Percy Tyrone "Ty" Beard designed
FFT after becoming frustrated with existing modern wargames like
Combined Arms by
Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). He felt that most were too slow and tended to focus on minutiae rather than on the important concepts. After an eight-hour game of
Combined Arms that only resolved four turns and ended in a draw when the players all had to go home, Ty decided to design his own game.
In Beard’s game design paradigm, there is a finite amount of detail that can be put into a game before it becomes unplayable. This means that game designers must ration the amount of detail and abstract anything that is not critical to the game. Meaning that, in the case of
FFT, the vehicle combat system is fairly detailed, while the rules for artillery fire are abstract.
In addition, he believed that speed of play was critical in any simulation of modern warfare, so he streamlined every
FFT subsystem to speed up play. As a result, turns typically take only 10 minutes or so. A two-player battle between a US
battalion task force and a Soviet
regiment usually takes one to three hours. And since Beard designed
FFT to easily accommodate multiple players on a side, it usually takes the same amount of time to fight much larger battles.
www.etsy.com
www.youtube.com
