Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

One of the big shifts in the design philosophy behind the Table Battles expansions when compared to the base game is that I've made the morale cube splits more immediately fragile and asymmetric. The base game has a lot of 2-3 splits, and with bad play that lent itself to a lot of situations where I rout one, you rout one, I rout one, you rout one, passing the same cube back and forth until neither side has enough oomph to secure a decisive victory. The expansions are more likely to use a 1-3 or 1-4 split, or to offset...

There are a number of reasons why I write these blog-things twice a week. Some of them are pretty obvious and mercenary: for example, it helps promote awareness of me as a designer and us as a publisher. Since we're a weird little outfit doing weird little games, there's plenty of folks that have never heard of us, and if they happen to follow a link to one of these things and as a result get curious about us or our wares, well, that's a win. I'm also primarily a verbal person, and there are few interests that equal the...

17. Chaeronea (2 August 338 BCE) When I translate a given engagement into the peculiar language of Table Battles, a lot of my time is spent on things that a lot of players won't really notice. What die results a card can accept, whether or not it's limited to one die per turn, how cards are divided into wings and how often die results are duplicated within a wing and within an army, how the cards interact with one another: it's there, and it's what makes the thing work, but it doesn't necessarily call a lot of attention to itself....

A week from now, I'll be in Denver at Heavy Con, where I plan to get as many people as possible to play This Guilty Land. In fact, my hope is that I won't be playing the game myself at all, but will just be on hand to teach it and to observe each match. I've played the game more than anyone else and I already know how it works (even if that doesn't necessarily mean that I know how to play it well). Especially given the game's more unusual features and its potential brittleness, it's important for me to...

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...