Designers’ Notes
Introduction
Anyone attempting to design a companion set of rules to a game as popular and successful as Arty Conliffe’s SPEARHEAD rules is asking for trouble; every change of the rules is bound to upset someone somehow — perhaps even the original designer. Furthermore, SPEARHEAD gamers are certain to have predetermined expectations of how the game should be applied to the modern era.
In designing a modern version of SPEARHEAD, we thus faced dangers on two fronts. If we altered too much, we risked violating the integrity of the SPEARHEAD design; if we altered too little, we might fail in our efforts to simulate modern warfare. With this double jeopardy in mind, we present the following Designer’s Notes to explain why we made the changes we made to the original SPEARHEAD rules (for an explanation of the design philosophy that led to SPEARHEAD, we refer players to the Introduction).
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Introduction to Modern Spearhead
Modern Spearhead is based on the highly successful Spearhead game system Arty Conliffe published for World War II. Like Spearhead, Modern Spearhead focuses on the higher level command and control issues rather than the minutiae of individual weapons and vehicles. The basic ‘element’ in Spearhead is a Platoon, not individual tanks or soldiers. Modern Spearhead is an operational level game that is designed to recreate the view and challenges from a Brigade, Divisional or even Army Corps level – The player’s major issues are when to attack or defend, when to issue order changes to formations, and when to commit reserves, rather than focussing on what individual elements (tanks and soldiers) are doing.
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