Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

The core idea of With It Or On It, the first game in our Shields & Swords Ancients line, was to create a simplified model that could capture the essential nature of hoplite warfare - the advantages, the disadvantages, and most importantly, the feel. Each individual counter is only as strong and as resilient as the counters adjacent to it, leading one gamer to dub the game's model "the hoplite buddy system". Winning a battle is a matter of putting pressure on the line, pushing at it, until you force it to weaken, to crack, and to collapse. I knew...

When we evaluate a design submission, the first thing we do is take a look at the rules to get a sense of the thing. If it captures our interest, we then proceed to getting the game on the table. I don't have hard numbers on this, but I'd hazard a guess that only about a third of the submissions that we turn down get to that second step. If we've taken the time to print up a copy of the game, or to ask the designer to go to the expense of sending us a playtest kit, then we...

Today, a few brief words of advice about playtesting. Playtesting is of course the scalding hot viscera that brings these little Frankenstein monsters to life, and as might be expected by my choice of metaphor, it can be a messy, dangerous, and exhausting process. There are oodles and oodles of advice out there about how to choose testers, how to conduct tests, what to ask, with much of the advice often being contradictory. Really, you just have to find the method, or combination of methods, that will work best for you. But whichever method you choose - however you go...

For most projects, I have a square canvas that measures five-eighths of an inch. That's already small, but it gets smaller: even when you cut counters with a laser, there is still some slight variation. To protect against that, I have to keep the functional text and illustrations roughly 1.2 millimeters away from the margins. What I'm left with, then, is a fraction over half an inch - about 0.53" to be more precise. The first thing that tiny little square needs to do is communicate. It'd be nice if it was also pretty - I want it to be...

I had a problem: my chaotic little freebie game that I designed to end suddenly was ending suddenly. That probably requires some explanation. As you probably know, every year I do a small promotional game that we give away during our end-of-year Hollandays Sale. This year's game is Reign of Witches, which views the Quasi War (1798-1800) through the lens of factional politics within the Federalist Party, cast as a struggle between President John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Neither side is really "controlling" events, but rather reacting to events that are outside their control, and seeking to capitalize on them....