Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East Interview: Mark G. McLaughlin

 

Once again good old Mark has decided to stop by the blog to tell us about one of his games.

ACME is a game of the chaos-inducing wrath of gods & men—a chaos each player does their utmost to manage, survive, and guide their civilization through to triumphant victory. Spanning the ancient world from the Hellespont to the Indus, from the Caspian to the Red Sea, and from the early Bronze Age to the Hellenic Age, Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East allows you to command not just 10 but 16, SIXTEEN CIVILIZATIONS!

The rules and images shown here are not final.

You can find it in P500

1-How did you become a wargame designer?

I made my first 'war game' when I was 11. I had just finished reading Cornelius Ryan's The Last Battle. So I got some poster board, drew a rough map based on one in the book, drew a grid and brought out my Airfix HO figues and Rocco mini-tanks and some dice.

In college I wrote a set of miniatures rules for the French and Indian War (which my group here in New Hampshire just started playing – 50 years after I wrote them!) And in my last year of college I designed Dark Lord – a Lord of the Rings game. Played it at my local game store, and the owner had contacts at Citadel Games. They bought the design, gave me $100 earnest money and a contract for royalties. Unfortunately, that same year SPI won the legal battle over the rights to such games, so that was it for me – but they let me keep the $100.

Three years later, In 1978, I had just gotten married – and when I returned from my honeymoon discovered that the company I had worked for had folded. I decided since I had some free time, I would write to Avalon Hill in Baltimore (I was living in a Maryland suburb of Washington DC) to come up for a visit. While I was chatting with Don Greenwood, Tom Shaw, the big gun at AH, came by and invited Don for lunch – and said “bring along your new friend.”

As I raised the first spoonfull of the Maryland Crab Soup appetizer at the Harvey House (a classic restaurant) Tom said: “So, what's this game idea you want to pitch?”

I also dropped the spoon. I had no such idea. I had come up just to see where those great games I had been playing since I was a kid was made. Rather than say “I don't have an idea,” however, I just thought on my feet. By dessert I had a handshake to design a game for them – War and Peace.

The first edition of that game came out in December 1979 (I was playing it on my mother-in-law's dining room table the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan – and I was back in DC the next day, as I was on the Afghan desk at the news organization I worked for). The 5th and 6th editions came out 40 years later – beautifully remastered and updated by One Small Step.)

War and Peace was my first published design – and Ancient Civilizations of the Middle East will be my 26th (or is it 27th?)

2-Why did you decide to do this game?

My co-designer, Chris Vorder Bruegge, and I both took courses from Dr. Carrol Quigley when we were at Georgetown 50 years ago. A few years ago Chris came across one of his books, The Evolution of Civilizations, along with another book by Dr. Eric Cline, 1177 BC – The Year Civilization Collapsed. These brought up old memories of Quigley's classes, and added a really dramatic twist. Chris came up with the idea of a civilization SURVIVAL game instead of a simple civilization BUILDING game. We are both avid long-time players of the classic Civiliation board game as well as the Side Meier computer game series of the same name. The first game in the series, Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea, pretty much designed itself from there on. We decided to do a sister game (not a sequel, not an add-on) to cover the Middle East. As I had begun work on my Throne of Darius series of historical novels, I was already current with much of the reading for the last epoch of the game, and my shelves are full of books I read to inspire me when painting my thousands of figures of ancient soldiers (I can field massive armies of Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians and the like, as well as classical armies from Rome, Greece, Macedon, Carthage, as well as lots of Gauls and Celts)

3-Can you talk about the mechanics?

It is a simple game of placing disks – which can represent anything from traders to cities to great fleets and armies – and playing cards. It is NOT a card driven game, but the cards that people play define the mood, interaction and goal of the players – and the game.

As my friend and famed designer Mark Hermann says, this is the best “take that” game that he and his pals ever played – and he is from New York, so that is as good a compliment as I will ever get. One to six players not only build civilizations, but struggle to survive in the face of Event Cards that unleash hordes of barbarians, as well as cards that players can toss at each other to inflict earthquakes, floods, plagues etc., some of them quite literally of Biblical proportion.

OR they can play nice. And just build and build and co-exist and sing Kumbaya until the game is over.

OR they can go to war! They can mass fleets and armies, play an assortment of “Competition Cards” (our Eurogame-speak for War). Loot and sack cities, take captives and, in THIS iteration of the game, CAPTURE their enemies GODS and bring them home to their temples.

OR they can do any combination of the above – it is your choice.

4-How the different factions work?

There are 17 civilizations in the game, up to 6 of which can be active in any set up or scenario (there are specific setups and scenarios for solo, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 player games, as well as a 'sandbox' set of build-it-yourself setups).

Each civilization has some unique gift. It could be more disks in growth, or free mina (ie money), or extra cards (or choices of cards), or bonus disks for Competitions , or bonus victory points for doing what they did best historically – or some combination of the above.

If you look at the sample civilization display card provided by GMT, you will see what I am talking about.

5-Scenarios and/or length of the game?

A game can be as long or as short as you like. You can set a turn, epoch, time or victory point limit, and when that is reached the game is over – and it is still a full game, just as if you started at Epoch I and went all the way through Epoch IV (which could be up to 16 turns, although there are multiple sudden death early endings for epochs, so they could be as short as one, two or three turns).

There are dozens of setups and scenarios, historical and sandbox, as well as a number of purely historical wargame scenarios (Alexander vs Darius, Cyrus the Great, etc.) as well as one based on the legend of Rostam. There are also exploration scenarios, where most of the map is empty and you go looking for gold, glory, god and civilizations run by the Non Player Character rules – which are extensive and very well-thought out to give people a real challenge in both solo and multiplayer games.

6-Tell us about future games in the series

Chris has already completed the prototype for Ancient Civilizations of East Asia, complete with a rough playtest map (which I need to paint – I use art paint to color in my maps) and the basic cards (I have to add the 'color' quotes, like I did for ACME – on which each card there is an appropriate verse from the King James Bible).

We have already talked about game four – Ancient Civilizations of the Americas. I did Viceroys and Columbus in 1985 and 1992, respectively, for Task Force Games, and Chris was involved in those as consultant, playtester and proofer. Once East Asia is on track, we will work on the Americas and, god willing, maybe a fifth – Ancient Civilizations of Africa.

And we have been playtesting Ancient Civilizations at War – the Card Game. You have a deck of either one Civilization (Rome, Gaul, Carthage, Macedon so far) or make a deck with 2/3s of the cards from one Civ and 1/3 of an ally – from the list above). You play cards on a battle board to place units (Hastatti, Principe, Triarri, Velites, Warbands, African Spearmen, Pike Phalanxes, ballistae etc...and elephants, of course) and leaders to empower them, as well as terrain and camps (fortified or not) plus special cards (traders, traitors, spies, scouts, assassins, physicians, specialists etc). The games are meant to be played in under an hour, and there are both free-form and mission-specific scenarios, as well as historical battles).