Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — board games
SO NOW I'M A COLLECTOR APPARENTLY (by Tom Russell)
Years ago, I was reading James Dunnigan's Complete Wargames Handbook, and I came across a passage that I thought was so ridiculous, I had to read it out loud to share it with Mary: "Reading" games rather than playing them is quite common. Always has been. Many gamers "collect" games. They buy them, but never play them. This does not mean that they are not used. Quite often, the hobbyist will spend several hours with the game. The usual procedure is to lay out the map, examine the pieces, read the rules and scenarios and perhaps place the pieces on...
ON THE JOYS, FRUSTRATIONS, AND POSSIBILITIES OF FREE SET-UP (by Tom Russell)
The other day, the inestimable Robert Peter Bottos - he of BottosCon fame - commented on a Facebook post we had made about our upcoming release Plan 1919. Our post was as follows: Many of our wargames give the player a lot of leeway in setting up their forces, and Plan 1919 is no exception. The Germans set up on one side of the line, and the Allies on the other, and a solid set-up is really crucial. Each side has well over a hundred units (155 for the Germans and 226 for the allies, to be precise) of different...
DESIGNING PLAN 1919 (by John Gorkowski)
Major General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller, (1878 – 1966) a senior British Army officer, military historian, and strategist, was an early theorist of modern armored warfare and the author of "Plan 1919". When Hollandspiele asked me to design a game covering JFC Fuller’s Plan 1919, I had to peer deep into my foggy memory of this might-have-been campaign. Luckily, I found a great web site that shared Fuller’s plan verbatim. Here are some telling excerpts (with the British use of s in certain words such as “disorganised” converted to a “proper” American z such as in “disorganized”). The Influence...
WARGAMING AND POINT OF VIEW (by Tom Russell)
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus, Roman senator and historian, born sometime in the 50's AD, sits outside the Austrian Parliament Building in Vienna. On a recent episode of the 1 Player Podcast, they discussed wargames in general, and my solitaire design Agricola, Master of Britain in particular. One of the gents on the program mentioned that pretty much everything we know about Agricola's life and campaigns comes to us from Tacitus, his son-in-law. We know very little about the indigenous peoples of Britain during the same period - only what Tacitus tells us, much of which is suspect. (For example,...
RUSSIAN VICTORIES AT INKERMAN (by Tom Russell)
"A panoramic view of Inkerman", 1854, William Simpson. One of the most interesting things about the Battle of Inkerman is that what should have been a Russian slam-dunk (sneak attack, dense fog negating the long-range of the Allied Minié Rifle, not to mention what was originally a five-to-one advantage in numbers) turned into a decisive, humiliating, lopsided defeat. The mechanisms that power Blood in the Fog are designed to recreate the factors that led to that lopsided Allied victory. That doesn't mean that the Russians can't win, however. It's harder for them to do so, and I would advocate that...