Cone of Fire Design Notes
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2008

I design games for various reasons. Most often, some event sticks in my mind and I want to understand it better, so I build a model of it in game terms. Or maybe I'm just obsessed with the topic. Sometimes I need the money and come up with something I think might sell reasonably well. And then there are a few for which I have absolutely no idea.

Cone of Fire is one of those. Early in the Great War at Sea process, well before there was an actual Great War at Sea game at all, I had toyed with the thought of someday doing a game on the Chilean-Argentine confrontations around the Strait of Magellan. I worked up the ratings on a number of the ships involved sometime in the early 1990s (I have a file dated 1994) but didn't do anything with it at the time.

A couple of years later, we were invited to present a Great War at Sea variant in a large-circulation gaming magazine, and Brian Knipple drew up operational maps for the 1914 battles of Coronel and the Falklands. That magazine folded abruptly — we even tried to buy it, but it was already gone — and I put the pretty maps in a file folder. But the project stayed in the back of my mind, and we discussed how it might be expandable into a boxed game with the addition of those Chileans and Argentines.

There it remained until we launched our Classic Wargames program in 2004. A pattern soon emerged: Naval games did much, much better among our customers than anything else. And the presence of a naval game on the list of proposed topics boosted orders for all of them. Therefore, we reasoned, there should always be a naval game on the Classic roster — but it shouldn't be one that would be popular enough to sell in our regular line of games.

South American navies fit that bill perfectly. And so Cone of Fire joined the list of proposed games, after U.S. Navy Plan Gold was completed and left the line up. I picked the title myself, playing off "Southern Cone" and "Tierra del Fuego." I have selected better titles, but Beth Donahue redeemed it with a striking cover — the Classic Wargames line allows for more experimentation in that area.

Cone of Fire began as a Great War at Sea game, but almost immediately fans began asking if it would include the 1939 chase of the German commerce raider Graf Spee. Those questions frustrated me, mostly because they remind me of one of my greatest blunders in managing Avalanche Press: allowing the two naval series to use slightly different operational scales. They're just different enough so that aircraft ranges won't work properly when using a map from one series in place of another — but close enough that "why not?" is a legitimate query at a glance. And we got lots of those.

While those questions were coming in, I was also finding that Great War at Sea: Cone of Fire would have fewer playing pieces than its budget allowed. It was also, as the experience of Plan Gold was showing, under-priced. The Classic Wargames model we were using at the time (since abandoned) really needed games to be priced higher than anything in our main line. Since a pair of Panzer Grenadier games come in at $74.99, the smallest Classic Wargame really needed to be priced at $79.99.

So there was room for Cone of Fire to grow, and I decided to make it our first crossover naval game, with pieces and maps for both series. It certainly seemed like a good idea at the time. By the time it sank in that I had committed us to designing and developing two separate, large games for the price of one, it was too late to back down. Cone of Fire would be our first — and last —"double" game.

Artist Beth Donahue made the game possible. I've always had trouble drawing naval game maps, from the very first one on which Great War at Sea is based. Actually, I'm not very good at drawing sketch maps of any sort and Brian usually ends up drawing them for me after I whine and plead a lot. But in this case, Beth grabbed hold of the project and cranked out all six maps very quickly from scratch. All I had to do was fill in which ports I wanted. I'm pretty sure we could not have done a six-map game under our old, slow system.

In filling in the ports on Beth's early versions, I realized that airbases would be a problem. There aren't many airfields south of the big Argentine cities — while Latin American armed forces are often deeply involved in domestic politics, their planning and preparation for conflict with other nations is limited to boasting and threatening. Yet when Argentina contemplated an actual hot war with Chile in 1978, the Air Force embarked on a very rapid and efficient program of airfield construction, placing a half-dozen well-equipped bases on Tierra del Fuego. Had war been likely in the 1940s, I reasoned, they would have done the same — if it came at a time of their choosing. If war were thrust upon them, there would be less preparation.

Therefore, there are no printed airfields on the Cone of Fire maps. Instead, there are markers for major and minor airfields, and players are allowed to place them within certain parameters. If the situation models a conflict coming after long political preparation, players might have a large number of airfields. If war breaks out suddenly, they might get only a few.

