Back in 1977 Steve Jackson designed a small war game called Ogre. It was published by Metagaming Concepts as the first in their series of “Microgames”–war games that were simple enough and short enough to be played on your lunch hour. I picked up a copy of Ogre around the time I started high school, and played it with a number of my friends.

The basic notion is simple. You’ve got a force consisting of advanced armor units (heavy tanks, missile tanks, and light ground-effect vehicles) and infantry in powered suits, a la Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Your job is to guard your command post. Your enemy has only one unit, a giant cybernetic tank called an Ogre. It’s pretty much an even match.

I’ve still got my copy of Ogre; in fact, I have two copies, one of the 2nd edition, and one of the 3rd edition. I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago, to let my 9-year-old look at it. It’s a little advanced for him–at least, it would have been advanced for me when I was 9; but I’m not persuaded that it’s any more complicated than Fire Emblem, or the other turn-based strategy games he’s playing on his GameBoy.

Playing it, though, brought back a whole bunch of memories. I was a young computer geek in those days, and naturally I thought it would be cool to implement an Ogre computer game. It was not to be; this was before the GUI revolution, and I didn’t have the skills or the hardware to draw the Ogre map plausibly on the screen. Ogre uses a hex grid, and that’s not the easiest thing in the world. Especially for a punk kid who’s been teaching himself BASIC. If I had managed to pull off the graphics for Ogre, I’d have been stumped anyway; the AI for the Ogre itself would have been too much for me.

But I got home Friday night, full of creative juices, and with Ogre on my mind; heaven knows why. So I pulled out my Tcl/Tk environment, and my memories, and sat down to see what I could do.

The first job was to figure out how to draw the hex grid, and place icons in the hexes. That was easier than I expected, but it took me most of the evening. (The results are in the previous post.) Having figured out how to make Tk draw the hexes and such, then I needed to package that functionality up neatly into a Tk megawidget. That, and the obvious enhancements, took me most of Sunday afternoon and evening, at which point drawing the map and the units was no longer an issue.

In order to have a working game, though, I’d need some AI for the Ogre. How to do that? Would I be able to do that? When I started, I wasn’t at all sure that I could. And then…but that will have to be another post.

A note: Ogre is a copyrighted game, so even if I succeed in creating a playable version of Ogre with a computerized Ogre player, I won’t be able to release it publically. But, of course, if I do succeed I can then use what I learn to develop something which I could conceivably release; and some of the library code will likely be of interest in any event.