I am a big fan of the old Succession Wars board game, a strategic conquer the Inner Sphere game released by FASA in the long ago times. The rules had some clunkiness, and some hard to decipher sections, but did an excellent job of meeting my hopes to conquer the Inner Sphere.
I played a couple PBEM games in the 2010s (?), and since I had long ago “lost” my copy of the board game I built a way to track the game in Excel. I could assign units where they were moving to and have a map showing relative unit strengths to plan out my turn.
Succession Wars Excel Tracker
My blocky “Minecraft” style map ended up being used, and then refined, for Scrapyard Armory’s web based version of the game. Aesthically as appealing as dirt, but it worked well.
Both the PBEM and web games let to many rules questions, and efforts to rewrite/errata the original rulebook. Catalyst Game Labs mentioned wanting to republish the original game, and I suggested some updates that could be made. They eventually decided on a straight reprint + an entirely new game (Resurgent Empires) that are still waiting for release (more testing, production, etc). But here’s my suggestions that I made. In addition to cleaning/fixing the original rules, I wanted to update some of the presentation both to use miniatures instead of counters, more cards instead of tables (I know, BattleTech loves tables…), and more modular for expansions/mixing up for new scenarios.
warsofthepalatine.com 