Introduction

Dan Verssen has a significant amount of acclaimed tabletop board and card game designs to his credit.  Rise of the Luftwaffe, the Star Trek Collectible Dice Game, 7th Sea, and Zero are just some of his designs from his prolific 15 years of work.  Despite his notable success with these offline tabletop games, Verssen has decided its time to join the information age and so he is currently converting two of his more popular works to the PC, Modern Naval Battles and Down in Flames.  The projects are classic turn-based card games, so their conversion into PC games struck us an intriguing and challenging project.  We recently talked with Verssen to learn more about his first two computer games, scheduled for publication later this year by Battlefront. 

Battlefront and Dan Verssen contributed 10 screenshots from Down in Flames for this interview.  No screenshots were available for Modern Naval Battles.

Interview

The Wargamer:  Dan, could you give us a background of who you are.

Dan Verssen: My game designing career started in high school when I started modifying already published games with my own house rules. I then inflicted my gaming group with these early attempts and luckily for me they were willing to put up with these early attempts at “improving” games. Advanced Dungeon and Dragons, Traveller, Axis and Allies, and several others were all victims of my modifications.

By late high school I was attempting to design my own games. This was back in 1982, so desktop computers were very limited at the time. We had none of the great desktop publishing software back then like we do now, but it was still a major leap forward from pencil drawn pictures and words written on 3x5 note cards. I remember one attempt was to make a Star Wars ship combat game. At the time, I couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for George Lucas to simply sign a piece of paper saying it was okay for me to use his universe for my game. I did receive several written pages from the LFL legal department explaining why it wasn’t okay, and what would happen if it tried it without their permission.

WG: Give us a brief history of Modern Naval Battles as a card game.

DV: I started designing what was to be my first published game in the mid ‘80s. Modern Naval Battles was inspired by the books Red Storm Rising and Show of Force. Both involved modern day naval battles and made the topic sound very exciting. I then tried to bring that feeling of excitement to the game, while keeping complexity and technical matters to a minimum. The game began on 3x5 note cards and was worked on here and there for a couple years. In 1988 a friend, Paul Phillabaum offered to help spruce up the game by creating the cards on his Mac Classic. So, with the mighty Mac Draw and Mac Paint at our disposal we set to work. I sent in the prototype to World Wide Wargames and they decided to publish it. The game came out in 1989 at Origins here in Los Angeles. I still remember walking through the doors to the dealer room and seeing the tall stacks of the game (it was the first time I had seen the final game) and people were actually buying them. For the rest of the convention I walked through the open gaming area to see who was playing the game.

WG: Give us a brief history of Down in Flames as a card game.

DV: My interest in aircraft began with the stories my dad told me about his years building aircraft at Lockheed during the 1960’s. This lead to reading books about airplanes and WWII and many late nights spent watching classic war movies like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo and 12 o’clock High. I had tried playing a few air games, but they were always very detailed and heavy with math and procedures. My goal in designing Down In Flames (DIF) was to capture the fast action and excitement of aerial combat rather than the physics of flight.

Down In Flames evolved out of two games, the first was a WWI game that had the basics of the ‘action-reaction’ core of DIF, and the other was a game that kind of got forgotten along the way called Sabre-Fresco about Korean War era dogfighting.

I showed the WWI game to the guys at GMT Games and they liked the mechanics, but thought that it would do better as a WWII era game. So, I switched out the aircraft and added a few features that made it more uniquely WWII and the first game was released as Rise of the Luftwaffe.