Game Design: Part 1; Scale and Size

So I thought for my first post about the game I'm in the process of deigning that I would start at what I consider the beginning.  This is the size of the game, the scale of the miniatures and the setting of the game as these three things lay the foundations on which to build the mechanics and forces of the game.  In this post I discuss my thoughts on the size and scale aspects with the setting being the topic of my next post.

The first decision to make is the size of the game you want to make, by which I mean whether you want a skirmish, clash, battle or huge battle as the different sizes need different types of mechanics to make them flow as a game.   For example skirmish games generally focus onto individual soldiers whereas for huge battle games, your playing pieces get more abstracted using multiple soldiers per base for example or one soldier representing multiple soldiers.  

All the sizes have their pros and cons, skirmish games often allow for larger character presence and almost movie style heroics and cinematic moments but often miss showing the players the full extent of the conflict while the larger sizes are the opposite showing the scale of a true conflict while the individuality of the soldiers is diminished.  This means that on average the amount of book keeping for each size is roughly the same as skirmishes often have multiple things to keep track of for each model but use a handful whereas battle sizes have lots of pieces on the table but have only 1 or 2 things to be tracked often for a collection of pieces rather than individually.  The size of game you want to do often goes hand in hand with the scale of the miniatures you want to use for it.

When picking the scale of minis you have to keep in mind that your players will have a limited amount of space for playing and storing models so as the number of models needed for a game increases the scale of the minis needs to decrease.  This means that large minis such as the 54mm Inquisitor models from Games Workshop are perfect for skirmish games but are not at all suited to play a game such as Warhammer 40,000 as you'd need such a large table that it would be unplayable.  This relationship between scale and size mean that a choice of one will usually either decide or limit the choice of the other.

A comparison of Sherman Tanks at differing scales.

For my game I drew from experiences of what I've played and enjoyed, and for me there is something really cool bringing an army to a game that is an army so has multiple squads of infantry supported by tanks, planes and artillery and getting to experience a full battle rather than focusing in on a small handful of guys.  This is not to say I don't enjoy that kind of game or that they are bad games but that if I was given a choice between something like Flames of War and Infinity, I'd pick Flames because I like driving squadrons of tanks about a battlefield more than commanding a small squad.  

This is my kind of game with lots of units and lots of options.
Forge World Calth Board from Warhammer Fest 2014 

This meant that when planning my game I had the idea that it would be a battle or huge battle scale game which meant that I knew that I needed to pick a smaller scale.  The scale I ended up picking was 1:72 scale inspired by some model kits that I saw and to me it gives a balance between being small enough to sensibly play a full battle while keeping a good amount of fine detail.

I hope this starts to give you an insight into my process of designing a game, and might even be helpful for you if you're thinking of doing the same.  If you have helpful comments or even criticism please post it and keep an eye out for part 2.