October 2, 1998 - Interview
Fireside Chat with Kevin Zucker
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The following Interview with Game Designer and Operational Studies Group Publisher, Kevin Zucker, was conducted at One World Cafe in South Baltimore, 22 September, 1998. Kevin Zucker (KZ), Dave Schubert (DS), Andy Joy (AJ) participants on behalf of ConsimWorld.COM.

BEGINNINGS AT SPI
AJ: Can you talk about your career in gaming?

KZ: I started working at SPI in '72. I was supposed to be editor of Moves, but that job was taken by somebody else before I started working there ... so I did some game development. I worked on about six games in about three months. But I sort of got tired of that, so I went back home to California for a while.

AJ: That's where you're from?

KZ: That's where I was living at the time. I ended up back at SPI again and started doing rules editing.

DS: How did you first get into gaming anyway?

KZ: My dad was in the military, that had something to do with it. I was always interested in the maps I could get from my dad ... the global navigation maps the Air Force used. I was always interested in the military, but I was never going to have a career in the military because of the Vietnam War. I was against that, so I sublimated my military interest into the games.

I was editing rules for SPI. I edited 96 game rules in two years if you count every quad game. I had a system, a checklist, a clipboard for every game. Where is this, what stage is it in: editing, proof-reading, type-setting, paste-up, checking, final and I just moved stuff right down that checklist. So I was pretty efficient, they decided "well, we could get more production out of this guy here." So they said, "Let's start doing quadri-games." So I'm like, "Let me get this straight. You want to go from doing two magazines every six months and two boxed games and an issue game, to doing one boxed game and one as a quadri-game. Which means we're sort of doubling the number of games." So to protect myself (during the first quadri-game, which was BLUE AND GREY) I got the designers together in a room and said, "You're not leaving until you guys agree on the basic concepts of your four games, so we can have one set of rules. Because it's too much work."

AJ: Had nobody done a set of standard rules before this?

KZ: No, this was the first.

DS: So how many days did they sit in that room?

KZ: (laughs) They didn't want to waste time. They may have been pissed at me, but I just said, "Look that's too bad. If you can't get along with the way Movement works, then you make an exclusive rule for your game." I told them that I thought wargaming was mature enough now that we don't have to keep re-inventing the wheel of how movement works. We can just take that as a given. And what that did was it forced people to look for other areas like leadership. At that point, leadership wasn't really touched on at all. It forced them to look for new areas to innovate.

AJ: So, this is the first standard rules game? When was this, around '72?

KZ: No, this is in '74 or so. I quit at the end of '76. Oct of 72 to Jan of '77 ... about four and a half years.

KZ: But I really wasn't doing design, I was editing rules. My first design was a quad game: "BLOODY RIDGE" ISLAND WAR QUAD. It was a silly game. A generic game with window dressing to make it look like Guadalcanal.

NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES
AJ: Why were you approached to design a game rather than just edit?

KZ: They had a rule that if you wrote a successful feedback question, you had to design the game. I had written a feedback question for NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES. I took this idea that this game (BLUE AND GREY) that had four related civil war battles and had the same standard rules ... what if we went one step further and related them even more - so that they actually were four battles from one campaign. And, hmm, weren't there four battles from Waterloo? And can't I draw a map for each of them and sure enough, they fit together. So I wrote that feedback question, and it came back very high (there hadn't been any Napoleon games for a while), so I had to design it. I took on issues like Leadership ... I was interested in making a game unlike all other wargames that was not a continuous front from one edge of the map to the other. That might be appropriate for World War Two or World War One, but it's not appropriate for Napoleonics. More appropriate is the model of naval fleets in the Napoleonic era. So I created some rules that I hoped would cause little task forces to move around. I sort of got in that direction, but people still play that game with continuous fronts. At least they try to. So I said I've got to go to a different scale. That's when I tried thinking of the NAPOLEON AT BAY system with has two miles hexes, but I tried it first at one mile - but I was unsuccessful in accomplishing what I wanted to do at one miles hexes.

AJ: And what was the scale of NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES?

KZ: 480 meters or 525 yards per hex. One hour turns. So I tried a variety of scales. And I used NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES as a model for what could happen over larger time periods. I'd look at the outcome finally when I ended up with my two mile hexes, two day turns. So I said "what can happen in Last Battles in two days?" These guys can fight down here and two days later they can end up way back there. So I had to build the pursuit/retreat thing into the combat system. I used Waterloo as a test bed. I knew that campaign now after doing NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES. So basically, I kept building on my research. That's one of the reasons I kept with the Napoleonic subject. I kept getting more and more knowledge about how things worked, and a lot of things about warfare in the era don't change. Those things are those things you run across, they're not the things deliberately talked about. Things like shoes wearing out. Supplies and how they did that. Those are the factors ... supply is generally ignored in military history and as a result it's ignored in games. When I went to do "Napoleon at Bay," I still had a problem.

A traditional wargame of that era could not model the 1814 campaign because you had the French outnumbered two-and-a-half to one over the entire front. Regular wargames arbitrarily assign huge strength factors to the French. Well, there were good designers of the era who were not above doing that stuff. But I said, "I'm not going to do that. In fact, I'm going to make every strength point worth a thousand men." You can quibble with me about that. Maybe the guard should be worth more, maybe you think I should build the guards excellence into their combat strength. Maybe so, but I'm going to use other methods to show why the French were able to do as well as they were rather than just simply arbitrarily assigning them whatever number combat strength they need to win the game; which is too easy. And that sometimes was the modus operandi ... "we seem to be having a balance problem with the game. Well, try taking a strength point off the Prussian units and try it again." What is that telling you? You're not learning anything. So I said, "I'm using one strength point for every thousand guys for all the armies, for all the troops."

I was reading in Chandler, about the campaign, and he mentioned the phrase "strategic consumption." Strategic consumption is detachments left to guard bridges when you're in enemy territory. You've got to guard your line of communication. A battalion here, a battalion there, pretty soon your army is melting away. Plus, your army is melting away anyway because they're in enemy territory and a little partisan band comes out and grabs a guy here or there, guys get lost, guys go native, guys get sick and die. They're not nourished properly, so they're susceptible to disease. Also the hygiene around an army camp in 1814 was not very high. And if one guy had a disease, everybody else stepped in it basically.

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Copyright © 1999-2002. ConsimWorld.COM. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Web Masters are encouraged to link directly to this page, this URL is not subject to change. For general site information: kranz@consimworld.com

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Copyright © 1999, 2000 ConsimWorld.COM. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Web Masters are encouraged to link directly to this page, this URL is not subject to change. For general site information: kranz@consimworld.com