In the lead up to the release of the Momentous Issue of War, we've made some executive decisions regarding the company.

The main one of note is that we've redesigned the logo, going for something more simplistic and sharp. We will still have our tag line "The Devil's in the Dice" in our hearts but we need something cleaner and more professional looking to present on the front of our publications.

Henceforth we will use the above logo and will be implementing it on the site from this week. The home page will be amended soon! 

We also have commissioned an awesome title logo for the front cover of "The momentous Issue of war".

Above you can see the working pages for the front and back of the book. Currently we're waiting on the final piece as the one we've received has one coloration issue. Soon though we will be ready to send this for test print which allows us to do a few things:

1. Finish the trailers!
2. Check colouring, photo resolutions, font scale and readability. 
   
3. The final format. 

Once we have the test print and these tasks completed we will be confident sending this to the crowd funding platform for people to help us get it off the ground and hopefully raise a little funding to support the hundreds of hours we've worked on WW products this last year and a bit. 

Keep your eyes peeled for more, coming very soon. 

~ Arthur

Hey everyone, Charles here, and I want to tell you about my personal thoughts about Kingdom & Command, and, of course, where it is in terms of development.

My thoughts on the game

In the past few weeks we've been running a playtest, and it's been a lot of fun. It's our longest playtest yet, and I've discovered that in addition to being a game, it's essentially writing a short story together. Just like game of D&D is creating and experiencing a story together,  this is writing one together.

It suits Arthur and me well, given that we're both writers (or at least like to think of ourselves as such!), and world creators in RPG games. Both of us have laughed, gasped and teared up from this game.

Developments on the game

The game is meant to be played by letters. However, to speed up playtesting, we decided to play this game by email. We will faithfully report below what we learned from this, but we nevertheless suggest playing by letters for the physical elements, explained in the first bullet point:

• The game plays perfectly via email instead of letters. Although one cannot use wax seals, letter folding or tea stained paper, the game retains all of the drama and story-based elements, which is the core part of the game.
• Just like with letters, swapping drawings is still totally doable. In fact, it means we could have one "master file" of a map that we exchanged with each letter, and here it is:

Continuing with what we learned:
​

• A "Stuff Tracker" is useful for - you guessed it - keeping track of stuff in the game. As with the map, both Arthur and I would add it to with each letter and send it back and forth:
  

What's next for the game? Not much:

• Commission a graphic designer for a front cover image.
• Finish off a few photographs for the book, just to spice it up, as with the images below.
• Edit in any desirable changes learned from our current playtest.
• Finish the playtest: just one letter left!

Oh, you're still here?...


Okay, I'll tell you one more thing about what makes this last letter special:

I'll be honest here, I'm a little frightened of how it might turn out. It's not just the end of a playtest game, but the end of a story.

Both Arthur and I have become invested in the lives and trials of characters we created together. Although I have creative license to direct the story and its ending, I believe fellow story writers can relate when I say that if a character becomes alive enough, they are no longer in your control.

I don't know how the story ends, but regardless, I adore the feeling of creating a vivid world, and I want to know how it turns out, even if I myself am the one to write it, and this is the feeling I want to share with the players of this game.

When playtesting Cretacea, we've used dinosaur models (painted by Arthur, a professional miniature painter)

When playtesting Cretacea, we've used dinosaur models (painted by Arthur, a professional miniature painter) however, we recognise that not everyone will have dinosaur miniatures at home, and some people will just want to pick up the book and play. For those people we include dinosaur tokens at the back of the book.

This will be a few pages you can print, and they'll have top-down pictures of dinosaurs that you can cut out and play with them as substitutes for models. So to give you the best possible play experience, we decided to outsource creating these tokens to an artist, Naizu.

Here's a picture from the brief we handed Naizu:

And here's a draft of what she produced:

Interesting note: observe the Compsognathus at the far left. For visual consistency, ​Naizu used the same brush for all the dinosaurs, but the difference in the dinosaurs' relative sizes meant that the Compsognathus would end up just a blob, so she'll increase its size a tiny bit to maintain design consistency and showcase the art and colours.

Although it sacrifices historicity, the game gains visual beauty. We often discuss balancing the game this way for things like realism, fun, speed, ease, beauty, etc.

If you like her work, click here for her instagram, Naizu's art is mixed and whimsical but she is working to a specific brief so that we cna bring you some serious and wonderful tokens!

More news soon. 

Hey everyone, Charles here to update you on Cretacea and tell you more about our dinosaurs.

Hey Charles, what's going on with Cretacea?

Well, as mentioned in the post on our Facebook Group, we've decided to relax the focus on Cretacea to allow more time to focus on our two other games, The Momentous Issue of War and Kingdom and Command. To put it simply: those two games are much smaller and easier to create, so even though we've been working on Cretacea for longer, we think we should focus on releasing something sooner to the patient public.

Okay, so is any progress being made on it?

Yes, we've run a few playtests for new dinosaurs, and we've outsourced some work to a hired artist. More on this to come in an upcoming blog post. As mentioned, our main focus has however been on our other games.

Cool! Stuff is happening. What can you tell me for now?

To start, let's talk about what everyone wants to know: the dinosaurs. Which ones are we adding? Well, to speed up the release, we're adding four new dinosaurs to begin with, and the rest will be stretch goals. This will ultimately increase quality by allowing us to work harder on each dinosaur individually.

