The
concept behind Fog of War is to try to get a little closer to being in the captain’s
chair. Players would have to make
decisions based on limited information on the board and limited input from
their fleet-mates.
Players
would not know who was on their side.
Everyone was given pseudonyms to hide their identities from each other.
Information about the enemy was limited by the Tac-Intel
rules (D17.0). We very quickly cut the
ranges given in the Information Chart (D17.3) by half, just to make it
interesting. For our purposes, the chart
was too generous with important information.
Ships
had a limited number of “radios” that could be used to send a single
200-character message or receive one.
Talk too much you may miss something from someone else. Messages were delayed by 8, later 4 impulses.
Which meant some advice from the chain of command would come a bit late to be
useful
There
have been 8 FOG games to date and every one is
unique.
FOG
Games
FOG 0: A Starbase raid that was used as a
proving ground for the rules, originally written by Jeff (Blackbeard) Tonglet.
FOG 1: A deep-space fleet battle with Alliance ships (Federation, Kzinti, Tholian, Gorn, Hydran)
on one side and Coalition (Klingon, Romulan Lyran) on the other
FOG 2: (archived
here) A modified version of FOG1
where races on each side were picked, not assigned by General War allegiance.
FOG 3: (archived
here) A departure from FOGs 1 and 2, the game played out the
scenario “Rescue the Kishawk”
FOG 4: A return to large-fleet battles. This game had a false start (archived here), went back to the drawing
board, and began again. (archived here).
FOG 5: This FOG split the players into four squadrons as well as
the available races. Each squadron had
an ally squadron out there, but no side started the game knowing who that was.
FOG 6: (archived
here) A return to 2-sided fleet games that made all races
available to both sides and experimented with allowing Tholians
to use snares.
FOG 7: Up to now fleets were built by committee in the forums. This FOG had players assigned a certain
“bucket” of points to buy whatever they wanted.
Also ships were allowed unlimited-length communications within their
squadron of 3 or 4. They were still
delayed by 4 impulses.
FOG 8: (archived
here) This
FOG introduced Terrain in the form of the Stellar Matter Zone, a terrain built
for the scenario which cut the map in two with a fleet on each side. The fleets couldn’t see each other and had to
hope and guess when and where to cross.
FOG games were previously split between the planning phase using forums
at yahoo.com and then “combat phase” when the actual game started. FOG 8 left the forums open throughout the
game. In fact there was a set of forums
for both fleets on both sides of the map, owing to how difficult it was to
communicate through the terrain.
FOG-like games
E0004: Playing out a published scenario with FOG-style hidden
identities and limited communications, a full-scale Gorn
and Romulan fleet blunders into each other as they
each try to sneak through an ion storm to surprise-attack the other.
Survivor: Like the TV show players are
divided up between two sides which are pitted against each other. When the
numbers are thinned out enough, it’s a free for all! Like E004, the game used limited
communications and identities.
Drop a line to Vorlonagent.