Sam Mustafa

The Wargame Library Speaker Series continues with Sam Mustafa, author of Longstreet, as well as Blucher, Lasalle, Maurice, Nimitz, and many more. To learn more about all of Sam's wargames, visit Honour Games.

What was the original design spark behind Longstreet, your first foray into the American Civil War? 

I've always been interested in the topic and I know fair amount about it, but I did a deep dive into reading lots of memoirs and training manuals and scholarly analyses, and it occurred to me that from a game design point of view, the challenge of ACW is that it's so symmetrical that it could be boring. It's a bit like 18th century warfare in this way, that both sides are basically using the game tech, the same doctrine, the same weapons, etc. There are only two sides, and the lack of an effective battle cavalry simplifies it even more.What makes the ACW interesting are the often outrageous personalities involved. There's a "characterful" aspect to it, which personalizes it for a lot of Americans. We care about this particular regiment of North Carolina volunteers because that's where your great-great-ancestor served, under some famous eccentric general. So I knew that I wanted a game that would be as narrative as possible, and driven by characters and events, not a standard sequence of play.

The card-driven system in Longstreet is a central mechanic and over the years you've incorporated cards into more of your designs. How did this come about for Longstreet? 

I wanted to create a game that had a narrative feel. Using a card-driven system was appealing to me for that reason. Without needing a lot of rules, you can pack a lot of "story" and "flavor" into the cards. And without needing extra or "special" rules, you can add or subtract certain cards so that the deck differs from side to side, and from year to year.

For some reason, playing a card (with its title, and image, and verbiage) feels more "story-like" than just rolling a die. Players often remember the cards they played that enabled such-and-such clever move.

Longstreet's linked campaign system gives players a narrative sense of progression and consequences through the war. Did you design and build the game around the notion of a campaign, or was this a later addition after the core rules had been designed? Consider this a "chicken or the egg?" question! What came first, the battle system or the campaign concept?

I generally do some sort of campaign system for each game I design, but in the case of Longstreet we were really simultaneously working on the battle game and the campaign, because I knew we wanted to use cards in both cases. And for the same reason: they provide a very clear, efficient and unpredictable way to tell a story. There's a fair amount of role-playing in Longstreet, in fact I'd say it's at the heart of the game. So I knew it needed to be sited in a campaign system.

The decision to pitch Longstreet at the brigade level is an interesting one. Not many games zoom in on that command scale. Was there something about this level of command that captured your imagination for the American Civil War?  

Big battle horse-and-musket games always face the hurdle that the bar to entry is too high; it scares off newcomers to the topic. And the old grognards who do have that many figures, are often committed to the games they've already got. Longstreet is so different from any other ACW game that it needed to "recruit" new players, as the grognards probably wouldn't be interested. Thus I decided to keep the scale small. That, and the fact that a smaller scale allows us to look at some of the interesting technical issues of the era, such as the evolving nature of artillery. At a higher level you lose that granularity.

We're featuring the free lite versions of Longstreet and Maurice. What was your goal creating these introductory editions? How do you decide what to strip down versus what must remain to preserve the core player experience?

In both cases I got a lot of flak from people complaining that they had to buy BOTH a book and a set of cards. I thought that was a bit silly, given how willing gamers seem to be to purchase custom dice, or custom markers, or multiple codexes, or a new edition every couple of years for any number of other games. But I thought, OK: if you genuinely do want to try the game before buying two products, then I would offer this free, low-res, low-cost version.

People managed to complain about THAT, too, i.e. the free game, at which point I began offering to everybody who had the free game, that I would refund them their full $0.00 if they were unhappy.