A few months ago, I became aware of a newer company called Accurate Simulations. I visited their website and found out that they had a new game coming out in early May called Desert Storm: The Hundred Hour War designed by Eric Harvey. I purchased a copy and decided to reach out to the designer to see if we could get some information on the design. Eric was very happy to provide details and quickly responded with the following information.

Grant: First off Eric please tell us a little about yourself. What are your hobbies? What’s your day job?

Eric: Wargames have been a fascination for me since I was teenager, and while I had played Risk! when I was a kid, I was given, as a Christmas gift one year, the game Panzer Leader. When I opened it and saw what it was, I was enthralled. The whole thing just looked so cool. Like Joseph Miranda once said to me, it was like this whole other world in a box that you could step into. That began an interest in the hobby that I’ve always enjoyed. The good thing is that I found pretty much any historical era fun and interesting, so while I tend to lean towards wargames set during the 20th Century and later, I equally enjoy a good Civil War or Napoleonic game, as well as a game set in the Ancients era. A good wargame is a good wargame, whether playing the Romans or Pirates or Napoleon or Klingons or whatever, I really do enjoy it all. Likewise, I can enjoy the complex wargames (I was big into ASL for example) as well as a simple wargame as long as it gives the right feel for the conflict.

Grant: What motivated you to break into game design? What have you enjoyed most about the experience thus far?

Eric: Probably like most every designer, it starts with an inclination to fix something about a particular game that doesn’t seem to work right or could be done better, and then it becomes an obsession to retool entire systems, and then that becomes an idea to design a whole game, and then you’re hooked.

Grant: You have 60+ games to your credit. What have you learned about design through the course of designing that many games?

Eric: Easily, the most valuable lesson I learned is that being rushed to design by a schedule or strict deadlines (such as with magazine games) is assuring that problems will surface. And, when such problems inevitably do surface, there’s little time to fix them properly (or at all) if an intractable deadline looms. My advice to any aspiring wargame designer is to not let anything push a design (or the development) before it’s truly ready. Don’t be in a position to have to rush a design before it’s ready.

Grant: What historical period does your new game Desert Storm cover?

Eric: Desert Storm covers the 1990-1991 Gulf War. It was the shortest war in history that simultaneously spanned two decades. 😉

Grant: What did you want the subtitle of “The Hundred Hour War” to say to players about the game?

Eric: Though the game actually covers the months leading up to the war (and then the war itself, of course), I thought that the subtitle “The Hundred Hour War” sounded interestingly contradictory, as if to say, “How could a war only last a hundred hours?” The fact that the war only lasted a hundred hours says something about the conflict, it seems.  

Grant: Why was this a subject that drew your interest?

Eric: The main impetus for designing this game was all the new info about the war that became de-classified a few years ago. All this new data was a treasure trove because it meant that a new Desert Storm game could be designed that benefited from accurate stats and information that wasn’t all available previously.

Grant: What research did you do to get the details correct? What one must read source would you recommend?

Eric: Because Desert Storm occurred during the start of the data age, there is a wealth of superb details about the war available on the internet. Including many details that wouldn’t be found in print. As to books, they come in different varieties depending on their purpose, so Tom Clancy’s Into the Storm is a very narrative (not surprisingly) treatise, but then there is Chuck Horner’s book which is more technical (good data), and there’s also another Clancy book Every Man a Tiger, a great read for those that love reading about air operations. Clancy, being an accomplished writer, of course, adapted his writing talent to these topics, so they’re more vivid than we might normally get from other sources. Still the internet provided the nitty gritty details that made for a very accurate simulation.

Grant: How does the game incorporate the geopolitical events of the time that were so key in not only starting the conflict but causing it to continue over the next decade?

Eric: Ah, good question, that is actually the main feature of the game. The two card decks included in the game basically are a summary of the whole war on the political and diplomatic fronts, and players have to play these cards just as wisely as how they orchestrate the war on the map. Winning the war on the map is one thing, but you have to play the event cards to your advantage as well and use them to further your goals on the battlefield.

Grant: What is the scale of the game and force structure of units?

