Designer Diary: Brave Little Belgium

Now that the school year is almost half over, I am reminded of my years spent at St. Dominic's Catholic School in Baltimore, Maryland. Like many kids of the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was fanatical about Star Wars, liked to bike, and played pickup football. I also loved Dungeons & Dragons and wargames. In many schools, I would have been a loner, but fortunately I had a core group of friends that also liked the same thing. Shane, Dave, Fred and I would get together for marathon D&D sessions or take over our parents' dining room table with Axis & Allies. It was a fun time that unfortunately did not last long. My desire to be "cool", to get dates, and to fit in overrode my desire to just have fun playing games with my friends. We all slowly grew apart through high school and college and afterwards began our careers and families. For me, sadly, there was no time for games.

Twenty-five years passed. I slowly started to reconnect with many of my grade school and high school friends through Facebook. I noticed that many of them were still playing games, and I really wanted to get involved again. I was no longer concerned with the silly notion that playing games was somehow "uncool". I joined a weekly game group and also started to play games again regularly with my elementary school friends. I introduced them to the games I was playing with my weekly game group, and they reintroduced me to the wargames that I used to love as a child.

It was during one of these wargame sessions in 2016 that Dave Shaw and I discussed creating a wargame of our own. I had already been working on a small filler card game now known as "Space Race", but I was very interested in working on a wargame. I floated the idea by Dave and he mentioned that there was an idea for a game that he had been thinking about ever since he and his wife took a trip to Belgium. He wanted to make a game that would cover only the struggle for Belgium at the start of World War I. He even had a title for the game: Brave Little Belgium.

I was quite intrigued by the idea and told him that I would begin working on some concepts. I had never designed a wargame and had no idea where to start. I did have some background in graphic design, so I figured I would start by putting together a basic map and some counters. That is probably a backwards way to proceed, but it felt right to me. Dave provided me with some good resource books and I began to work. I made certain that I understood the basic nature of the conflict and I created a basic order of battle for it.

Before I could do anything else, though, I needed to decide on the format for the game. Based on the research that I had done and the geography that I was looking to cover, I quickly decided that I wanted to do an operational game with a point-to-point map. At the time, I was very much into the game Fading Glory; I really liked the size of the maps in the game (22"x17") and the small number of counters. I did not think I could keep the game under 20 counters, but still wanted to strive for as few as possible.

I suggested these concepts to Dave and he was quite surprised. He also wanted a small board with a small number of counters, but said that he always imagined the game as a hex-and-counter game. We discussed it a length, and we both concluded that point-to-point would work perfectly given the nature of the game.

I now had my marching orders and began to work. I found an old map on the internet that covered just Belgium and France during the war. I loved the look and feel of the map, and decided to try modeling Brave Little Belgium's map on this. I wanted to create something with a similar color scheme and give the map an old-time feel with texture. The early prototype maps left much to be desired, but at least they were a start. I continued to add more and more points, researched and added in train and road routes, and eventually had a fairly decent prototype for a map.

While working on the map, I also needed to figure out the basic mechanisms for the game so that I could create the necessary counters. Despite the fact that I enjoy playing IGO-UGO style games, I knew that mechanism would not work for this game. In addition, since I had already decided to create an operational game with a low counter number, I definitely did not want to create anything smaller than the divisional level for the units. Finally, I knew that I wanted to include special events like the Belgians blowing up the bridges over the Meuse and the potential use of Zeppelins by the Germans for reconnaissance or bombing.

One night while trying to get to sleep, I had a brainstorm. (For some reason, many of my best ideas come while I am trying to get to sleep.) I was thinking about the counters, how I wanted to activate the units, and what to do with the special events. I suddenly came up with a random chit pull mechanism, one in which the player could pull an army chit and activate all of the divisions within that army, or pull a special event chit that could be used to help the player or hinder their opponent. I also included three "end of day" chits that would end the turn when all three were drawn. I thought, "What a neat, novel concept."

Since Dave worked a night shift at the time, I texted him and told him my idea. He really liked the idea and informed me of a bunch of games like Eric Lee Smith's Across Five Aprils that had successfully used chit pulls in the past. Although I was humbled to learn that my not-so-novel "concept" had been done many times, I still knew it would work well for this game, so I started designing the unit activation and special event chits.

