Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — board games
"DO WE HAVE ANY HEXIDECIMAL GAMES?" (by Tom Russell)
RIW recently moved into a new storefront (their old shop having been burnt to a crisp by the restaurant next door), which is less claustrophobic and brighter, but sadly lacks pics, so here is their logo. Before we discovered our Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), RIW Hobbies in Livonia, we went to The Other Game Store. The Other Game Store was paradise if you were into minis, but rubbish if you were into board games, having a shelf dedicated to Munchkin, and another shelf where they squeezed in everything else, "everything else" being only the most popular of Euro-style games....
DESIGNING THE AGRICOLA GAME, PART 1 of 2: IS THERE A GAME HERE? (by Tom Russell)
Some designs come together very quickly (my Irish Gauge or my Shields & Swords II series); some are basically sound right from the start, but need a lot more tweaking and finesse (Von Moltke’s Triumph was one of these); some you struggle with for years, convinced you have something but not entirely sure how to actually turn it into a playable game. Agricola, Master of Britain was one of those. I began working on it in 2011, as a two-player game. One player naturally controlled the Legions under Agricola, taking actions to suppress rebellion and build up civilization. Every action...
COVER STORY - AGRICOLA, MASTER OF BRITAIN (by Tom Russell)
My first love was the cinema, and so it's probably no surprise that I have a great deal of affection for, and draw a great deal of inspiration from, great movie posters. I'm a big fan of the Polish school, but my favorites, hands-down, are the work of the legendary Saul Bass. Bass is a hugely influential designer-- so much so that there are lots of posters that are so "Bass-like" that you might think Bass did them. Take, for example, the poster that Jouineau Bourduge did for Kubrick's Barry Lyndon: Really, almost everything I try to do in my...
OPENING MOVES FOR "THE GRUNWALD SWORDS" (by Tom Russell)
The original monument to the Battle of Grunwald was erected in Kraków for the battle's 500th anniversary. It was destroyed during WWII by the Germans and rebuilt in 1976. Broadly speaking, the Teutonic Player must absolutely protect the camp hexes in his rear at all costs. The Allied Player can win the game immediately if he takes possession of those hexes. The Allied Player's two Polish Wings have the best chance of grabbing it, mostly because they're the ones that are going to stay on the map during the entire game. Naturally, if the Teutonic Player is able to box...
(RE)MAKING SHIELDS & SWORDS, PART THREE: BEST HOOF FORWARD (by Tom Russell)
Death of Ulrich von Jungingen, detail from "The Battle of Grunwald, Jan Matejko, 1878 Way back in 2013, I designed an ACW boxed game themed around the Seven Days Battles at Mark Walker's request. For various reasons it was decided in 2015 to break the game's five battles into five separate games for publication in Tiny Battle's folio line. The first game was the second battle to happen chronologically (Gaines's Mill), the second was the fourth (Glendale & White Oak Swamp), then the third (Savage's Station), then the first (Beaver Dam Creek). The reason why it didn't start with Beaver...