Eric: Division scale, with brigades and some smaller formations. The division scale here works great for this topic because the war was over so quickly, so it was all pretty straightforward at the division level.

Grant: What is the anatomy and layout of the unit counters?

Eric: Well the game was designed to be simple while still accurate, so land units only have a firepower number and a movement number with their national flag in the upper right along with some other bits of information. Air units have a bombing number and an air combat number. This makes combat easy and quick to resolve for the players (and without the use of CRT’s!).

Grant: What are the Suit markers and the Suit Marker Track? Why was this important to your vision for the game?

Eric: I wanted Desert Storm to be represented by the other dimensions that typified the war, such as diplomacy, public perception, economic impact, and also the human cost (casualties), and so the tracks are the barometer of these different aspects. I used the four common card Suits (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs) as easy symbols to represent these factors, and I liked that idea because every gamer can relate to the standard card Suits…it’s a neat sort of crossover of the traditional and the new.

Grant: What area does the map cover? What do the different icons on the map represent such as the gas masks, missiles and oil derricks?

Eric: The map encompasses most of Iraq and Kuwait from the Saudi border all the way up to Baghdad. In the game, for instance, the Coalition player can actually choose to drive on Baghdad if he wants to go for it (although there are risks associated with doing so, but it’s a viable strategy). As to the map symbols (like the gas mask), they represent all of the actual Iraqi weapon facilities or other infrastructure that was meaningful during the war. All of this was an enormous research effort, but the symbols on the map are all a 100% accurate accounting of where every Iraqi facility or installation was located, and it’s neat because bombing or capturing them actually matters in the game. There are chemical weapon facilities (represented by the gas masks), scud facilities (the missile symbols), and even things like oil pumping stations.

Grant: What is the general Sequence of Play and flow of the game?

Eric: First, players draw and select an Event Card to play from their own card deck. Every card in the game has two unique events (one on each side), every event a historical occurrence. These cards are one method to manage the Suit Tracks (i.e., you can try to play a card to get some specific Suit of your choice to go higher on the track).

After that, it’s the typical move and then combat mechanism, although there is a phase for air units to bomb prior to movement. This gives the Coalition the opportunity to bomb and potentially degrade Iraqi units before engaging them in ground combat. This is important because Iraqi divisions, especially the Republican Guard, can be a menace if the Coalition barrels into them without bombing them first. And, this is what the Coalition did historically, so the Sequence of Play matches history in that way.

Grant: How does the game use cards? Can you show us a few examples these cards and explain how they work?

Eric: Both players receive three cards each turn (six possible historic events). Each card is printed with a specific Suit (hearts, diamonds, spade, clubs, or even the joker), and so a player can play a certain card (such as “U.S. Jams Iraqi SAM’s”) to try to bump up his particular Suit marker on the Suit Track. Ah, but what Suit to play? Perhaps the Coalition player is bombing Iraq’s infrastructure, which gives the Coalition a bump on the diamonds track (the “diamonds” Suit represent the economic dimension of the war, i.e., diamonds = money), and so the Iraqi player plays a diamonds event to offset that. Throughout the game, there is this endeavor to gain various Suits on the track via actions on the map, and then Event Cards that augment that.

Grant: How does land combat work?

Eric: Inasmuch as I wanted the game to be quick and give that sense of the lightning speed of the campaign, land combat is simple yet works well. There’s no CRT, each unit simply has a firepower value, and when it attacks or defends, the player rolls a die against that value, and it either hits or not. What I like about it is that a defending player, whether his unit is hit or not, can voluntarily give up his option to roll a defense die roll and try to retreat instead. This doesn’t undo a step loss it may have suffered, but the defending unit can try to “get away” rather than fighting back. That gives a surprisingly dynamic land combat system for simple rules because it’s thus helpful to try and surround enemy units if possible (just like in reality) with the need for cumbersome rules for surrounding modifiers or things like that.

Grant: How does air to air combat work?

Eric: Air combat is like land combat (each air unit has an air combat value, and you roll a die against that value to get a hit on your opponent’s air unit). Better jets like F-16’s almost cannot miss, but older jets like the Iraqi MiG-21’s are still a menace to any unescorted Coalition bomber. Nonetheless, even an A-10 can actually defend itself in air combat, but it’s not likely to prevail against something like the Iraqi MiG-29 unit (there is one such Iraqi MiG-29 unit in the game), so air combat gives all the feel of the different qualities of older and modern aircraft in a way that just feels right.

