes they have part-time employees but that’s a lot different from having a group of full-time employees.  (I’ve been told Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games is the only full-time employee, and I’ve also been told there are several full-time staff (which seems more likely).  In any case, SJG is a good example of a self-publisher, which Z-Man is definitely *not*.)  The other cases of full-time employment come when it’s a really big company like Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast or Fantasy Flight, or a middling company like Mayfair.

In a few cases the principle people in a publishing company are also game shop owners, as with Valley Games and GameSalute.  So they have (or had) a full-time job but it’s a full-time job in games.

The men who run GMT have full-time jobs (there may be an exception now at GMT).  For example Andy Lewis, who is their acquisitions person and the “face” of the company, is an engineer and makes a lot more money as an engineer than from his game company.  Steve Rawlings, owner of “Against the Odds” Magazine, has a full-time project management job.

This is not exceptional in creative fields.  Few classical composers can make their living from their composition, most of them are teachers and sometimes performers.  Philip Glass, who is arguably the greatest living classical composer, once worked as a plumber to support himself.  Most novelists have full-time jobs.  Even one as prolific as fantasy and science fiction writer Glenn Cook, who at one time was writing three novels a year, worked full time at General Motors until he retired.  Few painters or sculptors support themselves through their work.

Most of the game designers who make a living at game design are employed by the very largest companies such as Hasbro/WotC and Fantasy Flight.

Specialization
The larger companies tend to specialize in certain kinds of games.  Hasbro has mass market games, their subsidiary Wizards of the Coast has Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and some fantasy-related boardgames.  Paizo has RPGs especially Pathfinder.  Mayfair publishes many games but what makes them really go is that they have the American license for Settlers of Catan.  Fantasy Flight publishes fantasy and science fiction games that positively drip with atmosphere, but many of their most well-known games are licensed from movies or video games, such as Doom and Starcraft, and developed internally.  Britannia did not fit their M.O. in 2006, and even less now; but the owner likes the game, and he wanted to reissue it.

Location
Many hobby game publishers with several employees are “virtual companies”, that is they don’t have a single location, their full-time and part-time employees are scattered throughout the country.  GMT and Mayfair are examples.  On the other hand the really large companies like Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast and Fantasy Flight have main locations where most of their people are, as do many other kinds of businesses.  In any case, there is nothing like “Silicon Valley”, Austin, TX, or Raleigh, NC as locations where many video game studios congregate.

The Original Question
Now what does this mean for someone who is trying to interest a publishing company in one of their game designs?

If someone has a full-time job and is trying to run a game company in his “spare time”, or when someone is the only full-time employee for a company of any magnitude, they are going to be really busy.  When I see him at conventions I always try to tell Zev (Z-Man) how amazed I am at the large number of quality games he published despite being the only full-time employee.  And not surprisingly it has always been difficult, at least for me, to get Zev to respond to email.  If you know really busy people in any field you know that talking with them directly, or on the phone, is a lot more effective than email because when someone doesn’t have much time it’s often email that gets ignored or forgotten. 
It probably helps a lot sometimes to live near the publisher.

Hobby Trends
In recent years several trends have made it much more difficult to get the attention of most hobby game publishers.  One is that there are so many games published that even the established publishers can have problems getting attention from “consumers”.  In the book publishing world this translates to selling fewer copies of each book, so the book publishers have to publish more books (and more are published every year).  Another trend is that there are a lot more people designing decent games, just as the standard for what a decent game is has gone down.  Decades ago the idea was that any game you bought should be good enough to be played many, many times.  Now the standard is a game you buy is at least okay if you play it a few times, that is, the buyers themselves don’t expect to play a game more than 3 to 5 times.  It’s (a lot) easier to design a game that meets that criterion.

