Chad Ellis Interview

Battleground: Fantasy Warfare is a wargame played with cards instead of painted miniatures. It's a great game that has received an enormous amount of acclaim for making wargaming accessible to everyone, as wargames are traditionally very time and space consuming - not to mention very expensive due to the amount of miniatures that are required to build an army. Factor in the cost of paints, terrain and then the time it takes to prepare your armies and it becomes very clear why wargaming is such a niche hobby. Battleground: Fantasy Warfare is a real breath of fresh air for gamers who were always interested in wargaming, but never had the time or money to be able to play them. I recently had the chance to speak to the co-designer of Battleground: Fantasy Warfare - Chad Ellis - about the development of the game.

Chad, can you tell me a little about yourself? How did you get into the games industry, and what made you take the first step into game design?

Until starting Your Move Games, Inc., I had a pretty conventional "business" background. I was a securities analyst for several years with James Capel (now HSBC Securities) in London and New York, got my MBA from Harvard and then held a couple of different management positions. Most recently I ran a marketing department for SiemensMobile out of Munich.

Well, Siemens was closing down my business unit so I started thinking about what I would do next. I drove up to Berlin for the Magic World Championships (in which several of my friends were playing) and mentioned to Robert Dougherty that my dream would be to start my own company producing games. He replied that he had the same dream and that was about all it took!

I've always been a huge gamer. I was a chess fanatic for many years and then gradually shifted over to playing competitive Magic but I've always been up for learning and playing any new game. Robert and I met because he owns a retail game store (also called Your Move Games) and began playing and hanging out together from that.

Can you tell me a little about Your Move Games? Would you say that Your Move has a particular target audience or a house style? If so, how does Battleground fit into that?

Our game design philosophy is fairly broad, but we think it's only sensible to design the kinds of games we really like and understand. That means relatively meaty games with difficult strategic and tactical decisions.

Battleground fits us perfectly. It's got all the depth of a meaty table-top miniatures game. In fact, I think (and our early feedback supports this) that it's a better rules system than most miniatures games because we're really focused on the game itself rather than building cool models.

How long did Battleground take to design from concept to completion? How did this compare to other games that you have designed?

It depends a lot on when you define the start date! Robert developed the initial concept of a card-based miniatures game and the command action system several years ago, but didn't take it much beyond the concept stage. I'd say we began serious testing/development in August 2004, right after GenCon Indy.

Battleground was very development intensive and in fact still is. We first began working on the general system and figuring out how to point-cost units accurately. Gradually we refined the standing orders, command cards and final units for the initial factions. Finally we spent time trying to "break" the game - looking for
potential rules problems which are always a big danger when you're trying to simulate free-moving units.

Battleground is a very unique product, in the way that it takes an existing type of game and redefines it to make it far less time consuming and much more affordable. Did the recreation of wargame into card form present any headaches during its conception?

In essence Battleground is a unit-based miniatures game in which the miniatures are two dimensional rather than three, so using cards doesn't really create any major hassles and naturally makes things like setup and damage tracking much easier.

That said, our particular system involved some serious headaches - one of which was embarrassingly easy to fix once we hit on it.

As you know, Battleground uses a standing order system whereby you give units orders like "Close" or "Hold" and they carry them out. Robert's original vision for how we would represent this involved putting tokens on the cards, and that's how we playtested for several months.

As we developed the Men of Hawkshold army ability we were going to use tokens to represent that a unit had bravery. I asked, "Why not just circle the courage on the card? After all, we're writing directly on the cards to track damage." We tried it and it worked well. Then a week or so later, Darwin Kastle (who did a lot of development work with us) asked why we couldn't do the same thing with standing orders.

To this day Robert and I occasionally tease each other about how close we came to publishing Battleground with tokens for orders. It would have made the game clunky and much less attractive - and within a week of launch some player with a brain would have said, "The tokens are awkward but in my group we just write our orders on the cards."

Aesthetically, Battleground is very striking. Was the CGI-based visual style decided upon from the beginning? How easy was it to find artists that were able to come up with the style that you were looking for? Were they able to bring anything to the visuals that you weren't necessarily expecting?

We weren't thinking CGI at first. We used two Renderosity artists for Space Station Assault, but CGI is naturally better at spaceships than people, especially faces.

Our art conception emphasized that Battleground is a miniatures game that uses cards instead of models. We wanted a battle to look like a battle. We began by taking pictures of a bunch of Robert's miniatures to figure out how to capture that and also started looking around for artists.

