There’s a game in the Alea Big Box range called Chinatown. It’s recently been reprinted by Z-Man games. The game is a fairly simple one: you trade with the other players to get sets of buildings which you then construct on the map. The more sets of similar buildings you have, the more income you make.

What struck me about the game was how few rules it had. The core of the game is trading. The rules for that? You can make any trade you want. Want to trade for buildings already on the table? You can. Want to do a three-way trade? You can. The rules get out of the way of the good bit: making trades.

Instead the rules provide a framework that doesn’t interfere with the play of the game. They show you how you make money and acquire buildings at the start of each turn, as well as give a victory condition, but interfere very little in the fun part of the game.

On the other side of the equation, you have games like Advanced Squad Leader, where the system tends to be somewhat intrusive. The game has lot of chrome: your squad can produce a hero or leader who steps to the fore when most needed; booby traps might activate as you cross the field, and enemy snipers are drawn to increased activity (i.e. a player making a lot of dice rolls!)

I’ve spent some hundreds of dollars on ASL, and it’s one of my top-rated games! Yes, it’s fun, though I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking up rules.

It’s interesting to compare the handling of rules of ASL and Dungeons & Dragons. ASL has a policy of not abandoning rules. Once a rule is included in the book, it is unlikely to be jettisoned. A few rules have changed over the years, but only a handful have had major updates. (Rules are printed on loose-leaf binder pages so they can be exchanged with errata pages).

The change from Squad Leader to Advanced Squad Leader was a massive clean-up and reorganisation in the rules. Once Squad Leader was combined with its three expansions, it had a lot of confusing and contradictory rules. The result was a new game, in much the same way as the transition from original D&D to AD&D occurred.

Meanwhile D&D, which is likely a much-more played system, has had four major “system resets”: each of the editions of “AD&D”, and one branch line (BECM D&D) that has only seen minor revision. (Note: 4E was the edition when this article was written.)

There is no edition of D&D that is as elegant as Chinatown. The original D&D comes closest, but both it and AD&D are hampered greatly by the lack of a good editor and a development process. D&D has acquired complexity over the years through a lot of expansions and supplements.

AD&D recast the complexity garnered through the initial supplements into a more robust system, but, unlike ASL, it didn’t have a good editor, giving us such oddities as the initiative system and the monk’s surprise chance. (Surprise in AD&D is rolled on d6s, with the number showing on the d6 indicating how long surprise lasts for. The monk uses d% to find out if he’s surprised. How do they intersect? No idea – the rules don’t specify).

AD&D 2nd edition did have a good editor and development team working on it; the base system actually is pretty clean. Unfortunately, the system lacked oversight and, especially with its supplements, had great problems in maintaining an overall approach to complexity. (Indeed, the Complete Priest’s Handbook recommends throwing out the standard cleric to allow its system – at a different power level – to work!)

Looking back on these systems, you can see the dual desires for completeness (which ASL aspires to) and elegance (which Chinatown displays). Elegance might not be the best word, but for my purposes it will do.

Can you have an elegant, complete system? It depends on the subject matter. There is a certain elegance in 3E design, for instance, even as it attempted to be the most complete system of D&D (a title that, I believe, it still holds). To a large extent, it is the form of elegance displayed by Mark Rosewater in his controversial column on Magic design, “Elegance“.

The trouble with trying to design a system that will handle anything is that, along the way, you have to make adjustments to cover things that you didn’t think of originally. One of my favourite examples of this is in the introduction of monster intelligence scores to BECM D&D. In the D&D Master set, one spell, Maze, requires the DM to know how intelligent the creature is. Unfortunately, monsters in BECM didn’t have those scores, so the rulebook needed to include the intelligence scores of every previously printed monster just to make one spell now function. Yes, the system is now more complete, but at a great loss of elegance.

I feel that 4E sacrificed a certain amount of completeness to become a more elegant game. However, it’s not like Chinatown: the rules and abilities are very present in your mind. (Compare to OD&D combat where, for the most part, it’s just roll d20, compare to table, and do 1d6 damage). Where it differs from ASL and 3E is that you’re unlikely to be looking up rules references all the time – well, assuming you have the condition chart handy.

Completeness or flexibility? That’s another question. 4e may be (or become) as complete as 3e, but is it as flexible? I don’t know. Or is it more flexible, in the hands of a group that knows it well? Perhaps in certain areas.

A recent World War 2 squad level game, cousin to ASL, is Combat Commander: Europe. This game has a certain correspondence to 4E, in fact: the game is card-driven, which somewhat restricts the play of the game (the main correspondence is to 4e combat, although the DM is free to go beyond the rules in 4e) , but because the special events have moved into the card text – unlike being die-trigger driven like in ASL – the requirement to remember all the special conditions is much, much less.

The point of all of this is not to say that one approach is better than another – certainly that is reliant on personal taste rather than god-given rules of game design – but rather to muse on some aspects of design and some correspondences I’ve noted between D&D and the board game world.

There are other musings I might make upon how retroclones may become even more elegant than initial oD&D, but I’ve mused long enough today.