# How Would You Implement Fog of War On a Tabletop Game **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [June 19, 2012, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636 "2012-06-19T13:02:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Meeko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Meeko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meeko)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/21 "2012-06-21T13:06:23Z")
The assumption is though, that if it’s tabletop, it’s miniatures, and if it’s miniatures, they are are going to be 3-D and unique. I can’t think of how to conceal unique 3-D things to the point that you would need them. So I’m not sure what you are after exactly. [Obligatory Magic Card reference.](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=3976) Or did you mean you want confusion? In that case, you could put a bonus / penalty to movement and attack. Probably half movement and a randomized angle / sector / space to be hit. If the game has a variable for Willpower or Initiative you could also tweak that. Or, if you want to be really brutal, you could have someone berzerk and go after the memebers of the same team / side. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Scud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/22 "2012-06-21T14:19:03Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’m an old school wargamer and there’s another issue of battle uncertainty I was wondering about. > > Consider the Battle of Blenheim. The two armies faced each from across a small river. The French had concentrated their units at the fords because that was the only place the English could attack them. But the English had done a little extra scouting and they knew something the French didn’t - there was another ford. > > So Marlborough, the English commander, sent part of his forces to attack at two of the known fords where the French would be expecting them. Once the French forces were committed to battle, he sent a third force across the unguarded ford and caught the French by surprise. Being attacked from an unexpected direction, the French were routed. > > But how would you simulate this in a game? Presumably both players would have read the rules and would have known the ford existed. So the French player would have stationed some troops there to guard it like he did the others. Even if the French player were forced to use the historical set-up, he’d still move some of his troops to the ford rather than committing them all to the initial crossings. You could do something like that with map tiles - on one side is the basic “lay of the land” - this is a river/mountain/plains/forest tile; on the other is the info that only someone who has scouted the tile can see - an ambush point that gives a defending unit some kind of bonus or a ford or a hidden mountain pass or something. If one player scouts the terrain, he gets to look at the bottom of the tile; when both (or all) players have scouted it, you flip it. Alternately (and probably easier to implement) you could have little “scouting” chips on each hex (or whatever) of the map; one might say “If this is a river hex, you can ford at this point; if this is a mountain hex, there is a hidden pass; if plains or forest, no effect.” I can’t think of a way off-hand to have totally randomized terrain that only one player can look at/scout. I guess you could have map tiles a la Settlers of Catan pre-laid but not turned over, and the scouting player can look and has to draw his own map until both sides have scouted the terrain; seems like a huge pain in the ass. ---
**Author:** ![Quercus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/7ab992/32.png) [@Quercus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quercus)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/23 "2012-06-21T15:57:43Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > You could simulate it very well on a computer game: you would have to scout out the terrain and only then would you have a sense of the battlefield. > > BTW, does anyone know of any serious computer war games? In the 90s Avalon Hill had put out some great wargames that were pretty much their hexagon games run on a computer. Anyone know of games that have a similar level of stategy? I play Total War on my computer which is a lot of fun, but not quite the same level of battlefield depth I’m looking for. Well, if you’re looking for a _Squad Leader_ kind of tactical game, go get _Combat Mission_ (I guess there’s a 2011 version, now). Seriously, these guys really know how to make a game that’s both fun (single person or against a human), and requires realistic tactics. You can even choose how much Fog of War you want.. And scenarios can be full of surprises for each side (at least the first time you play them). ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/24 "2012-06-21T16:39:48Z")
> [@Zebra](#): > > I owned a game of Squad Leader. I read the box and I had heard about it. I never got someone to play it with me. > The father of a friend of mine played this warship game that was completely to scale. I was like battle ship but you played in a large park and had tiny ships that were really far apart. You set the angle and guessed the range. A umpire would then measure and say where the the volleys landed. I’m not sure if you even knew what short of vessels the enemy had. (He also had this really cool, 7ft long model of a battleship from about 1900. Sounds like Jutland [link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutland_(game)), or Cordite and Steel [link](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/19288/cordite-and-steel) 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![N9IWP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/n9iwp/32/3154_2.png) [@N9IWP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/N9IWP)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/25 "2012-06-21T17:20:25Z")
Some aspects are implemented in [The Ares Project | Board Game | BoardGameGeek](http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65534/the-ares-project) The designers talk about the design on serveral episodes of The Dice Tower. Some of which made it Ludology: [http://www.ludology.libsyn.com/](http://www.ludology.libsyn.com/) There are probbaly text articles as well. Brian ---
**Author:** ![Balance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Balance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balance)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/26 "2012-06-21T18:10:54Z")
> [@Tom\_Scud](#): > > I can’t think of a way off-hand to have totally randomized terrain that only one player can look at/scout. I guess you could have map tiles a la Settlers of Catan pre-laid but not turned over, and the scouting player can look and has to draw his own map until both sides have scouted the terrain; seems like a huge pain in the ass. I addressed this back in post 7. You have multiple map tiles, one for each player, and each player has a different chart mapping tile symbols to terrain. When one player scouts the area and flips their tile, the other players just see an abstract symbol, and won’t know what it means until they scout the area and flip their own tiles. Concealing troop movements on a shared map is more of a challenge. Even if the troops are represented by a face-down or abstract token, it’s obvious that something is moving there, and it may even be possible for an astute player to determine the troop type through metagame analysis of the movement. Perhaps a player could exchange his troops for a set of dummy troop tokens when they pass into territory the other player has not scouted. One token would correspond to the actual troops, and the others would be decoys which move independently, but disappear if an opponent scouts a tile they’re present in. That leaves the problem that only the real troops would allow you to flip map tiles, which would reveal their path. Instead of flip tiles, say all the map tiles are face up to start with, but are still marked only with abstract symbols. When you scout an area, you are allowed to pull the card with that symbol from a deck and look at it to determine what your scouting has revealed. (This is as opposed to simply looking it up in a chart.) Thus, you can scout an area without giving any indication which troop token is real. ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/27 "2012-06-21T18:27:47Z")
Fog of War in board games is a passion of mine, my suggestions: Fairly simple to learn: [Hammer of the Scots](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3685/hammer-of-the-scots) [Julius Caesarp](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37836/julius-caesar) Medium difficulty: [[url=[EastFront: The War in Russia 1941-45 – Second Edition | Board Game | BoardGameGeek](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22143/eastfront-ii)]Eastfront II]([Rommel in the Desert | Board Game | BoardGameGeek](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84/rommel-in-the-desertRommel) in the Desert[/url) Ambitious: [Napoleon’s Triumph](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18098/napoleons-triumph) [Fields of Fire](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/22877/fields-of-fire) Great but expensive: [Up Front](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/586/up-front) All of these are fantastic and deal with Fog of War in different ways and/or in different eras, if the OP was more specific about historical interests I could recommend good games themed on that period. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Scud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/28 "2012-06-21T18:31:51Z")
> [@Balance](#): > > I addressed this back in post 7. You have multiple map tiles, one for each player, and each player has a different chart mapping tile symbols to terrain. When one player scouts the area and flips their tile, the other players just see an abstract symbol, and won’t know what it means until they scout the area and flip their own tiles. I can see how that would work, but I have an aesthetic issue with it - I like maps with little green forests, amber waves of grain, splashy rivers, and so on; sending my armies across a terrain of different-colored polygons would seriously detract from the experience. ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2012, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636/29 "2012-06-21T18:33:01Z")
Yeah, Wargamer is right, for double blind you can’t go wrong with Flat Top. Nightfighter too has this, but areal combat at night isn’t interesting to me so I can’t say if it’s any good. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-implement-fog-of-war-on-a-tabletop-game/625636.md?page=1)