Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

Sometimes folks will email me with questions about game design. This is not only very flattering, but it's also helpful, particularly when I need to write a blog-thing but haven't yet settled on a topic. The stars happened to align in just this way recently, and so here we are. The question was, When designing games and using mechanisms created by others, how do you avoid feeling like you're stealing from them? Specifically the designer in question was inspired by a game he loved to make something using similar mechanisms, and was worried that his own work would be too...

Games are unusual in that they generally have the structure of a story (a beginning, a middle, and an end) but are not themselves stories. I don't build a plot or create characters, and I'm not leading you along from A to B to C. I'm not a storyteller; the idea is to create models and dynamics that allow you to tell your own stories. In the case of wargames, these stories are historical. The model is meant to isolate certain aspects of the historical event that the designer thinks were important and will help you understand how and why...

One of the many projects I've got on the backburner is a solitaire civ-building kinda-sorta legacy game. It has a neat twist that I'm going to keep to myself for the time being, but when I tell people about the game and about that twist, they get pretty excited and they very much want to know when the game is coming out, and why am I not working on it right now? And the reason why the thing is still on the backburner is that I have a problem with civ games in general, and that is the tendency of...

Years ago I wanted to do a big, complicated game about the Thirty Years War, and spent some time immersing myself in the topic. I eventually decided that my ambitions far outpaced my abilities, and chose somewhat lower-hanging fruit instead, which has worked out pretty well for me. But still the topic fascinates me, and from time to time I've circled back and dipped my toe in those waters, only to jump right back out. "The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648", Gerard Terborch, 1848, oil on copper. But the last time I did it, I became...

I had the pleasure over Memorial Day weekend of attending Heavy Con in Denver, where I dedicated quite a bit of time to running playtests of This Guilty Land for twelve persons who had never played the game before. I was more than a little nervous going in. While the dozens of playtests before Heavy Con had all seemed to confirm that I knew what I was doing, it's always a little nerve-wracking pushing something in front of brand new people, particularly when that something is as aggressively odd as my open-hand political CDG.  In particular, the way that cards...