Daimyo is a set of fast-play, mass battle wargames rules set during Japan's Sengoku period. Author, Alexander Smith, explores his inspirations for the systems and his intentions for the design. 

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Inspiration

I owe a lot of my fascination with the samurai period to my father, who introduced me to the world of Kurosawa and Clavell at an impressionable age. That interest was further solidified when I played Shogun: Total War for the first time. Even now, 25 years later, I still remember it absolutely blowing my mind.  

Finally, my interest was turned into practice when I received a large lot of Perry Brothers samurai miniatures in a trade. Delighted with my beautiful new army, I started my hunt for the perfect ruleset to field them in. 
While there are plenty of excellent skirmish rulesets set in the world of the samurai, mass battle games are few and far between, or at least were when I started writing Daimyo (ironically about half a dozen mass battle samurai wargames have been released since then). Unsatisfied with my options, I decided to begin working on my own ruleset.

Cover illustration by Giuseppe Rava

Development

Whenever I write, I typically start with an outline, so for Daimyo I started with a few guiding design principles. The first was that the ruleset should allow players to complete a large game in an afternoon. I’m a teacher and a father, which means my own time is limited and I simply don’t have all day to finish a game anymore.  
The second principal was to, as much as possible, keep the action on the tabletop. Wherever possible, my desire was to minimize the amount players would need to reference the rulebook to avoid interrupting play. 
Third, I wanted Daimyo to be as scale and basing agnostic as possible so that players with existing collections could play it without impediment.

Lastly, I wanted Daimyo to use an alternative to the I-GO-U-GO activation system. No offense to the venerable mechanic, but wargaming has evolved dramatically in recent years, and there are now just so many more exciting ways to handle activation!

Keep It Simple, Samurai

One of the first decisions I landed on was expressing unit stats as quality dice, a system Force on Force or Dracula’s America players might recognize.  

Essentially, all rolls in the game need a 5+ to succeed, without exception. The dice that units roll is determined by their quality. For example, lowly peasants roll D6’s, Ashigaru D8’s, while mighty samurai roll D10’s – all of which are looking for 5+’s to succeed. Because the success target number is never modified, players can instantly determine which of their dice have rolled a success or failure, without needing to consult a chart. What modifiers do exist in the game largely affect the number of dice a unit might roll, or occasionally upgrade or downgrade the quality of dice they get to roll.

Morale

Morale was another area I wanted to make impactful without adding too much bloat. My theory of morale is that soldiers are more cognizant of losses to their own unit than the amount of damage they are inflicting on the enemy. So, rather than using a comparative model for testing morale (for example, which side inflicted more damage on the enemy in melee) I instead opted for units to test for morale based on their remaining unit strength. The chance of a unit successfully passing a morale test shrinks as they take casualties, reflecting the dwindling appetite for combat among the soldiers as their ranks thin and comrades fall. This means commanders will need to be careful with their damaged units, lest their fragile morale break, and they flee from the battlefield.  

Conclusion

The most intricate mechanic in Daimyo is certainly the Order System, which governs activation order and what actions units may undertake. But that is a topic I will cover in-depth in the next Dev Diary! 

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 Daimyo is available July & is available to pre-order now.

Check in next week to read the next part of the design diary.

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