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I just had a random idea which I want to hash out and see what everyone thinks for a wargame mechanic.

So, the concept is that every unit in your army is allocated a card, and you have a hand of all of these cards (thinking 5-10 units per side tops).

Your army will have a leadership/initiative value based on the leader, which denotes how far ahead you need to plan - higher numbers mean worse initiative.

The cards are used by placing them face down in a pile. New cards go underneath. Each activation (AA) you draw the card off the top and activate its corresponding unit, then place a new card from your hand to the bottom of the deck.

This would mean that someone with Initiative 1 would need to have a single card at a time, allowing them to adapt quickly to a changing battlefield. A worse initiative of 3 would need to have 3 cards in front of them, so when they play an activation, they have to consider the 2 activations they've already got planned, making them less responsive to needing to change plans.

My thought was that everyone would start at 1, and then perhaps each time the leader is slain and a new leader chosen, the number increases by 1 - your army loses co-ordination.

This could be built upon by allowing some commanders to influence the stack, such as re-ordering them. Maybe command units will have extra cards to add in (removed from your hand when they die) which have effects when drawn (EG "order an artillery strike on a single piece of terrain, then activate the next card"), so that you can pull off cool tactics.


It's a random thought I've suddenly melded across from a fighting game I conceptualised which was all about how quick your reactions are, which I scrapped because it basically stripped you of most of your agency, whereas here you are still free to act however you want, but only with the unit you planned to!

What are peoples thoughts? My thoughts are:

- gives an army wide mechanic to be affected which denotes how well commanded it is
- makes people plan ahead and can make some armies physically weaker but more adaptive - jack of all trades units will be better for flexibility, where specialised ones will shine if they pull off the attack
- makes targeting unactivated units more risky, as ones which have already activated are predictable
- could be a challenge to get used to, and might not work
- potentially abusable if too much of the game affects it

I might have a go at building this into my eternally-being-designed wargame at some point!

Something from a similar system I wasy playing around with years back that might interest you.

When units were activated they didn't return directly to the hand, instead they were placed in the 'unit queue'.

The queue was a line of numbered boxes - and each box could contain any number of queued cards.

At the end of each turn cards in the queue move one spot down and are returned to the players when they reach spot 0.

This caters for ponderous units (i.e. artillery) and spam prevention on unit-specific special attacks (i.e. an infantry unit throwing a hail of grenades might be 'queue 3', while their normal action is just 'queue 1')

It also had the potential for 'charge up' and delayed actions - delare the action, place the card sideways in your queue, and when it returns to your hand the delayed action occurs immediately and out of sequence.

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The main issue I had was unit speed on the table when someone could pick and move the same unit over and over and over. In (limited) testing the factions tended to move in a very piecemeal way.

IIRC the last varition allowed the player to move and conduct ongoing melee on every single unit in their hand before of after they played their activated unit (but the other cards in their stack or queue had to wait).

'Hero' units were exceptions, allowed to move and defend even while in the queue/stack.

Have you played Star Wars: Armada? It has a similar mechanic but per-ship rather than across your whole army. You have to commit to a ship's orders (maximum firepower, maximum movement, etc) on a dial that goes on a stack and you reveal one dial per turn. Small ships have a stack of a single dial and get to choose the orders they'll have on the following turn, larger ships have 2-3 dials in the stack so you have to plan your orders multiple turns in advance (with some degree of stack manipulation from upgrades you can buy). IMO you want something like that, where the unit's card in the stack also includes its orders. Otherwise you get the weird scenario where how fast a unit reacts at all depends on the chain of command being intact, but once you reach the "hey guys do something" trigger you can freely choose what it does. So it takes time to get the unit to start listening to orders, but once it responds the messages suddenly become instant?

And I'd definitely not use the "everyone starts at 1, modified by +1 each time you lose your commander". Command units like that tend to get stuck behind cover all game where they're as safe as possible, so what you're effectively doing is saying that most of the time everyone uses a single card and ignores the mechanic but then randomly you'll lose the wrong unit and have to start stacking up orders. Consider using more of the design space to make this a more consistently relevant factor. All but the fastest-reacting armies should have at least a stack of two cards, and several should have three or more. And consider having more effects than just a dead officer add to the size of the stack: EW jamming, weather conditions, etc.