Let's start with a new dinosaur:

​As mentioned in our last post on the blog and on Facebook, we've revamped the combat system to include more dice, and this will be one of the biggies.

Most of the time, it rolls three attack dice. This is one of the highest rolling dinosaurs in the game. It means that in most instances it could roll in the 3-18 range, whereas some small dinosaurs might only roll 1-6.

Specials are where a dinosaur gets to shine, and we went for a narrative approach with this one, focusing on its supposed amphibian lifestyle, and the strong bite and powerful tail... but you're going to have to wait for release to find out what they do!

Next up, we have fan-favourite:

​We've worked a lot on game balancing, and personally I'm a big fan of tactical and strategic games, which is why the stegosaurus is one of the most interesting dinosaurs to me.

Its attacks are varied, with a deadly tail on one side and an iddy-biddy head on the other (albeit with a powerfully sharp beak). Its attacks reflect this, meaning that you have to play well to use its best attacks, or else be caught out-manoeuvred!

And, of course, it's just an iconic dinosaur. Writing the specials for this one was fun, especially the Flush Plates rule, which was a Wicked Wargames hypothesis regarding intimidating tactics. The special lets it intimidate hostile dinosaurs.

Lastly, I want to tell you about a personal favourite, and one that comes a little bit out of the left field:

Yes, it's not technically a dinosaur, but it's too cool to omit, and we are mixing dinosaurs from different paleontological eras, after all. Also, if your imagination is running wild right now regarding ways the game could expand, imagine what ours has been doing! (We've been thinking an Ice Age expansion!)

This dinosaur will be a stretch goal, so I won't show the stat card, as it's still open for editing, even though it's been through some playtesting.

I just want to say that I love where this creature fits into the game design: a slow, sneaky boi that bites hard when he gets you, giving a sense of approaching danger. It was hard to decide on a special for the sail-fin, but ultimately we decided to go for a camouflage effect.

Okay that's cool, but -

Yes, it is cool.

No, listen, I have a ques-

Did you see the dinosaurs?

Yes, but about Cretacea and upd-

DINOSAURS!

​

Okay, seriously though... We know we've been quiet, but we have been working. More updates are coming. We remain focused on The Momentous Issue of War and Kingdom & Command as our higher priorities, but Cretacea is still happening.

​For example, we're outsourcing creating some dinosaur artwork for tokens to a professional artist, playtesting continuing when it can, Arthur continues to compile miniatures, and lots, lots more. Stay tuned for more on that.

Warmly,
​Charles

Hey, it's Arthur. Co-founder of Wicked Wargames. We have been busy bees and pushing forward on all the games in the business. We both work multiple other job, but we are making time to get these projects done by setting regular, dedicated working hours.

Since our last updates in October we have pivoted slighty and we have taken a new approach to our current targets. 

Here is a summary of the new goals:

1. The Momentous Issue of War
We aim to finish this first. The reasons for this are basic but sensible: it's a smaller project and is simple to playtest. (Quick, simple and snappy games of which we can bash out many in a day) . This means we can develop the game at a much faster pace. We have now gotten this rule set to a fairly complete position and are sending it to printers for test prints very soon. 

2. Cretacea
We are still working on Cretacea (believe it or not) and we have realigned to a larger project (again) with a broader scope. We are creating around twenty dinosaurs (where the original had just twelve) and we aim to provide at least fifteen of them in the core book with stretch goals on the planned kickstarter for more. It's all very exciting. UPDATES COMING TOMORROW

3. Kingdom & Command
We're powering through playtests for Kingdom and Command, our correspondence roleplaying game. It's a low-key favourite of ours due to its communicative nature being that we work remotely so communication is our forte. UPDATES COMING FRIDAY 

​Let's start in this post by talking about: 

We've been dedicating a lot of our time to the creation and playtesting of The Momentous Issue of War, our US Civil War "block game", which uses basic blocks of units and an 8x8 square grid.

​About the game
It's a riveting game, it plays like a well-thought-out and traditional board game, and when you play it you can almost feel like this game has existed forever which is such a nice feeling. The game is very tactical and also very quick (on average one hour per game), and one can really feel the magic and momentum of the battle as it ebbs and flows back and forth during the game. 

What's the status?
The game mechanics are done, and we're awaiting feedback from fresh-eyes friends with overall thoughts on book formatting. Test prints will follow that. We have playtested this game to a T and are very happy with the state of play.

We have also recently created a live playtest video. As we want our games at a professional standard, we decided to hire a videographer, and have no regrets. The video edit will be out soon so we can show you the fun and tactical nature of the game more personally.

Here's a snip from the editing program:

What does the book look like?
As seen from the images below, we've gone for a contemporary paper like background and a newspaper font for the titles, splattered with quotes from generals of war.

It features some awesome acrylic paint-style images of Civil War troops in action to supplement the methodical imagery of the gameplay examples.

Lastly, it's a short book, which is how we want it. We may release more parts for it in the future but it's currently very streamlined and quick to skim, which is great when you're at the table.

These previews are fairly small, but you'll have the book in time. For now, we're just showcasing look of it. Soon we'll have test copies in our hands (so excited!), and we'll be able to release better previews.

Come back tomorrow for updates on Cretacea and then later this week for updates on our writing game, Kingdom and Command.

​