New translation: The Founders’ Statement for T9A

The Game Itself

The target of T9A: Fantasy battles is to create a rank and file war game that is a unique blend of competitive gaming, immersion, modelling, social interaction, and most-importantly that appeals to a broad gaming audience of varying skill. The game should feel fair and balanced at beginner and advanced player levels, with victory typically awarded through a combination of careful strategic planning and tactical finesse despite being in a dice-based setting.

The “Old” Player Base:

The player base can be roughly divided into 2 different subgroups aka (with vast overlap between both halves), the tournament-focused players and non-tournament-focused player sections. The target for both groups is to foster a symbiotic relationship between the tournament-focused and non-tournament-focused players. Tournaments drive interest, inspire innovative tactics, and motivate most players to hone their skills. Casual games invest people in the setting, provide a draw for future tournament players, and place to develop new concepts to be explored.

The “New / Untapped” Player Base:

Equally important than the “old” player base, however, is the game’s accessibility to a broad pool of new players, particularly those unfamiliar to tabletop war games. To this end, T9A should strive to refine and focus its ruleset to be accessible, while simultaneously seeking to maintain or increase tactical depth of play. It should be easy enough for people to pick up, and yet challenging for the more experienced players master.

Maintain Our Current Player Base And Seek To Expand Game Reach:

It is important that T9A adopts a balanced approach of retaining our tournament prominence (e.g., ETC) in Europe as a premier competitive game, while striving to attract new players, particularly in the non-European markets. The favored methodology here is a Core + Add-On system that can accommodate different styles of game play.

Growing The Setting:

Background should play a key role in attracting and sustaining interest. We need to boldly explore new and exciting ideas that are wholly our own, because this will also inspire more immersive and creative internal design, not to mention appeal to hobbyists. We should be fearless in sharing our material with the community, and aim to widely promote our content. This could and should mean we should seek to expand the unique T9A setting to products outside of regular war gaming (RPGs, Novels, Card games etc.).

Keeping It Real:

While striving towards lofty goals, we must remember to be pragmatic in our expectations, particularly given that we are a volunteer organization. Thus, although we should aim to support, innovate, and promote whenever possible, let’s employ our resources (manpower and money) and precious goodwill wisely.