Trench Crusade has one of the most striking aesthetics in contemporary miniature wargames, and that style is a massive draw for new players - but it's the fast-moving yet deep rules engine that keeps players coming back. In part two of Wargamer's interview with lead designer and rules architect Tuomas Pirinen, he explains the inspirations behind the innovative core rules.
While Trench Crusade's success has been meteoric, it didn't look like such a sure fire thing when Pirinen partnered up with artist Mike Franchina and sculptor James Sheriff to develop a wargame from Franchina's original designs. "I didn't for a moment believe we'd get this kind of a success", Pirinen says, "I thought What do I need to do in order to get players to give this game a chance?".
"I had a clear goal; the more barriers to entry you put in, the more players you lose each step", Pirinen says. He knew he needed to remove those barriers. It was a directive for the game that went beyond rules design: "We've committed that the core rules are always going to be free of charge on our website", he says, "same thing for the warbands" which can be represented with any miniatures you want to use.
"I want[ed] the combat resolution, which is the heart of any war game, to be as tight as possible", Pirinen says. "Most games average four or five dice rolls in order to decide what happens in an attack" - rolling to hit, to deal damage, for a potential armor save, and then for the amount damage or the kind of injury that results. "I squeezed it into two [rolls] without (I believe) losing any of the granularity; what kind of wound it is, how does your ability in melee combat affect it, for example".
For the unfamiliar, Trench Crusade uses a 2D6 system for tests, either looking for a 7+ total in a regular Success Role for an action like shooting a target with a bolt-action rifle, or referring to a chart to see the outcome of an Injury Roll. Pirinen says that getting a version of this system which still felt appropriately dramatic "was by far the hardest part of the rules".
It goes hand in hand with another piece of design minimalism, "squeezing the [unit] statline into something [so small] that you can learn your entire warband's statline by heart very quickly", to minimize the amount of time players need to spend referencing specific stats. Units have a movement speed, an innate bonus to their melee or ranged attacks, and that's about it. Despite this narrow foundation, a variety of keyworded abilities, unique unit special rules, and equipment manage to make every unit and faction feel distinctive.
"I want to keep players invested even when it's not their turn", Pirinen says. "Of course, obviously I love Warhammer" - he worked on several editions of it while employed at Games Workshop - "but the amount of time I've spent more than an hour waiting for my opponent to finish a turn and I can't do anything is not ideal". Blood Markers are one way that Trench Crusade keeps the non-active player engaged.
Trench Crusade is very light on defensive stats: a model that is hit will either be killed, gain a blood marker, or get knocked down and bloodied. Unlike hitpoints or even flesh wounds in Necromunda, blood markers aren't just a passive status to track. They're a resource for the opponent to spend, either to boost their own attack against the bloodied model, to penalize it when it attempts to take an action, or (in the case of the daemonic Court), to cast spells.
He also mentions the way scattering blast attacks work - the opponent determines the direction of a scatter - as another design that came about in order to engage players on their opponent's turn. It has other benefits: "you don't start arguing about what direction it goes in" as you interpret a wonky scatter die, "and it's far more likely something interesting happens" as an Artillery Witch's bomb drifts towards a cluster of unsuspecting allies. "Everything followed this principle of the maximum depth at the minimum amount of complexity", Pirinen says.
The activation system is another area where Pirinen has done a lot with very few rules. Models are free to take multiple actions in a turn, provided they don't repeat an action, in an order their controller chooses. But some actions are Risky - should the model fail a Risky action, their turn ends. "If you pull off a Sprint in the beginning of your activation you have a huge advantage because you have the second move banked, you can make a hugely long charge based on that - but it's a Risky action", and it might not succeed.
It creates opportunities for daring plays and humiliating failures. "You can shoot with an assault weapon, climb up a ladder, do a diving charge with your bayonet", Pirinen says, a heroic sequence of actions that is balanced out not by expending a large budget of action points, but because there's a chance a bad dice roll will leave your figure hanging out in the wind. "People now say when they play Trench Crusade 'Oh, of course that's how you do it!', but it was much harder before when [we] had to trailblaze it".
Pirinen's name has a lot of pedigree in the skirmish wargaming world, thanks to his role as lead designer on Games Workshop's 1999 classic Mordheim. After two decades out of the tabletop gaming industry, his return with Trench Crusade is extremely welcome. To learn how he hopes to train a new generation of great games developers, check out the first part of Wargamer's interview with him.
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