Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

I had a problem: my hoplite lines weren't breaking. One of the core things I wanted to do in With It Or On It was to represent units - those individual square pieces of cardboard - as parts of a whole. I wanted players to think of the ten or twelve counters that made up a wing as a single "piece". When an individual counter was flipped to its exhausted side as the result of combat, it was like a little stress fracture. As these pile up, it became more and more likely that the line would break. When it...

One of my favorite tools to use in a game design is the feedback loop. While it's something that's featured in several of my designs, Blood in the Fog is probably the one that illustrates it best. The Russian Player has certain advantages while the dense fog neuters the range of the powerful enemy rifles. This fog remains in place until a Fog Chit is drawn from the Russian cup, at which point it starts to gradually lift. Every time the Fog Chit is drawn, the number of Activations per turn - the number of chits drawn - increases, which...

I was talking with someone last week about my game Optimates et Populares. This is the game where I first used the political will "teeter-totter" mechanism that also powers This Guilty Land and The Vote. I'm proud of that mechanism, and of the design in general. I set out to capture (in very broad strokes) the political processes of the late Roman Republic - how they functioned, and also how in the face of hyper-partisan class conflict, they ceased functioning - and I think I did that. Consuls act like Consuls, Tribunes like Tribunes. For its scale and level of...

Games are unusual in that they generally have the structure of a story (a beginning, a middle, and an end) but are not themselves stories. I don't build a plot or create characters, and I'm not leading you along from A to B to C. I'm not a storyteller; the idea is to create models and dynamics that allow you to tell your own stories. In the case of wargames, these stories are historical. The model is meant to isolate certain aspects of the historical event that the designer thinks were important and will help you understand how and why...

I remember a game submission we got two or three years ago for a card-driven game. Now, I'm not generally in the habit of discussing submissions that we passed on - spoiler alert, we passed on it - as that can feel rather gauche. Certainly when I was a freelance designer, I would have been disheartened and horrified to read a story from a publisher, and slowly realize that it was one of my games that was being discussed But I think this is a useful story, so I'm going to go ahead and tell it; details have been changed...