You may not agree with me there, but what’s indisputable is that there are so many game designs being submitted to the publishers that they are inundated.  This can lead to very long lead times before publication and it can lead to publishers saying effectively “we don’t take submissions”.  For Hasbro itself this means that Mike Gray has a list of about 300 designers who he is willing to deal with directly, and the rest have to find a Hasbor-approved agent.  An agent is going to take part of your remuneration (if you’re published) in return for his work.  But Hasbro requires them because the agent can weed out the many, many obviously unsuitable submissions before Hasbro has to deal with them.  One or two of the German publishers have done the same thing.


A publisher may also refuse to take outside designs because they have an in-house staff to design games.  Many of the Fantasy Flight games are designed in-house (and remember they started out as a self publisher).  So are most of Wizard of the Coast’s. 
Kickstarter influence?
Remember the inquiry that started me along this path?  My correspondent wondered if the advent of Kickstarter would cause publishers to be more attentive to game designers.  I suppose he thought of this in terms that Kickstarter ultimately provides more competition for publishers, though he didn’t say.  My response is that many of the successful Kickstarters are run by established publishers themselves, and that unknown people are quite unlikely to succeed in raising funds through Kickstarter.  It’s the known people, the people with track records, who are more likely to succeed.  When you see stories about huge Kickstarter results it usually involves a known quantity and often involves an individual who is well known in the game community.

In any case, with hundreds of games being published each year the addition of a few dozen more from Kickstarter is insignificant.  Existing well-known publishers are inundated with submissions, so I don’t see Kickstarter making a difference in how they treat wannabe designers.  It may mean that even the existing publishers publish a few more games because there is less risk in a Kickstarter published game than in a normal game.  Kickstarter enables the publisher to gauge the demand as well as to raise money.  In fact I suspect gauging the demand is sometimes more important than raising the money.

Whether Kickstarter will ultimately fail as a funding source, perhaps when some high-profile projects fail to deliver, is an open question.


Self-publishing
Self-publishing has always been an alternative to established publishers for game designers, but it is much easier now than in the past.  That’s especially true if you go the POD (Publish On Demand) route that requires little or no money up front.  Thegamecrafter.com is the granddaddy, but there are others such as www.superiorpod.com . Desktop publishing is becoming popular as well.  Remember, though, that when you become a self-publisher, you may end up spending much more time on publishing and marketing than on game design. 
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I hope I’ve been accurate in my descriptions above (which are entirely from memory).  And I hope this gives you a better idea of what the landscape is like.  It is not easy for any designer, let alone one without a track record of success.

“War” games are fundamentally different from “battle” games, although most people would call both wargames.  In the former there’s an economy and the war is essentially about controlling a better economy that ultimately gives you the preponderance of force.  The focus tends to be strategic rather than tactical with maneuver contributing to gaining or keeping control of economic locations.

In a battle game you have an order of appearance that rarely changes, and no economy.  Then the focus tends to become tactical, finding better ways to butcher the enemy before they butcher you.  There may be objectives that are locations on a map, but if you slaughter enough of the enemy you’re likely to take those objectives.  Maneuver then contributes to killing the enemy (or scaring them off) not to capturing/controlling economic resource/production locations.

Wargames for more than two players are almost always of the first type, and wargames for two players are usually of the second type.  The scale of wargames of the first type tends to be much greater both geographically and chronologically than the scale of the “battle” type, as well, which befits the importance of economy.  In a few days, the time-scale of most battles, economy is not going to matter.

Wars are about economies (and technology in recent times).  Battles are about troops and terrain.

I’ve discussed this at much greater length in an article that will appear in Against the Odds magazine.  Here I’m only interested in the fundamental types of economies and how they affect games with an economy.

The first and more true-to-life economy is the “maintenance model.”  You must have the resources to support the units you already possess before you can recruit/build new ones.  Consequently there’s an upper limit on how many units you can have because of the cost of maintaining them. 
The simpler “accumulation model” lets you use your economic power to build new units regardless of how many you already have.

In some sense the maintenance model is zero-sum insofar as when you reach the limit of units, the only way to get more is to take economic capability away from another player, which will also reduce the number of units he can have.  Sometimes this is explicit as in the classic game Diplomacy, where there are 34 “supply centers” on the map of Europe and each one can support exactly one army or fleet.  A player wins with 18, because he then has a majority of the board and (presumably) will gradually overwhelm all further opposition.

