A game idea: infinite campaigns
I started with the notion of modifying chess so that it's not always the attacking piece that wins. Any piece that attacks could use a d6 while the defender rolls a d8, that way the defender has a slight probabilistic advantage. Perhaps if it's too much of an advantage the attacking piece would win ties. Going beyond chess though, what about ranged combat and having castles that are actually castles instead of orthogonally moving bishops?
I know much of wargaming probably has much of my ideas here already done, and so this is just another form of reinventing the wheel, but still hopefully this might either be a cool idea for someone to make or it already exists somewhere and I just don't know about it. Anyhow, here are some basic ideas:
*every piece gets one move per turn.
*maps could be assembled by players each game iteration.
*elevated terrain counts as positive dice modification for ranged combat units, relative to the units they are attacking. The units being attacked get a positive defense bonus for being on higher terrain than ranged combat units attacking them.
*catapults/artillery would require an extra turn or more to reload so as to make them cumbersome on the battlefield and not overpowered.
*rivers cannot go uphill and must end either at the edge of the map or on the edge of a body of water.
*some units can swim based on type and others cannot, based on whatever makes sense.
*castle walls do not have to be completed and can be breached by various siege works.
*ships could have various classes, some single purpose and some multi-purpose. Triremes could carry some troops like transports, ram other ships, and carry a catapult (usually a giant crossbow called a ballista). So, some ships could be like that and others just transports, just artillery platforms, etc.
*Starting positions, unit numbers and composition are to be determined by the players before starting. Reinforcements should be declared a number of turns ahead of time as well as the direction they're approaching from (or at least it should be written down so as to not just have units pop out of thin air at random, unless one is playing against Q.)
*stealth should somehow be incorporated, but I don't know how that would best be done in an original-ish manner.
*pieces and tiles should look nice and be highly detailed. Also, they should all be the same scale, if possible, except when it would be spatially or logistically awkward. Units that serve as transports should have actual functional space that serves as its own geometric limit rather than merely stacks of tokens/cards because I think it would be more interesting seeing people argue over how best to pack everything.
*there should be no arbitrary limit on number of tiles or requirement that the perimeter of the map form a regular polyhedron - whatever physical space is available and however many tiles one has or wishes to deploy should be the limit. Making it so the units are able to be moved easily would be a good rule of thumb, but if someone really wants to make a huge map that they'd have to walk on, that's their business.
*tiles and pieces should be made to last out of sturdy materials, not plastics, and made in factories that pay their actual workers well and don't have rampant nepotism ideally.
*some artillery should have areas of effects and some, like ballistae, should be able to pass through multiple units for some given distance on the basis of unit composition and order of units in path of projectile.
*defilade fire, where there is no line of sight, should have an aim penalty.
*fire should spread with each turn to anything adjacent which is combustible and there should also be some units able to fight fires.
*perhaps, if hit points were used, some units should be able to heal/revive others.
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