Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Dual Gauge

Last week I wrote about the Honshu half of the first Dual Gauge expansion: a nasty, sharp, cutthroat little map where money is very tight. As a contrast, I wanted the second map, Wisconsin, to sprawl a little bit: the map is a bit bigger, the game runs a turn or two longer, and money is more plentiful, especially in the endgame. The end is actually where I began. I knew I wanted the last couple ORs to be about running these big routes, ideally from one side of the map to another, ending in a route-doubling destination hex. These...

As I write this, we are in the process of reviewing the maps for the first Dual Gauge expansion pack. This adds two new maps to the base game, Honshu, set on the main island of Japan, and Wisconsin, set in the mythical and fantastical land of Wisconsin. You’re probably wondering, wait a second, what about the base game, which has been out of print since early December? Well, the good news is that we finally got the wood bits we were waiting for, and are also starting the long and tedious process of sorting, counting, and bagging them, with...

Because my train-and-stock games tend to put a great emphasis on stock value versus cash on hand, and because the opportunity to buy stocks can be rare – London & Northwestern, The Soo Line, and Dual Gauge limit each player to a single new share between each operating round – it stands to reason that the player with the most shares in the best companies has a stronger chance of winning, and that getting ahead in the “share count” gives you an advantage. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that: in order to have the cash to buy...

My most recent choo-choo game, The Soo Line, was weird and experimental, in that it involved me deliberately breaking "rules" of train game design: it's very front-loaded, there are fewer companies than players and therefore some players will be taking a less active role, and all the companies are rubbish. It was always intended to be a sort of an oddity rather than a crowd-pleaser, and as expected, there were folks who really dug it, and there were folks who found it frustrating and self-indulgent. I did see some comments about how Soo and the equally experimental/divisive For-Ex proved that...

In my last four choo-choo games - Iberian Gauge (2017), London & Northwestern (2018), The Soo Line (2018), and Dual Gauge (2020) - the game's structure is bifurcated into stock rounds and operating rounds. In Iberian Gauge, a stock round will continue until all players pass consecutively, giving players multiple chances to buy shares before the next set of ORs. But with the other three games, a player only gets a single go during the stock round, in which they are limited to the purchase of a single share. This does a couple of things. First, and most obviously, it...