Sometimes this zero-sum affect is much less obvious because players rarely hit their maximum maintenance level.  They keep losing units at such a rate that they can’t build enough to “max out”.

Frequently when the maintenance model is used explicitly it costs much more to build the unit than to maintain a unit.  For example in my prototype “Seas of Gold” about the Italian maritime cities in the age of the Crusades, maintenance costs one economic unit for an army or fleet, but an army costs three economic units to build and a fleet four to build.

In my highly simplified version of Britannia that will be part of the new editions of the game, the number of units a player has on the board is subtracted from the economic value of his holdings, and that results in him losing an army, standing pat, gaining one army, or in rare cases gaining two armies.  This does away with the Increase Point Track of Britannia and also means that overpopulation rules are not required, because if the comparison is bad enough the player actually loses an army.

There are hybrid economies that let a player build units as though in an accumulation economy but provide a limit on the number of units.  This limit can be “overpopulation”, as in Britannia, or it can be a maximum army, fleet, or air force size as in Britannia and many other games, usually reflected in the piece mix.  For example, if you have no more battleship pieces for your nation you can’t build more battleships.  In Britannia the maximum force size is supposed to represent the limits on communication and control for primitive Dark Age nations; for more modern games it may not represent anything specific but still has the maintenance limit affect.   Britannia’s economic model is consistent with the idea that the armies represent both populations and military forces, as was generally the case in the dark ages where there were no professional armies and few trained/experienced warriors.  Most of an army was essentially farmers armed with whatever they had to hand.  The more farmers you had, the bigger your army could be.

But piece mix limits can represent real-world limits.  In World War II most of the major participants reached a maximum size military because some 10% of their population was under arms - most of the men of military age – and the rest were required to run the economy or were not of an appropriate age or gender to fight.  In earlier times the percentage of participation in the military was usually much less at any given time, although if we go back to Greece and Republican Rome we’ re again at high levels of participation.  While population is not strictly an economic variable it becomes a limit for the size of militaries unless mercenaries are available.  There’ve certainly been times when mercenaries were commonly available as in Greece after the Peloponnesian War and in Hellenistic times, in Italy at the time of Machiavelli, and during the 30 Years War.

So there’s a variety of ways to introduce limits on the size of military forces in a game that are not directly related to the economy but have many of the same effects as an economic limit.

In contrast to the maintenance model we have the accumulation model as seen in games like Axis and Allies, traditional (pre-2008) Risk, and Vinci.  You could play Axis and Allies for quite a long time without fighting much, and still have more pieces to use to create new units.  A&A is not much like the real world but you don’t really notice because of the constant slaughter of units that means the real economic limits, if any, will never be reached. 
We get the massive armies of traditional Risk because it’s an accumulation economy.  Imagine how different the game would be if you could only have, say, three armies per area you own, or maybe only two.  The latter is my initial step in turning Risk into something that might resemble a real “war” game.  Vinci and Smallworld go one step further in providing no economy for most empires most of the time.  An Empire begins with its maximum military and can only go downward unless the Empire characteristic includes a special rules to gain more armies

In general, "games about war" with no pretense to being models of reality (Risk, Vinci, Smallworld, Conflict and Broadsides from back when, and many many others), as opposed to war games, tend to have accumulation or no economy at all.