I initially intended that the three maps for each series overlap to form one large map, but it didn't occur to me at first that I had asked for them to be "staggered" — the right (eastern) edge of each is progressively moved to the right. When placed together the maps do not form a clean rectangle, thanks to South America's geography. But in development Doug McNair pointed out that the scenarios rarely required fleets and aircraft to cross the map boundaries, and it was much easier to leave the maps untrimmed and in a rectangular configuration, simply moving the counters from one map to the next when they crossed over. And so that's our recommendation: In the multi-map scenarios, just place the maps next to each other and don't worry about aligning them.

Each game in the box comes with 21 scenarios, six battle scenarios and 15 operational scenarios. Now, when doing a naval game with 42 scenarios, the work required isn't even across all 42. Some are harder than others, and the second 21 are enormously easier to finish than the first 21. You usually have already completed the research, and you've got a good idea how play flows in the game so you end up writing a "cleaner" draft for the developer. That wasn't the case with Cone of Fire. The second 21 scenarios pretty much meant a fresh start.

What emerged was a pretty comprehensive look at Latin American naval history from the 1890s to the 1950s. I'm not going to call it worthwhile yet, because the scars on my brain are still fresh, but even so I'm pretty impressed. And I'm not usually very pleased with a game design — there's always something I wish I'd done differently.

The scenarios, across both games, fall into several groups. I wanted to have similar scenarios in each time frame to show the developing technology, and also to get across the point that Latin America's political conflicts changed so little over six decades.

One prime location is the Cone of Fire itself, Tierra del Fuego. The three small islands at the eastern end of the Beagle Channel represented a serious challenge to Chilean and Argentine manhood from the late 1800s until very recently (and I am not convinced that current mutterings of friendship are all that heartfelt). Scenarios range from a struggle between two fleets of armored cruisers in 1899 on through a potential carrier battle in 1955 with Argentina fielding several squadrons of jets. There are troop landings, commerce raiding and terror bombardments. Chile has a major port right on the Strait of Magellan, while Argentina has a large base at Ushuaia on the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego.

The Strait itself, and the many channels nearby, create the most intricate terrain we've used in either naval game series. Fleets can play cat-and-mouse games in the channels, with coast-watchers constantly spotting them and the danger of becoming trapped in the maze always present.

The next hot spot is the Falkland Islands, another prime target of Argentine nationalism. Scenarios include Argentine attempts to take them, British attempts to take them back, and the efforts of both to supply their garrisons there. No actual invasions of the Falklands took place during this time frame, though both sides considered the question very seriously and made plans to take or defend them. The British at one point, in the panic that followed Pearl Harbor, even feared that the Japanese might sail around South America and grab the islands.

The third prime location is the Rio de la Plata estuary. During the first half of this century, it rivaled the waters off New York as the most heavily-trafficked destination for merchant shipping thanks to Argentina's booming agricultural exports. The Argentines get to defend their trade from Brazilians and British.

Along with the expected time frames (turn of the century, World War I, World War II, post-war), there's also a series of scenarios set around 1930. While I selected this as a period of Anglo-Argentine diplomatic rupture (Argentine nationalization of British oil firms was the catalyst, but the economic conflict ran much deeper than that), I also wanted to see some of the Royal Navy's older ships in Second World War at Sea garb. We'll eventually do a complete game, circa 1930, with them in a starring role.

There are relatively few historical scenarios. For Great War at Sea, we have the hunt for Admiral Graf Spee's squadron, the Chilean hunt for the secret Royal Navy base in their southern archipelago, and the british hunt for the cruiser Dresden after the Battle of the Falklands. For Second world War at Sea there are just two, a battle scenario and an operational scenario for the adventures of the cruiser Admiral Graf Spee.

It's very pleasing to see Cone of Fire on my office shelf; it fulfills what I expected of it, it has many unusual pieces, and brings the players good scenario play value. I'm looking forward to working on the next Great War at Sea and Second World War at Sea games. Separately.

Your chance to buy two naval games in one box is here!
Order Cone of Fire now.