Interview with Eddy Sterckx - Waterloo Squares

Hello! Welcome back to the PNP News! This post is part of a series of interview that I'll be conducting with game designers who are participating in board game design contests on Board Game Geek. Today, I'll be interviewing Eddy Sterckx who designed the game Waterloo Squares for the 2015-16 Wargame Print and Play Contest.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your gaming history?
Been a gamer all my life, discovered hex-and-counter wargaming in my teens and added it to my bag of games. Over the years I've also discovered miniature gaming, rpg's and eurogames. These days I play eurogames twice a week and a wargame about twice a month.

What is your favorite PNP game?
Well, that goes back a while as it was my first, back to the mid-eighties actually when I duplicated a game a buddy of mine had : The Russian Campaign. Back then it was impossible to get and I've kept and taken good care of my very first PnP despite buying the real game a couple of times since.

How did you first discover PNP design contests?
Saw it popup on the front page years ago. Didn't think it was anything for me because it required me to finish a design. Like most would-be designers I've got a lot of ideas, but as soon as a prototype sort-of works I tend to lose interest in it and can't be bothered putting it all into a digitally downloadable format. Until that very first Wargame PnP contest came along and I saw it as a challenge to finish a design for once. That seemed to be the push I needed and since then I've finished another game and I'm now putting the finishing touches on a third.

Could you describe your game from a thematic point of view?
Waterloo Squares is an entry-level wargame of the battle of Waterloo in 1815 between Napoleon (the French) and Wellington/Blucher (the Allies).


Could you describe your game from a game mechanics point of view?
During the game players construct and modify a deck of cards which act as a command deck for units they want to move and fight with on the board. So it's a deck-building wargame.

What were your design goals with the game?
Make a low-complexity wargame that still gives gamers a good feel of the challenges both sides faced and has a historically plausible outcome. The deck-building mechanic as first seen in A Few Acres of Snow seemed like a good fit for simulation the command and control problems generals faced in those days.

How long have you been working on your game?
Like most game designers I always have a few designs "in progress" - sometimes you get stuck with a design and it goes on the backburner for months or even years. In contrast to that Waterloo Squares came together pretty quickly, also thanks to my play-testers who seemed to like the game even in early beta.

Finish the sentence: “If you like , then you’ll probably like my game” and perhaps let us know, what the similarities and differences are.
If you like the simplicity and low-unit count of a game like Manoeuvre combined with the deck-building / order delay mechanic of A Few Acres of Snow, you'll like this game. And it's free too :)

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