Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Franco-Prussian War

In the first of three blog posts about our new three-in-one release Teutons!: Assaults on the West, 1870-1940, designer Lou Coatney talks about the title, and the history behind the "France 1870" game, as well as offering some play advice for the same. Next time, we'll be diving into the 1914 game. Germanic Thing (governing assembly), drawn after the depiction in a relief of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, 193 CE. The title, Teutons!, has piqued interest. I chose it to evoke the ancestral - from Roman times on - image of hordes of blonde barbarians pouring en masse from their...

Teutons!: Assaults on the West, 1870-1940 collects three Lou Coatney designs (one each about the Franco-Prussian War and the two World Wars) in a single package. The major aim of the counter design was to clearly differentiate the counters for each game from each other, while maintaining a consistent style. Usually when you have multiple games in a set, or multiple battles each with its own set of counters, they're differentiated by some kind of small letter code or symbol printed on the counter. I'm not a big fan of that, actually, and wanted to find a more overt way...

Hex grids. Column shifts. Odds ratios. Zones of control. These are the essential, primordial building blocks of commercial wargaming, invented whole cloth – much like the hobby itself – by Charles S. Roberts and his Avalon Hill Game Company. Many gamers grew up playing the Avalon Hill titles before graduating to more sophisticated simulations. Since the hobby had already started to collapse when I was born, and had started to rebound and grow in new and interesting directions by the time I was aware that it even existed, I didn’t have that experience. My first wargames weren’t Avalon Hill boxed...