What we quickly realized was that there were basically only two choices for our approach. We could either have an abstract game with really cool art but no battlefield "feel" or we could have above-ground shots with a very slight forward angle (anything over 15 degrees gives a vertigo effect) and identical vantage points.

That, by the way, is a disaster for conventional artists. Above-ground shots are really hard to do well, and we would need multiple artists to work to the same perspective with identical land backgrounds, etc. We weren't sure it could be done at all, let alone with any kind of sensible timeline or budget.

Fortunately I included Renderosity in my search for solutions and found an artist named David Lloyd, aka Flak. David had done some wonderful pieces represent an epic conflict between humans and skeletons that just blew us away. I contacted him and explained our project and requirements and after a few back-and-forths we had just what we were looking for. (Several other artists from Renderosity were also involved, although David did more pieces than anyone else - all the Men of Hawkshold plus the skeletons of the Undead army.)

What was particularly exciting for me was how each of the artists brought his own style to the project and yet was able to work within the constraints necessary to make it all look like a single battlefield. Also, while CGI isn't the best medium for human faces, it does some things amazingly well, such as "correct" shadows. That really helps create the battlefield effect we were looking for.

How has the reception to Battleground been at trade shows and conventions? Have you had any specific feedback that you are looking to incorporate into future editions or expansions?

We thought we were onto something big, but you never really know until you go public. We soft-launched Battleground at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas early this year. At that point our Command Cards were just cut out pieces of paper (with typed text) straight off of my printer and tucked into sleeves. We only had a handful of unit artwork - basically just some skeletons and humans. The graphic design on the units was OK but not as nice as the final product.

In short, it was clearly a prototype.

The excitement of that convention was amazing. Multiple retailers told us they thought ours was the best new product at the show.

The consumer soft launch was at Origins, and this time we had full mockups with final art - but they were still just mockups, tucked into sleeves. We took preorders there and sold 80 decks, which made us pretty happy - who sells nonexistent product? Again the overall response was very positive towards the game and it was exciting to see people liking something so close to the final product.

The real launch came at GenCon in August and it exceeded our optimistic expectations. We sold almost 600 decks, picked up a Peruvian distributor and were generally amazed at how consistently people seemed to love the game and the concept.

So far the critical response from reviewers and players has been equally exciting. Our average rating on http://www.boardgamegeek.com is 8.6 after twenty ratings and our lowest rating is a 7 with the comment, "A very good tactical fantasy wargame, just the sort of thing I've been looking for." We got a 9.2 out of 10 from you and a 9 out of 10 from www.gamingreport.com.

Obviously that can't continue forever - even the best games have some players who hate them - but it's really encouraging.

What can Battleground fans look forward to in the future? Are there any plans for different eras or settings? A modern warfare or futuristic warfare setting, interchangeable with the currently available factions? I'd quite like to pit Zombies against a modern army, for example - but maybe that's just me!

Our next few expansions will be in the fantasy theme - an Elvish faction is due out in February. We're also excited about historic Battleground armies and yes, you will be able to pit your Orcs against Roman Legions, for example.

Aside from your own products, what are your favourite games?

I love a lot of the classic games like Chess and Poker, and I'm a big fan of Magic: the Gathering, on which I've written lots of articles for magazines and websites. I've played pretty much every type of game from RPGs to German style board games to peek-a-boo (mostly with my 20-month-old daughter).

I really like games that break new ground. I'm proud of Succession because I think it has some nice innovations in it, but Battleground is an entirely new product category and really revolutionises table-top wargaming. I'm proud just to be a part of it, and if anyone ever asks why I dropped a great career in business to partner up with Robert Dougherty, Battleground is the simplest answer I can offer.

What's next for Your Move Games? Are there any products in the pipeline that you can tell us about?

Right now we're concentrating almost entirely on expanding Battleground: Fantasy Warfare. We have two factions under development with more to follow, and we're also developing scenarios, leagues and campaigns as well as the storyline and map for the Battleground world. We're working on terrain and playmats to help create the battlefield feeling. We also want to introduce siege rules and equipment and of course historic armies. That's more than enough to keep us busy!

While Battleground is our clear focus, there are some other products on the roadmap. We have a truly fantastic card game by Darwin Kastle that is so good we're determined to publish it even though it's really hard to make money selling one-shot card games. I've also got a board game under development called Song of the Dwarf Lords that is simmering on the back burner. It's had a good round of playtest sessions and has some real potential but there's still plenty of work to go before it's ready. We'll see!

Chad, many thanks for your time!
Interview by Jason M. Brown

Click to Purchase Battleground Now!