Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — board game

I owe a lot to board game maps. When I was a kid, I had many more wargaming maps than I had games thanks to the vagaries of yard sales. I also had a drawer in my desk stuffed full of old roadmaps. There was nothing systematic about either collection. I just liked looking at maps. I guess I couldn’t help but become interested in a hobby that was so preoccupied with geography. When I was first exploring roleplaying games I produced maps by the dozens. Gradually my gaming maps moved digital, and I often used these projects to learn...

The design of An Infamous Traffic’s cover began with a surprisingly rejection. Mary and Tom had both loved the design of the game. They had loved the look of my playtesting counters, and they had loved the map. They did not, however, liked the cover. What more could they want?! This cover had everything. It had fancy typography and it had a pretty painting. What historical game box could want more? Well, it turns out that they both had strong opinions about covers. Wargame cover design over the past fifteen years or so has followed the Rodger B. MacGowan school...

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 to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...

      In his book The Complete Wargames Handbook, the noted wargame designer James F. Dunnigan had two basic rules for aspiring designers: Keep it simple. Plagiarize. Later he euphemized the second one as “use available techniques”, but still, these are words to live by. And once in a while a game system comes along so loaded with good ideas and potential directions it simply has to be used! Giving due credit to the original thinker, of course… we do stand on the shoulders of giants, and they all have names. In the particular case of The Scheldt Campaign,...