Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design
HOW TO DESIGN A GAME (by Tom Russell)
Beginnings are always difficult, as the fellow said in Trouble in Paradise, and boy do I know it. I've spent two-plus hours banging my head against the wall, writing and then discarding one intro paragraph after another in seemingly fruitless attempts to get to the part where I talk about what I want to talk about, which is kinda apt and maybe even ironic, because what I want to talk about is starting a thing - an area where, the occasional stubborn blog-thing aside, I usually don't have many problems. I recognize of course that this isn't the case for...
A FIRST LOOK AT ENSI (by Tom Russell)
Ensi is my solitaire civilization-building game set in the fertile crescent during the Bronze Age. It was originally envisioned as a legacy style game of sorts, only without all the stickers and torn up cards and writing on the board. So, more like a campaign game, where certain things carry over from session to session, with each subsequent session adding new challenges and wrinkles. Each time you would build a new civilization, rising from the ashes of what had come before. It sounded like a neat idea at the time - summer of twenty-seventeen if I recall correctly, though it...
LIMITS (by Tom Russell)
I got my start doing magazine games. Working in that format, I generally had a half-sheet of five-eighths inch counters - eighty-eighty of 'em, in five blocks of sixteen and one block of eight - and one eleven by seventeen mapsheet. That allowed for about twelve reasonably sized hexes in a column and twenty or so in a row. Because having a separate display sheet would increase the production cost of the game, any tracks, including the turn track, needed to fit on that mapsheet. I could however have some charts to go on the back of the rulebook. It...
FROM THE ARCHIVES: BIG HANDS, I KNOW YOU'RE THE ONE (by Tom Russell)
My new game Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Southern Strategy begins with the Siege of Charleston, still one of the most humiliating defeats in America's history. Or rather, it can begin with the siege - it depends who wins the initiative die roll. If the Crown Player does, then it's likely to go down as it did historically. There's roughly a 58% chance of that happening, and if it does, it's going to shift the Political Will Track one space into the red zone - that is, in a direction favorable to the Crown Player - and for...
MECHANISM AS METAPHOR (by Tom Russell)
About seven years ago Mary and I drove two hundred miles down to Columbus and paid our admission fee at Origins for the sole purpose of demoing one of my euro-style games for an interested publisher. This was probably the best of my games in that style, an economic engine-builder about private equity firms eating up small companies, building them up, and then selling them for a profit. The development process on this one was lengthy, and it was the first one I was really confident about, the game that I thought would at last break through the wall of...