Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — board game

"Destroying Chinese War Junks", 1843, E. Duncan. The East India Company steamship Nemesis (right background) destroying Chinese war junks during the Second Battle of Chuenpi, 7 January 1841 When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended...

The second game in the Shields & Swords II series is House of Normandy, a “quad” containing four battles of the twelfth century. The first question a prospective purchaser would have is, why does this exist? Even among middle ages aficionados, there’s not a huge demand for games on this specific period. None of the battles are famous, nor really the commanders who took part; this is after William conquered, but before Richard became lion-hearted, a bit of history that bridges the gaps between two more interesting eras and as a result is often skimmed past. So, what gives? USS...

Coat of arms of the duchy of Normandy Units in the Shields & Swords II series have two components: their unit type and their combat class. There are technically eight unit types – veterans, infantry, infantry with range (crossbowmen), levies, levies with range (longbows), heavy horse, light horse, and light horse with range (mounted archers) – though two of them, the crossbows and the mounted archers, have yet to make an appearance in either The Grunwald Swords or House of Normandy. The unit classes determine what cool stuff the units can do: whether they can go into shield wall, whether...

Note: I recently partook in a "how did you get into board games?" thread over at BGG, and Mary and I decided that a post might be of sufficient interest to warrant republication on the Hollandspiele blog. And so, here we are. When I was a kid, I loved to play chess and Othello/Reversi, despite the fact that I was terrible at both, and I remember playing Risk at my grandfather's house. And we had Monopoly, Uno, etc. So, fairly typical childhood exposure to board games. How I got into modern games... it's kind of a long, but hopefully mildly...

At the end of each of Agricola, Master of Britain’s game turns, you’re required to have met or exceeded a certain Victory Point threshold in order to stay in the game and, eventually, to win the game at the end of Turn 8. The thing to keep in mind is that you don’t earn VP for what you did on that particular turn, but on what you did over the course of all the previous turns. That is, each thing that scores you VP will score you that VP on every subsequent turn so long as the condition applies. Therefore,...