In games that depict a single battle there is rarely an economy, but there can be order-of-battle based objectives that introduce something like an economy.  For example, a side may get a few reinforcing units if they can take a particular road junction.  This pseudo-economy can occur in games that have a regular economy, as well.  For example, in Britannia there are two cases where the Angles won’t get a leader if they don’t control a particular area.  In effect, that area becomes a temporary economy that “produces” the leader.
In games with more than two sides - what tabletoppers call “multi-player”, though that means something else to video gamers - the nature of the economy can be critical to successful design.  An accumulation economy encourages turtling, that is, sitting on the sidelines while the turtle watches the other players fight and lose resources or units, as he accumulates resources and units (also known as “camping” in video game shooters).  If Risk didn’t have the territory cards then turtling would be very common because you can accumulate armies quickly while other players lose armies quickly when they fight.  In fact I strongly suspect the cards were added to Risk to discourage turtling, you can only get a card by capturing an opponent’s territory, that is by attacking and risking losses.  And you have to get cards so that you can turn them in for large numbers of armies.  In a long Risk game more armies will be acquired through the cards than through the economy.

This is in contrast to Diplomacy where you cannot sit on the sidelines if you want to win. Some other players will be gaining supply centers and consequently units while you will be static.  If no one gains or loses supply centers for a while then you have a stalemate and the game ends in a draw.

If there is no economy in a more-than-two-sided game, no player will want to fight because while he and his opponent lose resources or units the other players do not.  A multi-sided conflict game with no economy is likely to be a “turtle-fest.”

These are not problems with two player wargames because each player only has the other to fight, so fighting rather than turtling is going to happen.


Economies of one kind or another are common in big video games.  They are obvious in games like Civilization and real-time strategy (RTS) games, games that are (or can be, in Civ’s case) wargames involving more than two sides.  Civilization tends to have some limits on how big your economy can grow because of population unhappiness and pollution, but when you produce a unit there’s no reference to how many units you already have, there’s no limitations.  In the end you have an accumulation economy.  In most RTS games your buildings produce units as long as they have resources without regard for how many units you already have, a classic accumulation economy.  Turtling can work, but if there are limited resources in the “world” and you’re sitting in one corner rather than gaining those resources you will probably lose in the end.  I think particularly of WarCraft III where the amount of gold in the world is limited because there are only so many gold mines and so much gold in each mine, and gold is needed to create new units.  If other players gain control of this gold while you turtle then you will probably lose, unless they managed to slaughter themselves down to a level that lets you take over.

Even a shooter has an economy of sorts as the players pick up various weapons and medical supplies that miraculously lay about.  This is an accumulation economy except that you don’t need to own any particular economic resources to produce more, you just find it - so the affect of economics on maneuver is much smaller.  And there is a limit sometimes on how much you can accumulate because your inventory allows you to carry only so much, though some of these games allow you to store the rest of your “stuff” somewhere else.

In platformers and Nintendo-style games like Mario there are still things to pick up but there’s not really an economy because you don’t accumulate a lot of “stuff”.

What I said about shooters brings to mind an important aspect of economy.  In the shooter you don’t have to hold any particular place in order to gain more stuff, you just pick it up where it’s lying about.  Although some players would say you have to kill things in order to take what they “drop,” who plays a shooter without killing things, since that’s the major focus of most such games?  The point is, if there are no locations that can be gained or lost in order to improve or lose economic capability, then you’ve lost the major point of strategy and maneuvering in the game, and it can once again become a matter of slaughtering more of the enemy than you lose.  But that doesn’t work well in a multi-sided game because it encourages turtling.



Some non-wargames have ways to gain new forces or assets.  These can resemble an economy or they can resemble an order of battle.  Within those economic models you can also have maintenance or accumulation.  Monopoly (the accumulation) has a minor economy from passing Go and collecting $200.  Money is victory points in Monopoly, and there would be no sense in limiting what you can accumulate.  Chess and checkers are mainly tactical games with a strategic component, mainly battle games, but they do have economic appendages.  Chess has a minor economy from promoting pawns, just as checkers enables you to make Kings.  In both cases they contribute to the importance of maneuver in the game as you want prevent your opponent from reaching the last rank with a pawn or checker.

The unlimited supply of X’s and O’s in Tic-Tac-Toe or the unlimited supply of letters in Scrabble are more or less an order of battle rather than economy.

The economy/ order of battle question, and the maintenance/accumulation economy question, tend to be much more important in conflict games where you are hindering the other player(s) by destroying their assets.  This isn’t common in Eurostyle games, though common in screwage games like Bang! and Munchkin.

