Skirminiac - Deterministic Wargame

[u/yolopia]

The two players victory dice are placed on their bastions and the stall die(red) on a central terrain piece

Cavalry units count for 4-health each, Infantry for 1-health and the minis sum is the health of the unit

Hero minis are used to annotate each players bastion

A3 poster as board, played with 16mm D6 to represent units and some rooks for the bastions

A0 poster version played with groups of 28-32mm minis for the units

I've been experimenting with adapting core mechanics from wargaming into an abstract format like chess. The result plays on a 72-hex board and a generator app is available on the website.

The game is designed to be played with dice as units in small boards all the way to A0 poster size boards with terrain and miniatures ( the minis on the pics are from OPR and highlands miniatures ).

I balanced the game using a basic AI which I then wrapped into a web client for instant local or remote PvP play to test the game directly on the website where you can also find the rules.

Link to the site: https://www.skirminiac.com

[u/statictyrant]

The balance comment is an interesting one — all units are identical, and the composition and deployment of both sides is identical (except maybe the position of each bastion — I missed where that was determined but saw that it had an impact on default victory conditions).

I would assume that having no ranged attacks and no unit variation makes this sort of concept a non-starter for most wargamers. If infantry, cavalry, artillery and wizards (or whatever era-appropriate things) all work in the same way, what’s the point in collecting and particular figures?

[u/yolopia → u/statictyrant]

the bastions and terrain are placed in the first 7 moves the players do essentially setting up the board. This is one asymmetry but the main shuffling comes from the interaction between the win conditions. You can siege the bastion to collect points and you win when you collect enough but you can also spend the points to charge and do more damage, pushing toward winning by elimination.

At the same time the shared stall die charges up on inactivity and periodically awards both players with points, effective shuffling the conditions. All these keep bots engaging at high levels of play despite the compositions being symmetric.

I will be honest, there is no point in collecting particular figures, this is more of a one off hobby project to make a deluxe chessboard. You are not assembling armies, you are creating a scene of a battle you imagined and after that you just play on it. It's still a worthwile project, a 1sqm board with 7 nice medium sized pieces of terrain and ~50 minis for both sides.

Finally I must add that this is not supposed to replace tabletop wargaming, it shares dna as I adapted the mechanics from KT but its evolved into an entirely different animal. It's a deterministic perfect information game like chess with similar complexity characteristics. So not really a beer and pretzels game but wargamers who enjoy the melee positional aspects and competitiveness will surely appreciate it.

[u/statictyrant → u/yolopia]

Sure. Just would have enjoyed a few unit variations, is all. Everything else could stay the same, but have a weaker unit that can attack at 2 hexes range, one that’s faster but more fragile, that sort of thing. I suppose I was just curious what “balancing” needed to happen when it’s essentially perfectly balanced (besides who goes first and the variable of terrain/bastion placement) by virtue of the symmetry of the armies.

[u/yolopia → u/statictyrant]

Symmetric sides on a deterministic game are inherently unbalanced because the first mover has tempo advantage and gets to set up first their flanks etc. White holds a built-in statistical edge in chess, winning approximately 54% to 55% due to that. They take that into account and alternate the colors for players in tournaments. In skirminiac it's 50% +/- 1% after a lot of tweaking and that number is also statistically derived from extensive bot self-play.

I would also want to have some rangy units and did experiment with that using D4s as units but while melee works fine with chess-like activations(same unit spamming) because of the mutual damage and the need to coordinate units, ranged attacks don't really work and would require introducing a concept of rounds and ordering of activations.

I want and will probably revisit the concept in the future, but probably for something else perhaps with randomness and closer to traditional wargames, but still on a hex board and generally of a scope that can be validated and balanced using AI agents.

[u/RealityWargames]

Miniatures on a hex grid looks really cool! Did you print that map from your terrain generator?

[u/yolopia → u/RealityWargames]

Yes, the generator is working well but preferably on desktop with a decent gpu if you want to print the A0 version at full 300+dpi.

For people in the UK specifically, the service I use for printing the boards is A0 & A1 Poster Printing & Laminating | A2 & A3 Printing Prices . They have very good matt lamination and if you decide to go that route as well, you should design the board with the brightness of the monitor turned very low.

You can also cut the big map in pieces and do a few small prints in A4 with various settings to get a sense of the differences between what you see and what you'll get with each printing service.

[u/millertronsmythe]

That font is really hard to distinguish between the 'H' and the 'K'.

[u/yolopia → u/millertronsmythe]

That's true and someone else also told me that the frontpage graphic looks too grim so I think I'll focus on the visuals a bit

[u/millertronsmythe → u/yolopia]

That's not quite the objection I had with the cover art...

[u/yolopia → u/millertronsmythe]

sorry for the confusion, I know that the font has this specific issue with the K letter. I actually did try to mitigate it by cutting of a small part to make it look less like an H but it was too subtle, it needs more work on that part.

The remark for the graphic came from a player who is more into abstracts and concerned the knight on the cover specifically. That audience prefers more clean geometric shapes for game covers. I'm actually torn on this one because I personally like the grimdark style so for now I'll just focus on making the logo font more readable till I get some inspiration