Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

I've designed a lot of different games for a lot of a different player counts on a lot of different subjects. At first glance, my wargames look nothing like my train games - to the point where at least one person didn't realize that the same guy had done them, and even suspected the Tom Russell who does train games as being some kind of pseudonym. But there are certain features that all my games have in common, such as my usual obsessions with tempo, momentum, the need to weaken your own position in order to advance it, feedback loops,...

A few years back, I discovered backgammon. Now, of course I had heard of backgammon, and we even had a backgammon set growing up. Apparently it was one of my father's favorite games. That always makes me a little sad. I didn't know my father very well - he always felt distant, and I always felt isolated. He took my brothers fishing (I was squeamish) and went to their wrestling matches (I was a skinny little runt). If I had discovered and fell in love with backgammon before he died, I'd like to think that we'd have that, at least,...

I had a problem: the players in my highly-interactive game weren't interacting. The Vote tasks one player (Equality) with agitating for a more democratic American society, while their opponent (Supremacy) has to fight them tooth and nail. Equality tries to build popular support, Supremacy tries to confuse the issue with the usual bad faith arguments and calls for unreciprocated civility. Equality tries to garner enough votes for change, Supremacy suppresses them. Equality gets laws passed, Supremacy gets them overturned. And of course while Supremacy is trying to prevent Equality from pursuing their victory, they're trying to rack up points by...

In 2010, I began designing my first-ever wargame. It was something I did as a lark; as a sailor might say in salty language, "for ships and giggles". I was a Very Serious Eurogame Designer who was going to have a Very Serious, Prestigious, and Profitable Career designing mid-weight Euros. Just to be eclectic though I thought it'd be fun to do a wargame now and then on the side, and perhaps a nerdy train game. Of course, the way things panned out, I couldn't sell the Euros. The wargames sold, as did the nerdy train games, and so here...

Probably the thing I'm most terrified of is jellyfish. Mary found this out when we were watching a movie in the theater - I don't recall which one, but there was a shark who was a bad guy - and suddenly there were jellyfish on the screen and my whole body seized up. I was holding her hand at the time because that's the kind of mushy stuff we're into, and as a result, I squeezed her hand too hard. After the movie, I tried to explain it to her - their monstrous appearance, their vicious sting, and above all...