There are board and video games that are essentially economic engines, resource management games.  The economy here may be of either type, though there’s often a technology element that lets you remove the hybrid economy’s limitations on maximums.  The contrast with wargames is that in many wargames the economy is an aspect of the game rather than the major focus, while in many non-wargames the economy is the major focus. 

At the NC State Tabletop Game Club I attend five people were playing my prototype “The Rise and Fall of Assyria”.  Someone came by and asked if the game was like Britannia.  I answered no, because this game is much more fluid, is designed for 3 to 5 players, has less randomness in the combat though still using dice, has simpler scoring, and involves the rise and decline of empires rather than ones that can in some cases play through the entire game (as with the Welsh and Picts in Britannia).

But later I thought that compared with the other games that were being played in the room – we had over 50 people that day – the game is much like Britannia.  Because they are both games that require “strategic thinking” (strategic in contrast with tactical, though also in the sense of having to make difficult choices about the best play) that are also games of maneuver and location.  And they are both wargames.  In contrast most of the games that are played at this game club do not involve maneuver and location nor are they wargames.

Sometime I’ll describe at greater length what I mean by games of maneuver and location, but briefly, if you think about traditional non-commercial games such as chess, checkers, Parcheesi, mancala, Nine Men’s Morris, Go, and Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts & Crosses) they are all games where the spatial/geographical location of the pieces is important, and you either maneuver to arrive at locations, or you place pieces at locations in the case of Go and Tic-Tac-Toe.  Traditional non-commercial boardgames are, without any exception I can think of, games of spatial location with either maneuver or placement or possibly both.  In fact this is the essence of boardgames, until recently.  (In contrast, the essence of card games is hidden information.  See http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20120219/91123/The_Fundamental_Differences_between_Board_and_Card_Games_and_How_Video_Games_Tend_to_Combine_Both_Functions.php )

For example, one of the most popular games at the club is Red Dragon Inn.  In this game each player is a fantasy adventurer who has just come back from a successful adventure and wants to spend his money gambling and drinking until comatose (or until he runs out of money).  The player who keeps some money and is awake when others are comatose wins the game.  Each player has a unique deck of cards that he can play plus some money tokens and so forth.  Obviously this is not a wargame.  Perhaps not so obviously, it’s not a game where spatial location plays any part, and that virtually always means that maneuver plays no part.

The game at the next table was Agricola.  I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to the game, because I’m not interested in pretending to be a farmer, nor am I in sympathy with Eurostyle games.  But as I understand from talking with players and limited observation, location in the sense of location relative to other players’ assets - spatial location - plays no part in the game, just as is true of a great many Eurostyle games.  In many Eurostyle games the board or what passes for one is used to keep track of information, not to show maneuvers or relative locations.  Some of these games have “worker placement” but what you’re doing in that situation is recording which option you have selected.  You could just as well use tokens or cards, and take a token or card when you “place” a worker.  Many of these games are turn order games and the turn order might be represented on the board as in Last Will, but there is no actual location and no placement in the sense of occupying a particular spatial location. 
In a sense they are not “real” boardgames at all.  You can write down all the statuses on pieces of paper and still play the game, or you can use tokens or cards to represent turn order or worker placement and still play the game.  While you can write down the positions of pieces on a chessboard those positions have no meaning except in relation to where the other pieces are: they have spatial locations.

Another way to look at this is that traditional strategic games and virtually all wargames are geographical/spatial games.  One place is not the same as another and the relationship between the locations of those places is important.  As this corresponds to the real world, it may provide a feeling of familiarity to some, and it certainly helps model real-world situations.

