Hearts of Iron board game will have you fighting the alternate history of WWII in a single sitting

Steamforged Games has made a name for itself in recent years by creating miniatures-heavy tabletop games out of popular action-based video games. Franchises like Dark Souls, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and more have all been adapted — with varying degrees of success — into board games, card games, and even the odd role-playing game. But now the British publisher is looking a bit closer to home. Its next ambitious project will be adapting the Hearts of Iron series of grand strategy World War II games for the table, where it will compete with more established games like Twilight Imperium.

Hearts of Iron’s latest iteration, Hearts of Iron 4, was released in 2016. It added new and dynamic ways to wage war, including intricate production queues and elastic armies. But none of its features have been more impactful than its take on alternate historical fiction, with novel new ways to fight old battles and lead classic factions to victory. Polygon sat down with the teams at Steamforged and Paradox earlier this week to discuss Hearts of Iron: The Board Game in detail, in advance of a Gamefound campaign launching today.

Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: I first met Johan Andersson, designer and producer on Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, and Hearts of Iron among others, in 2013. Later, in a preview we ran about Hearts of Iron 4 in 2016, he mentioned how on his very last day of interviews there at what would become Paradox Interactive, they invited him to join a game of Axis and Allies — the classic WWII board game by the legendary Larry Harris. He sat down with the other folks there, I’m sure adjacent to Fredrik Wester’s garage at the time, and they played through the game for hours. 

Of course, Axis and Allies may have inspired Hearts of Iron, but they’re not the same game. They’re very dramatically different experiences — Hearts of Iron being much wider, much richer, much more strategic and tactical in depth than Axis and Allies — no shade to Mr. Harris. Now, audience appetites for these kinds of 4x games have really expanded. Arcs: Conflict and Collapse in the Reach most recently, a very avant-garde kind of design with a three-act campaign, speaks to that appetite. The Stellaris board game is another attempt. Academy Games’ conceit was to make a grand strategy 4x game that actually plays in two hours. Twilight Imperium, on the other hand, shed the conceit of timeliness long ago. Those fans don’t care how long it is, and they revel in its complexity. They revel in its length. 

What are your goals going into this project? How do you bring Hearts of Iron back around and even consider fitting it into a board game box?

Steve Margetson, lead designer at Steamforged: The main design goal for us is taking the experience and feeling of Hearts of Iron and condensing it down into a board game that is manageable, that feels like Hearts of Iron. You’ve got the complexity there that people obviously enjoy as part of that series, but also a big key part of it was we wanted to focus more on something that you can play in a night. It’s going to be a longer night, to be sure! You’re looking at three-to-four hours. But we didn’t want to do a campaign game that was going to take multiple sessions or even go to the really long lengths of say Twilight Imperium, because yeah, we wanted people to get together, be able to complete World War II in an evening.

One of the key pillars is this idea of either playing historically — rewriting history, or reliving it. So drawing heavily on the source material there, one of the most interesting things about Hearts of Iron is the fact that you can take the Soviet Union and play them communist, but also there is the question there of, oh, what does a Soviet Union look like if they are going in a down [a] different route, like a monarchy or a theocracy for example? So that was a big, key selling point. 

The other thing was a big focus on politics at the table. You are allying or going to war with various countries, and that is a thing that you have to declare. It’s not something that’s just innate in the game. […] You’ve got to justify it to your country. You’ve got to put in the legwork to manage your country to make it happen.

Let’s focus then on Soviet Russia for a moment. Out of the box, how do you communicate to the player, Okay, you can be communists, or you can be royalists?

Margetson: The way that we do that is, it’s taking something from the video game that we’ve adapted called the Focus Tree, and we’ve broken that down. It is a big tree, and there is a lot of material to mine and create interesting gameplay situations. We’ve taken that and broken it down into ideological pairs with countries. 

When you begin, you are choosing from the ideologies that are available to that nation. Not every nation has every ideology available to it. In the case of our Soviet Union, if you’re picking communism you have multiple, different Focus Decks that will determine the way you’re scoring points and the additional political options available to you. That choice will give them a suite of options to play within their game. […] With all of these Focus Decks, they are bespoke per country, so that a German monarchy looks very different than a Soviet Union theocracy. Ultimately, Hearts of Iron fans will care about that.

The other thing that you bring up is really very interesting to me. I sit down to play Axis and Allies and I know who are the Axis and who are the Allies. It’s right on the box! We’re starting in 1942, 1944, and it’s baked into the experience. So how mechanically have you created this ‘justification for war system’?

Margetson: This ties into those Focus Decks. They will give you ways that you’re scoring points, and essentially your overall country goal will be based on your ideology. So, looking at something like a fascist German Reich, that combination will be rewarded for trying to control as much territory as possible, just as they tried to do in history. Whereas a German Reich under a different ideology has different objectives. Perhaps it is looking to ally with a lot more people, or protect certain areas on the map, or things like that. It’s one of those where we are dictating these objectives largely by your Focus Deck choice and your ideology.

Peter, I turn to you and I think about the long and storied history of this franchise. Why was Steamforged the right partner to help create this expression of it?

Peter Nicholson, game director at Paradox Interactive: I think they’ve already answered that question in a way, and that’s by correctly identifying what makes Hearts of Iron 4 unique. It’s not the combat. It’s not the fact that it’s a tactical game. It’s the fact that it has these other elements on top of that, things like Focus Trees. 

I think if you took the first Hearts of Iron through Hearts of Iron 3, maybe even Hearts of Iron 4 at release, and said “make a board game” you’d end up with something that probably resembles Axis and Allies very closely. That game would be one of many tactical combat-based World War II board games. 

It was only fairly late in Hearts of Iron 4‘s development — midway through, four or five years ago — that it really exploded both in popularity, but also in a different sort of game design where we started experimenting with things like alternate histories, the sort of expansive Focus Trees that Steve’s already mentioned.

Of course, all of the Paradox grand strategy games have evolved out of board games themselves. It’s sort of the next logical step. If you had a human being that was capable of processing this many things at once and rolling that many dice at once, you would probably end up with board games that look very similar to Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis. So it’s an odd task to ask somebody to do, to take something that has evolved from a board game and then turn it back into one, but also in the process of getting there it’s developed its own identity, its own sort of veneer. As a board game it would be a very stodgy board game, but it’s developed these unique narrative paths embodied by these Focus Decks and their ideologies.

What are the incentives that you’re going to be putting into this campaign for potential consumers? What are the things that you’re really excited about?

Margetsen: The big one, and this is kind of a first for Steamforged, is that we’re doing a special edition at $120 and a regular edition at $65. In the past we have only tended to offer games with miniatures in our crowdfunding campaigns. We’re offering both versions here because we know not everyone is going to want all those hundreds of miniatures.

But these miniatures will nonetheless be an exclusive on the campaign. If you want to see those cool historical pieces on the battlefield and be pushing them around like a general, that’s one of the incentives there. Eventually, the regular edition will also arrive at retail.

Peter, is there anything else about Hearts of Iron, anything about Paradox that you wanted to share with me while I’ve got you on the line today?

Nicholson: I think actually the way that this project is being built is very similar to the way we build projects at Paradox: Lots of player feedback. I think the early access path is super interesting for Kickstarting things and getting as much player feedback as possible. That’s often how we like to design games, as close to the community as possible. We’re often out there and soliciting feedback both on pre-release and release content, for example. So I think it’s a project that’s being built in a very familiar way and it’s fantastic to see what Steamforged are doing with it. I’m looking forward to playing.