Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

One of the games that we're prepping for publication in early-ish 2020 is Streets of Shadows, a multiplayer game designed by Joseph Miranda and Roger Mason about occupied Paris. Players aren't taking on the roles of brave resistance fighters. Rather, they're something more cynical and insidious, playing both sides so as to ensure that however the conflict is resolved, they come out on top. Driving all these is a series of three event decks, called Shadows cards. One of these is drawn each turn. They might provide a short-term goal and reward for the turn: control a particular type of...

One of the key features of any game with cards - be it Cribbage or Bridge or Race for the Galaxy or Washington's War - is that you can't ever be sure exactly what's in the other guy's hand. In a wargames context, this provides for a quick and painless sense of fog of war; as Mark Herman noted in his article "My Philosophy Behind Card Driven Game Design", CDGs let "the player know the strength and location of enemy forces" but keeps you in the dark regarding "what his opponent can do with those forces and where he intends...

When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...

No matter how much feedback you get from playtesters, it's always going to be a small fraction of the feedback you'll get from players once a game has been released. And that is as it should be; if games had more testers than purchasers, there's no way it'd be paying our bills! It's common post-release to hear things you didn't hear in testing, and for players to raise questions that you never thought of asking. And sometimes, yes, something gets missed; this is the stuff errata is made of. There are some folks, particularly within the wargames niche, that regard...

Over the last few years, a few folks have asked me how I knew when I was done with a game. For me, it actually isn't super-complicated, because I generally don't start actively working on a game until I have a very clear idea of what the end product is going to be, and then I just get to it and I just keep at it until the game resembles that idea. I go into it with my parameters already defined: what the game is going to feel like, what tensions are going to be present, what ideas are going...