Bulge

We’ve had a lot of interest in this. Thanks for letting us know! It helps us to know better what to focus on. This project is shifting up into high priority.

What has the hold up been? Well first, we’re not happy with what we have. :/ There is a lot of demand for a title like this. We want to see it too. All too often, I think companies rush out a game because they know it will sell based on the subject. The game is total trash but who cares? They made their money, now on to the next one.

We hate that. We feel very strongly about not releasing a game until ‘we like it’. Games are never really done. They are also never perfect. It has to be a good game though. We have to feel that we’ve got something really good that we would want in our game collection. More importantly, that we like playing!

We’ve been really struggling with this design. We have 3-4 different versions of it that we aren’t happy with. It seems like one of the hardest things about game design is FIRST deciding what exactly you are making. What scale? What complexity? What type of game? What will it cover or not? We keep going round and round about many of these questions.

It occurred to me last week, that I’ve never seen a Bulge game out there that I like. Why not? Well, they all just seem like races to me. What is the Victory system? That can be a critical part to many games. Most Bulge games just boil down to: can you go faster than your sides historical result?

Oh! I got a few extra cities than the Germans did in the real battle. I win!

Or:

Oh! I pushed the Germans back 2 turns earlier than they did historically. I win!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That just sounds incredibly boring to me. Why are we even fighting here? Because those are your orders. True but that’s not very engaging.

Pondering this conundrum, we finally found a way to make this interesting: Variable forces with a reverse CRT Victory system. Just like we did in Little Bighorn. The solution has been staring us in the face the whole time. I don’t know why we didn’t see this earlier.

We’ll need to step this up to account for time, support strikes, munitions and oil spent by both sides in their efforts. This is what we need to really make this a fun and interesting game. Sure, if you’re a purist, you can play with the fixed historical forces. Fine but opening up the strategic options will make this infinitely fascinating and replayable.

Now that we know what we are making and why, it should be a fairly short process to pull all this together. No promises but we are hoping to have this ready by the end of this year. We’ll keep our fingers crossed!