Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

When my first few games were published, I wasn't very sure of myself, my abilities, or my judgment. I was constantly afraid that a game would come out and gamers would immediately discover some glaring and obvious hole in the rules that had somehow gotten overlooked. Then I'd be the guy who had designed a broken game. But you do enough of these things and you'll start to build up your confidence. After six years of working in the games industry, I have worked on nearly fifty games in some capacity or another, mostly as a designer or as a...

ears ago, when I had delusions of being a euro-game designer, I designed a game about monks in the dark ages copying the masterworks of antiquity. There was something like nine different actions a player could take, which were all somewhat related to one another. The crux of the game is that each player started with an identical set of action tiles, which they added to as they bought and placed new tiles, increasing the actions that were available to them (and, eventually, to other players). And so the rules for the game began by explaining the components and the...

Many of my games are short. Probably the quickest is Northern Pacific, published in 2012 by Winsome and reprinted in 2018 by Rio Grande, a single round of which takes maybe five minutes. Most of my other games top out at about an hour or so, and a key part of the development process is making the thing faster, simpler, and more streamlined. Partially this is a function of the kinds of games I'm interested in making. A lot of my games are comically fragile - one mistake and you're done for. If the game keeps going for another couple...

Perhaps unique among nineteenth century Germanic composers, Anton Bruckner was by all accounts humble, good-natured, and easy to get along with. No towering mad genius driven by violent passions and ego, he! Our boy Anton was soft-spoken, often naïve, awkward, and he was self-deprecating to the point where he thought that his own music was utterly worthless. He was very solicitous of, and susceptible to, the criticism and input of his friends, which he often implemented, to the point where there are multiple and contradictory versions of all his major works. This has led to what is sometimes known as...

Blucher at Waterloo, the French at Inkerman, the Eagles at the Black Gate: nothing turns the tide quite so dramatically as the timely arrival of reinforcements. There are some battles (and, depending on the decisiveness of the battle, some wars) that would have went very differently if said reinforcements arrived later, or sooner, or not at all. But reinforcements can pose a problem when it comes time to simulate those battles with cardboard squares and a paper map. If, for example, so-and-so arrived at such-and-such a time, which in game terms corresponds to Turn 6, then I know and you...