The Lab

Most wargames end with a winner. But history rarely does — or at least not in the way the combatants imagined at the start. In designing Iron Meridian, we kept returning to the same uncomfortable question: what does it mean to win Operation Bagration? The Soviets achieved their operational objectives. And yet 480,000 of them died doing it. Is that a victory? We think victory conditions are one of the most politically loaded design decisions a wargame designer makes, and almost nobody talks about it seriously.

We ran eight sessions of Crucible version 0.8 over two weekends, and the Flux player won six of them. That's not a balance problem — it's a design signal. What we saw was that Order players, facing an opponent who could rewrite cards mid-game, defaulted to defensive play in a way that made them lose without really understanding why. The mechanic was working. The communication wasn't. Here's what we changed, and why.

The Long Thaw has now been through eleven major iterations. Through all of them, five primary sources have remained consistently formative — not because they gave us mechanics directly, but because they gave us the texture of the decisions being made. Ambassador cables, politburo minutes, NSC transcripts. Here's why they matter for game designers, not just historians.

When we decided to include the deportation of civilian populations as a mechanic in The Long Thaw, we had six months of internal debate first. When does modelling historical evil become its normalisation? When does abstraction become erasure? We don't have definitive answers, but we have a framework that's guided our design decisions — and we think it's worth sharing publicly, if only to invite critique.

Version 3 of The Alchemy of Insurgency had a 34-page rulebook. Version 6 has 14 pages. The game is more complex in terms of meaningful decisions, and simpler in terms of procedure. Here is exactly what we cut, what we kept, and the principle that guided every choice: if a rule models friction that is procedural rather than historical, remove it.