Today I kick off a series of Insiders to take a closer look at a game that has everyone around the office buzzing in anticipation, our customizable deck-building game High Command. Over the next few weeks leading up to Gen Con, Development Manager David “DC” Carl, Creative Director Ed Bourelle, and I will be pulling back the curtain to reveal how we took a concept I scrawled down on a couple sheets of notebook paper and turned it into the game that is now High Command.
It’s no secret that everyone at Privateer Press loves the world of the Iron Kingdoms. WARMACHINE and HORDES allow us to experience dramatic and visceral combat across the battlefields of Immoren, which many of you are likely familiar with and share a passion for. But the WARMACHINE and HORDES miniatures games are only one way to explore the rich setting of the Iron Kingdoms. We’ve always wanted to create a WARMACHINE and HORDES game that would allow players to experience a truly grand level of strategic combat: to manage resources, troop movements, and combat over multiple theaters of war.
The concept behind deck-building games was already on my mind as a perfect starting point for a high-level strategic WARMACHINE and HORDES game, but there was a lot left to figure out how to make a deck-building game that faithfully represented the Iron Kingdoms.
The first piece of the puzzle centered on the market. In most deck-building games, players purchase cards from a shared market. In High Command, each faction needed to have its own personal market—we didn’t want Cygnar buying Juggernauts or Skorne utilizing Legion of Everblight Warmongers. Giving each faction its own market not only kept to the setting but also had the benefit of allowing us to make each faction unique, just like in the tabletop game.
The idea that each faction would have its own individual market led to another even more exciting idea: players could customize their markets (known in High Command as reinforcement decks) before the game began by adding specific packs of cards called detachments. Detachments also allowed us to tie deck construction to the most iconic characters of WARMACHINE and HORDES, the warcasters and warlocks, by connecting certain detachments to each one based on their own unique approach to battle. By using this system we gave players control over deck composition yet kept setup for casual games quick and easy, even for players new to card games.
Playing more with the concept behind how standard deck-building games work, I always thought it would be cool to turn a player’s market into a secondary hand, allowing the player to immediately play a card from the market rather than have to wait for it to cycle through the deck. This became known as a Rush, which represents commanders expending additional resources to rapidly mobilize key assets to the battlefield.
This brings me to the key concept behind High Command and what really makes it stand out within the genre: High Command is focused on player combat with deck building being the engine that drives it.
In most deck-building games, players rarely get the opportunity to interact with one another beyond a few attack cards. At their core, however, WARMACHINE and HORDES are about direct conflict. So right away I knew High Command would have far more than the standard level of player interaction. The idea that players would not only build their decks but would also actively use those decks to engage in direct combat really drove home how much I wanted this game to come to life. As much as I enjoy deck-building games, they rarely promote a lot of “table play” where players threaten, cajole, and curse each other as they try to outmaneuver their opponents, not just strategically but psychologically as well.
Of course, even though the original concept I sketched out had the core ideas of what would become High Command, there was plenty to be done to take those ideas and turn them into a fine-tuned, fully functional game. And for that I turned to our talented Development Manager, DC.
To find out more about how High Command went from concept to game, be sure to watch for DC’s Insider next week.
Until next time!