The Bears made it to the table Saturday morning. The game didn't finish but everyone had fun. Some bears got scared early and "ran away" while others were very brave and were in several battles. Bears got ambushed from the woods and Leader Bears encouraged their friends to fight on. No pictures were taken.
A Beary Simple Wargame is complex enough for my 2nd grader. The Kindergartner might be able to understand some of the consequences but definitely isn't playing with a strategy. The pieces were all robust enough to be handled/dropped by the 2 year old. I'd call it a success.
I re-read The Far Side of the World. I think it's a little dice heavy. Each unit has an activation roll and likely has at least one roll for combat resolution. That's a lot of time spent finding empty space to roll and looking up/remembering results. If I'm going to get players in a strategic but not deterministic game, I'm going to need fewer rolls. This triggered an idea.
It's not quite a war game, but hopefully still compact and strategic. The thought is that players run horse stables. They start with a a small herd of average horses, a small stable and a small pasture. From their they can enter horses in races, breed their horses to grow their herd, or sell horses. The core mechanism is the breeding mechanic. Each horse is assigned a singular quality that stays with them their entire life. When they are paired with another horse for breeding, the sum of both horses' quality scores are added to a 2D6 roll. This determines the quality of their offspring.
A player trying to win through racing victories will likely keep a small number of high quality horses, while a player trying to win through market/contract sales will need a lot of horses and varying qualities. Because a horse can only do one action per turn, there should be some good strategic decisions about horse allocatons.
