Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

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...

I remember listening to a commentary track that the director Paul Thomas Anderson did about his film Boogie Nights, in which he explained why a scene was cut from the final film. He was watching a cut of the film, and as one scene was wrapping up, he was giddily anticipating the next scene, which was one of his favorites. But when that first scene had ended, it wasn't followed by the scene he was anticipating - it was followed by another scene that he had seemingly forgot was in the film. And I'm paraphrasing here - it's been maybe...

 This is a new series of blog-things where instead of delving into highfalutin experimental game design theory, I look more practically at a specific game design problem and talk about how I solved it. This is the first of a handful about our end-of-year release The Vote, a game about voting rights in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I had a problem: I didn't want to do the thing that scores me points, because if I did it wouldn't give me enough time to score enough points to win the game. So, let me back up...

As I've written about before, I generally don't revise my games after they've been published. It's not that I think my games are unimpeachable pinnacles of design; it's that I have new games to work on, and would rather spend my time on those. I learn from every game and its reception, and I'd rather apply that knowledge forward than backward.  There were a number of lessons I've taken from the Table Battles base game, and those lessons have been applied forward as the series has continued to evolve. For example, the Bombard action has essentially disappeared from the expansions,...

One of the maxims that I would repeat to myself back when I was a tyro designer was this: There is no such thing as a normal scenario. The idea being that when you’re designing a scenario-based game, every scenario should have some kind of gimmick: this is the one where one of the commanders might defect, this is the one with the convoy passing through the gauntlet, this is the one with the exploding wagon. You would think it would be easier to come up with these when you're doing a fictional or hypothetical game, but for me at...