Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ON THE CURIOUS ORIGINS OF TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Tags game design, game publishing, Table Battles

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ON THE CURIOUS ORIGINS OF TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)

While Table Battles is a direct descendent of my earlier game Christmas at White Mountain, its existence can be better explained in the context of two apparently unrelated games: Richard Berg's multiplayer game Dynasty, and my two-player politics game Optimates et Populares. When we were publishing Richard Berg's Dynasty, we needed to get quite a lot of wood bits. We needed large cubes for armies and little cubes to demarcate control, black cubes for warlords, and wooden discs for home provinces and the Emperor's winter palace. And on top of all that, we also needed some long gray rectangular wood...


FROM THE ARCHIVES: ON THE SMALLNESS OF TABLES (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Comments 1 Tags game design, game development

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ON THE SMALLNESS OF TABLES (by Tom Russell)

Many of the games we publish have a "small footprint". Partially this is because my own designs tend toward being compact, the result of working habits I developed over the course of a dozen-or-so games designed for magazines and ziplocks. I try to get as much game as possible out of as few components as possible. The venerable Bruce Geryk once said of The Grunwald Swords that it "punches above its weight", and that's a rather nice bit that I'm eager to use in our advertising copy. So for a long time, I've designed reasonably compact games, though of late...


WAYS FOR LOSERS TO WIN (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Comments 2 Tags game design

WAYS FOR LOSERS TO WIN (by Tom Russell)

Battles and wars are often lopsided. That doesn't mean the result is inevitable, or that just because it did happen a certain way means that that was the most likely result - indeed, it could have been a statistically aberrant one. (For more on this, I recommend reading Brien J. Miller's "The Application of Statistical and Forensics Validation to Simulation Modeling in Wargames" in the book Zones of Control.) But, for the sake of argument, let's say that we have a conflict we want to model that was definitely lopsided, in which absent major out-of-left-field counterfactuals, one side is very...


FROM THE ARCHIVES: BRIEF THOUGHTS ON TWO TRADITIONS OF WARGAME DESIGN (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Tags game design

FROM THE ARCHIVES: BRIEF THOUGHTS ON TWO TRADITIONS OF WARGAME DESIGN (by Tom Russell)

I've been listening a lot lately to David Dokter's podcast Guns, Dice, Butter, in which he presents "conversations with members of the wargaming tribe". Several of his interview subjects were designers and developers for Avalon Hill and/or SPI. (Several of the SPI folks tell a story about Jim Dunnigan casually asking an underperforming employee if he was planning on coming in tomorrow? "Yes." Don't bother, quoth Dunnigan; you're fired.) One thing the illustrious Mr. Dokter mentions is a philosophical divide between the games produced by Avalon Hill and SPI. Avalon Hill designs were more about providing a balanced competitive experience...


PAINTING CORNERS (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Tags game design

PAINTING CORNERS (by Tom Russell)

If a game lets you paint yourself into a corner so that you can no longer impact the game state, do you have agency? The obvious answer is that, no, you don't; if agency is defined as "the things I do matter", then being put into a situation where nothing you do matters by definition deprives you of agency. Okay, but what if a game never lets you paint yourself into that corner: do you really have agency? I would argue that the answer to that is also no, because if there are no consequences for your mistakes, whatever agency...