Also, in the original game it was possible for a player to march a large army from one side of the world to the other, which, as Napoleon found to his cost, isn't really practical in the real world. The nature of same-time gameplay makes such a long march impossible, although we have introduced a special 'surge' move which each player is allowed to exercise once per combat phase, to allow specific forces to break through enemy lines.

Over the course of the six-month 'paper play' testing, we tried and rejected a number of ideas which, while occasionally nice, either slowed down the game or didn't work out in practice. For example, we originally included a 'retreat' option that could be exercised during the combat phase if an attack wasn't going particularly well. However, this not only caused complications in the gameplay (with players occasionally retreating into territories which they no longer occupied), it also allowed players to be slightly reckless with their forces. Once the retreat option was removed, players instantly became more prudent with their little soldiers' lives.

However, the biggest problem of all at the beginning of the development phase was the sheer hassle caused by the amount of paperwork which was being generated as players had to write down every single aspect of every single phase of every single move. Of course, this wasn't going to be a problem when the game was transferred to computer, but as Hasbro had originally insisted that anything we came up with had to work as a board game, we had to find a way of minimising this 'housekeeping'.

Then, in a flash of inspiration, one of the team (Jon Law) came up with what has since become known as 'EZ-wipe' system, where each player writes his or her moves in soft pencil on a laminated miniature version of the board. All that we needed now was another similarly brilliant idea to solve the problem of having six players rolling up to three dice each at the same time...

Which, I think, will be a good place to begin next week's diary.