Magic: the Gathering is by far the most played game at the club.  I’ve asked players specifically whether spatial location matters, and my impression from having watched Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh a lot over the years is that they are rarely if ever games where location is important and almost never games where maneuver is involved.  The cards are placed on the table as record keeping markers.  When you “tap” a land you’re recording that it has been used.  There are different zones in Magic: the Gathering that indicate the status of cards but those are not spatial locations, those are record-keeping or status tracking.
Not all the other games being played at the club lacked maneuver and location.  Probably the most popular game other than Magic is Betrayal at House on the Hill.  A great many of the club members who play games other than Magic are essentially role-playing gamers who also play board and card games.  Our meetings are too short and too loud to accommodate RPGs during the meeting, so people play RPGs at other times as arranged.  Betrayal is a story driven game much as an RPG can be.  It does have a considerable element of maneuver and location as the players explore the old mansion, drawing tiles to add rooms to the mansion and moving from one place to another.  Once the “traitor” has been identified maneuver can become quite important as various characters are trying to kill each other off or find particular items or go to particular places to use particular items.  I wouldn’t exactly call it a boardgame in the traditional non-commercial sense but it is a game where maneuver and location are important.

Another popular game is Dominion, and Ascension is another deck building game that is played a lot.  Clearly Dominion is a game where the cards are used to keep a record of what’s happening, as well is to provide randomization.  Information hidden from other players in the cards in each player’s hand is at least theoretically important despite the low levels of player interaction in this kind of game.  That is, if you knew what cards the other players had you could gain an advantage in play.

It may not be surprising that many of the games, like Dominion, that have only atmospheres and not themes – that is, the so-called story does not actually affect how the game is designed and played – are also games lacking entirely in maneuver and location.

So in this sense almost all wargames are like Britannia, and all those other games I’ve mentioned that are played at the game club are not.  Betrayal is the only one that goes in the distance toward Britannia and wargames in general.

Wargames also tend to be games of direct conflict, whereas many games played at the club are not (Magic: the Gathering being an obvious exception).  That is more obvious, and we can talk about that another time.

I’ll have more to say about maneuver and location in contrast other kinds of games at another time.

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My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is now available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (Books-a-Million has a PDF version).   I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

Atlas of World Military History: the art of war from ancient times to the present day.  By Richard Brooks and others.  Hardcover, 256 pages, large (“coffee-table”) format .  Originally published by HarperCollins in England in 2000, this edition by Barnes & Noble in the same year.

Although this book is out-of-print I was able to get a pristine “used” copy very inexpensively through a used bookseller on Amazon. 
This is a typical contemporary large-format “Atlas” insofar as there are maps on almost every page but also a very extensive commentary and narrative.  (Old-style atlases were just maps.)  It is also lavishly illustrated with drawings, paintings, and photographs.  And as you would expect the book focuses much more on the past century or two than on earlier times.  The American Civil War gets the same number of pages (four) as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.  The Crusades and Mongol invasions get two pages each.  The European part of World War II gets 28 pages.

The sections include:
The First Military Empires (ancient times)
Men on Horseback (Medieval)
the Military Renaissance (1500 to 1650)
Line of Battle (1650 the 1785)
Nations in Arms (1792 to 1815)
Heirs of Napoleon (1815 to 1905)
Storm of Steel (1914 to 1916)
Restoring Mobility (1917 to 1939)
Zenith of Industrial Age War (1939 to 1945)
the Cold War and the End of Modern War

An unusual feature of the book is that several of the authors are well-known wargame designers, including Richard H. Berg, Mark Herman, and David C. Isby.

The book is very good at getting to the heart of matters - as many books are not.  As I read I wondered if this was partly the influence of the game designers, who as model-makers have to get to the heart of what’s important in a situation and leave everything else out.

The authors have a way with words and the phrase I most remember is "cosmic levels of incompetence"  as a description of the Russian army in the Russo-Japanese War.

Atlases in general have the virtue of providing a view "of the forest, not the trees."  Yet the accompanying text here can show you many of the trees, as well.  You get both an overview and occasional details.  Many of the maps are of individual battles or doctrine, others show the sweep of empire (including such topics as trade and economics).  An excellent book.

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My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is now available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (Books-a-Million has a PDF version).   I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/