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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