Two things were still missing. I needed a way to address the Garde Civique (Civilian Guard) that existed in the towns and cities of Belgium, as well as the atrocities committed by the Germans in response to the Garde Civique. I knew I wanted the Garde Civique to be separate from the Belgian Field Army, and I knew that I wanted their appearance and strength to be randomized. As for the atrocities, my initial thought was to either connect them somehow to an overrun mechanism or to the Garde Civique. I ended up producing twelve Garde Civique counters and had them randomly appear via a dice roll as the Germans enter a town or city, and I included the atrocities as an event that could be randomly pulled.

Beyond that, I really had no idea how to proceed any further. I did not know what to do for combat, for besieging the forts, and for movement. I printed up the maps and the counters, then set everything aside in hopes that Dave and I could start hashing out the rest of the game. It sat that way for close to two years.

During the winter of 2017, I noticed that quite a few of my friends on Facebook were creating and submitting wargame designs to publishers. In particular, my Facebook friend Ray Weiss had created several interesting games on a wide range of topics over the course of only a few weeks and had submitted several of them to publishers for publications. (Since then, he has created his own publishing company, Conflict Simulations, LLC, to publish his games.) Seeing what he was able to accomplish in such a short time inspired me to go back to Brave Little Belgium and complete it.

The big problem that hindered Dave and me from working on it over the last two years was the distance between us. Dave lives in Pennsylvania and I live in Maryland. Dave works nights and I work days. We needed some way to work together on the project without always having to get together in person. Enter Vassal. Dave and I had played games on Vassal throughout the years, but we never had used Vassal for design purposes. Still, I knew that other designers had used it successfully, so I figured I could as well.

I thus quickly modified the unit counters, adding in movement and combat ratings based on the order of combat I had created earlier. I also modified the prototype map, simplifying the movement lines. I then designed a quick Vassal module that included the basic prototype map, the random chits, the revised units, and the Garde Civique counters. After typing up some basic rules, we had enough to play with and to push around counters to see if the game would work.

To our great surprise, it worked fairly well from the start. The random chit mechanism created an interesting random dynamic, the unit movement and combat values were fairly close to what would make sense historically, and the events provided intrigue and tension. It still needed modification, however. The combat losses were way too high, the game was not very balanced, the Garde Civique mechanism was too fiddly, and we still needed to figure out a siege mechanism for the forts.

With the Vassal module already created, it was easy to modify the graphics for the map and counters and reinsert them into the game. I turned the unit counters into double-sided counters with a reduced side. That helped to lower the combat losses and balance the game more. I added a random roll mechanism into the set-up to determine the placement of the Garde Civique counters. Finally, I developed a siege mechanism inspired by block games in which the fort's counter would rotate as hits were applied to it until it was eventually destroyed.

Dave and I continued testing and liked a lot of the changes but still had some difficulties with the random atrocity draw, which could lead to a quick German defeat, and the fact that the forts were still not powerful enough. At that point, I also started demonstrating the game to some of the other wargame players I knew, including my friend and fellow designer, Sean Druelinger (creator of the upcoming Lock 'N' Load game Point Blank). He felt the game was solid and fun, but did not like the randomness of the atrocity draw and the fact that the player may not be able to move all of the armies due to the random end-of-day mechanism. Based on his feedback, we began to refine and redesign.

Another late-night brainstorm brought the game to its final form. The fort modifications were easy. I took another idea from block games and had the player roll a number of dice equal to the strength of the fort. The atrocity and end-of-day mechanism was a little trickier, but I was finally able to resolve both issues by linking the mechanisms together. The turn would still end if three end-of-day chits were drawn, but now the German player still had the opportunity to move his armies. The only thing is that, by doing so, the player was risking the possibility of atrocities being committed.

Now that we had a solid game, it was time to submit to publishers. We submitted the game to two publishers, both of whom quickly made us offers to publish the game. Dave and I were in shock. As much as we loved to play the game, we knew that most first-time designers did not receive offers. After much discussion, Dave and I finally decided to accept the offer made by our first choice company, Hollandspiele. Not only did we know that Tom Russell and Mary Russell at Hollandspiele would do a great job developing the game. but we had designed much of the game with Hollandspiele in mind.

We made the right choice. Hollandspiele has done a remarkable job developing the game. They hired one of the best graphic designers in the industry, Ania B. Ziolkowska, to redesign the map. She was able to take the utilitarian prototype map we designed and created a true work of art. Tom Russell designed the box and counters, and Mary Russell laid out and formatted the rulebook. The final product looks amazing, plays smoothly, and is very fun. We hope that you will enjoy Brave Little Belgium.

Ryan Heilman