Grant: How did you include insurgents in the game? How do they affect Coalition forces?

Eric: This is a neat thing because insurgents are really only an issue for the Coalition if he attempts to drive on Baghdad. Of course, capturing Baghdad is a big victory bump, but every Iraqi city and town en route that a Coalition unit enters therefore risks encountering insurgents, and so some bad insurgent rolls could hurt the Coalition (not simply in terms of step losses, but also the effects on the Suit Track), and this was precisely what happened when the U.S. drove on Baghdad in 2003. So, the Coalition player can do that in this game to take Baghdad and unseat Saddam, but he might get ambushed frequently and take a lot of losses. That could be enough to bend public perception about the war, so it’s something to be considered carefully when playing.

Grant: How does each side obtain victory? How do the Suits play into the concept of victory for both sides?

Eric: For both sides, whichever side has the most Suit markers highest on the Suit Tracks wins the game. This means that a player could potentially win militarily, but if he failed to pay attention to the diplomatic side of the war, he could lose politically even if he won martially…I suppose something like what happened to Churchill after the Second World War ended. The Suits (gained by map objectives, card play, and inflicted casualties) are essentially victory points, except that they are different kinds of victory points, so you need the most quantity of the five Suits to win by the end of the game.

Grant: What type of experience does the game create?

Eric: Mostly, it is a wargame that concurrently emphasizes the political and diplomatic angle of the war, so it’s not simply enough for the Coalition to run roughshod over the Iraqi army, the players have this sort of public perception war going on in the background. Maybe, for example, the French assembly votes to give Saddam more time to comply with international sanctions whereas the U.S. wants to eject Saddam from Kuwait sooner rather than later, so there’s all these things going on in a simple card-play mechanism while players are also fighting out the war on the map.

Grant: What are some general strategies for both the Coalition player and Iraqi player?

Eric: Well, I have always had a policy to not offer strategy advice so that players can have the fun of figuring it all out themselves. Nevertheless, I’ll mention that the Coalition player will make a mistake if he plows into the Iraqi army without first bombing it, or if he tries to fight an attrition war. That will simply result in a lot of Coalition casualties even if the Iraqi army is ultimately defeated. For the Iraqi side, keep a healthy reserve in the Iraqi interior in case the Coalition decides to make a run for Baghdad (or a run to capture Iraqi infrastructure).

Grant: What are you most pleased about with the design?

Eric: Probably the accuracy of the Order-of-Battle and all the map details. A lot of effort went into researching all the unit and map data. Where the map shows, for example, the Al Atheer Scud and Warhead R&D Facility on the map, that hex is precisely where that actual facility was located. While I think the Event Card system is a new concept in wargamedom and thus has a certain innovation about it, I just think accurate OOB’s and map details are really neat above even innovative concepts or systems.

Grant: What other designs are you working on?

Eric: The next game, named The Last War, is a design that uses this (Desert Storm) system; it’s the Warsaw Pact invasion of NATO in the late 1980’s. Using the same system and rules, it will be equally easy and fun to play, but with three times more pieces than Desert Storm. In that sense, Desert Storm becomes a great intro game for what will become a larger and grander version of the system, so playing Desert Storm gears you up to play the bigger Warsaw Pact/NATO game when it comes out.

The game is thankfully already proving to be popular, so I hope these answers give a good summary of the game as a whole, particularly its more innovative features. We’ll likely see this system again with future designs. 🙂

Thanks for your time in answering our questions about the game Eric. When I first saw the advertisement on Facebook, I was immediately drawn in, purchased a copy and it is now at home being drooled over. We have not had a chance to play it yet but it is on the docket and we hope to play it in the next few months. Looks great!

If you are interested in Desert Storm: The Hundred Hour War, you can order a copy for $64.00 from the Accurate Simulations website at the following link: https://www.accuratesimulations.com/?product=ancient-war-sample-product-2-copy

-Grant