Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Brian Train

In 2012, Brian Train's game Summer Lightning came on my radar. If you haven't played it, it's a game focused on the German invasion of Poland, and as you might expect, it's a tough game for the Poles to win. This, along with the unusual combat system, fascinated me, and I put it on a list of games I was interested in playing. I mentioned that I had heard that the game took an extraordinary amount of time to set-up. Brian stepped in to let me know that this was not true. Shortly thereafter, we arranged a trade by which...

In 2012, Brian Train's game Summer Lightning came on my radar. If you haven't played it, it's a game focused on the German invasion of Poland, and as you might expect, it's a tough game for the Poles to win. This, along with the unusual combat system, fascinated me, and I put it on a list of games I was interested in playing. I mentioned that I had heard that the game took an extraordinary amount of time to set-up. Brian stepped in to let me know that this was not true. Shortly thereafter, we arranged a trade by which...

Brian posted the following as a comment on our recent piece on historical incentives. We thought that, like David S. Pumpkins, it was its own thing, so we asked Brian's permission to share it as a separate post, and he kindly agreed. “Boneheaded in hindsight” – there’s the money quote. I don’t like idiot rules any more than you do – I’m perfectly capable of doing new stupid things all by myself – but there needs to be some array of mechanisms and incentives to impel players to do things that are foolish now, but were done then for a...

Okay, here is a game on the short but spirited border war between Slovakia and Hungary that happened in March 1939! How long have you been waiting for this one? And what the heck happened anyway?  Territorial changes of Slovakia: land ceded to Hungary before (red) and after (blue) the war (Wikipedia) Well, it’s kind of complicated. After Germany annexed the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, other parts of that country started to fall away. In October Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia declared their autonomy within Czechoslovakia, and Poland took the Zaolzie (Teschen) region. The following month large strips...

Over the weekend of March 14-16, 2014, the people of the Crimea held a referendum to decide whether they should stay in Ukraine. This came after months of escalating tension, brinkmanship and low-level violence between the Ukrainian and Russian ethnicities inside Ukraine, and between their “parent” countries. This looked like either a solution to the crisis, or an escalation. So, I did what anyone with an interest in current events and a few hours on his hands would do: I took some time over that weekend to create a game on the crisis, rather uncreatively titled Ukrainian Crisis (hey, I...