Multi Player games

[Rabbit]

My impressions of team games (which is basically echoing what Alan just said):

Turnaround time. The number one challenge with team games is maintaining continuity. You would think turns would go much faster with multiple people playing a side, however it has the reverse effect such that if you have three people playing a side it actually takes three times as long to get that side’s turn performed. With six people playing and each making a turn a day, you can get one complete turn performed each week if you are lucky. And assuming you can maintain that rate, it would take almost 5 months to play a 20-turn scenario. I’d advocate that scenarios with few turns (but perhaps with large forces) make better team games. And every player involved needs to commit to making their turns within just a day or two on a consistent basis.

Communication. It helps to have a designated person on both sides managing the flow of their turn to make sure it doesn’t get bottlenecked by anybody. In the team games I’ve played, someone often would forget that it is their turn (myself especially!) and the game would languish until someone else finally pinged them for a status. If a commander for each side is included in all correspondence, they should be able to monitor the progress of the move to ensure it doesn’t sit for several days in someone’s mailbox.

Division of forces. Unless you are good at parsing through an OOB, it can be challenging to divide a side’s forces up evenly between players – especially if there are reinforcements. It helps to choose a scenario in which the forces are clearly defined and in which there aren’t many reinforcements (or else you have a good understanding of those reinforcements).