Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

No matter how much feedback you get from playtesters, it's always going to be a small fraction of the feedback you'll get from players once a game has been released. And that is as it should be; if games had more testers than purchasers, there's no way it'd be paying our bills! It's common post-release to hear things you didn't hear in testing, and for players to raise questions that you never thought of asking. And sometimes, yes, something gets missed; this is the stuff errata is made of. There are some folks, particularly within the wargames niche, that regard...

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...

I came to wargames somewhat sideways. I had initially operated under the delusion that I was the designer of mid-weight eurogames, only dipping my toe in the hex-and-counter pool as a lark, only to find, to my surprise and delight, that these waters were more agreeable to my peculiar talents. One wargame sold, and then another, and soon I stopped trying to hawk my eurogames altogether so that I could focus on wargames exclusively.  Do I miss the euro-style games? Not really. I wasn't very good at designing them, to be honest. Partially this was because I spent considerable time...

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...

One of the core ideas of This Guilty Land is that it's a two-player game with three factions, each representing an abstract idea. One player represents Justice, their opponent Oppression, and the third, non-player faction, Compromise. Justice has blue markers and Oppression red, while the flip-side of each is used by Compromise to indicate "Compromise that leans toward Justice" and "Compromise that leans toward Oppression". One of the primary ways that Justice gets victory points is to flip blue-aligned Compromise markers to their Justice side. Both players need to contend with the fact that "their" Compromise Senators can be persuaded...