How to make Illeria end

Weekly updates:
This was another productive week.  At this point I have 7 abilities that I'm putting near done (maybe 6?), and 3 in the "to do" category.  I had another playlets with my brother Nick.  He had some good insights.  He also seemed to do much better with the game this time around, leaving me to think that the problem could be fixed by explaining the game better, rather than fixing it more.  I've also made some progress on writing the book.

For this week, I want to talk about what makes an interesting mission and end-game condition.

A thing I've struggled with in Illeria is how to trigger the end of the game, and how to decide who wins.  It wasn't quite an afterthought, but really, most of my initial focus was on how combat worked, rather than how it ended.

Most of my initial conditions were taken from more classic wargames, where you fought until one team was totally dead (like in Heroscape or X-wing).  I also played games that had some kind of morale system (like Necromunda), but that lead to a similar outcome where you won by killing enemies.  The problem that I had with these missions was that they never felt interesting.

I eventually stumbled onto a system where parties that controlled certain landmarks gained a tactical advantage in the game.  This was eventually co-opted into also leading to victory conditions.  I also eventually changed it so that the tower's don't give you a tactical advantage, you just need them to win.  This made the games feel so much more interesting.  I think what I liked about them is that you had to cover different parts of the table at once.  Without that, it really felt like both parties just smashed into each other.  

On that note, I made a realization in this last week: For missions to be interesting, there needs to be a reason for characters to go to multiple parts of the board.  Thus, I've had a few missions where there is just one objective, such as take something that is in the middle of the board.  This ends up not changing the result all that much: characters smoosh into each other, it's just that now they battle over a single thing, rather than just trying to kill each other.

One of the things I am struggling with now is how to put a theme on things.  There was a great interview I listened to about game design with Joseph McCullough (the guy who made Frostgrave).  He said it is really important to ask yourself what keeps your characters on the table.  And I guess that much of the fighting in Illeria is about characters trying to secure resources that they can bring back to Avon to sell (on that note, I changed my mind about which story I want to Illeria as a resource-rich outland, partly because of the above interview).  But, some missions don't fit that super well.  For example, a mission I've played that felt really fun is one where each player selects a leader, and their team wins if they kill their enemy's leader, or if they move their leader off the enemy's boar edge.  It's fun, but it doesn't fit the theme, at least not in an obvious way.  I don't know, I think I just need to come up with a story that can explain it.