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When I started designing The Dirty Half Dozen, my Mordheim-Meets-WWII game that will be released in the next few months, flavor was the main driving force behind the design. For me, flavor behind a wargame is everything: if it has poor rules but good flavor then I can forgive a lot. If it has good rules but poor flavor, I lose interest.

So what did I do to make sure that The Dirty Half Dozen was going to have flavor? It all started with the premise: The game spawns from my favorite Warhammer game, Mordheim, and bounces off my favorite overall wargame, Bolt Action. I am fascinated by commando missions, both those which are real (St. Nazaire) and those that are fictional (The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone). I wanted to capture commando action in a small skirmish game, with one faction’s side of commandos going up against another’s.

Flavorful Factions

It was essential, then, that I come up with factions that are as flavorful as possible. It wasn’t enough to just have the five major powers of the war–I wanted to distill as much flavor as possible from each faction. I ended up with 24 different factions:

US Army
US Airborne
US Marines
US Rangers
British Army
British Airborne
British 8th Army
British Home Guard
British Gurkhas
Soviet Guard
Soviet Shtrafbat
Soviet Red Army
Soviet NKVD
German Grenadiers
German Fallschirmjager
German Sturmpionere
German Waffen-SS
German Osttruppen
Imperial Japanese Army
Japanese Teishin Shudan
Japanese Island Warfare Division
Italian Army
French Resistance
Finish Army

By breaking the game down into so many different factions, the flavor began to write itself. While it might be somewhat difficult for non-die-hard history buffs to tell the difference between the US Army and the British Army, it’s much easier to tell, at a glance, the difference between the British Gurkhas and the French Resistance. Just getting the factions down on paper and then deciding to write rules specific to them was the first step into creating flavor in the game.

Flavorful Faction Composition and Traits

While naming the factions differently is going to be the first step, the real advancement in getting flavor is creating the faction make up that will make each one different from the other. So, the German Osttruppen–a group that was made up primarily of conscripts in the late war (the old and weak who weren’t conscripted earlier) is going to have a different faction composition from the Soviet NKVD, the Soviet secret police with elite training. I was going to need to find ways to give both sides six characters on the board with wildly different training levels while balancing the game. This was done through the use of Traits, one of which is the Expendable rule.

Players with the Expendable rule can have their characters respawn once after they’ve been taken out of action. This means that the Osttruppen can be quite weak individually, but they’ve essentially got twice as many soldiers on the board than the better trained and equipped NKVD.

But Traits go much further beyond this: The British Gurkhas have the “Scary” trait, referring to their infamy on the battlefield as ruthless fighters (the trait gives them a bonus when assaulting), while the British Home Guard have the Trait “We Shall Defend Our Island Whatever the Cost May Be”, which makes it harder for the enemy attackers to secure objectives. The Soviet Shtrafbat–penal battalions–have the “Penal” trait, giving them penalties to aim and making it easier for them to be pinned. And the French Resistance have the “Hide” trait which lets them disappear from the board and reappear in a different spot on the next turn.

Flavorful Objectives

But it’s not enough to have flavorful factions: we need to have flavorful things for the players to do. In the launch version of the game there will be four main campaign tracks for your characters, each based off of well-known World War II media. The first is going to be a standard campaign, where the primary objectives will be things like destroying bridges, rescuing downed pilots, or sabotaging railroad tracks.

The second is going to be based on the movie The Dirty Dozen (“One: Down to the road block we’ve just begun, Two: the guards are through, Three: The Major’s men are on a spree”… etc.)

The third comes from a World War II movie that is a favorite of mine, not because of great combat scenes but because of the very different kind of story: The Monuments Men. Based off of this movie, the primary objectives will be securing great works of art: the Madonna of Bruges, or the Ghent Altarpiece.

Finally the last campaign (in the first launch, anyway) will be a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style campaign, with objectives like capturing the Ark of the Covenant, as well as non-movie relics like Reliquaries of the True Cross and the Shroud of Turin.

Conclusion

And we haven’t even talked yet about character specializations yet, because I’m saving them for a later post. There are just so many places in wargame rules create flavor, and every time you add flavor to a game, you’re drawing your players in. A wargame could technically be played with little cardboard counters on a map (many are) but there’s a reason that we paint miniatures and build terrain–it’s because these immersive elements provide us with opportunities to feel closer to the action, like we’re really there, like we’re actually on the board, fighting the other team.

I hope you join me next time when I talk about game mechanics. And don’t forget. The game will be released in March.