Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

I don't play a lot of tactical games; it's just not my jam. Occasionally someone will ask me to explain why it's not my jam, and there are several reasons, sure. Even the simplest tactical games are still a little too complex for my taste. I'm also not a big fan of turns that take twenty minutes to play but represent five minutes on the ground. And then there's a tendency for the hexes to get overly congested: I have a stacking limit of two units per hex, but one or both of those units can be a vehicle which...

One of the peculiar things about For-Ex that we've noticed over the years is that no one ever seems to remember how to play it until toward the end. I don't mean that players forget the rules, because the mechanisms are pretty simple and straightforward. What I mean is that no one seems to know how to use those mechanisms until the middle of the game. Mary and I were talking about the game over dinner recently, and that subject came up, and between the two of us I think that, at long last, we kind of figured out why...

When Mary and I were working on getting Hollandspiele off the ground, we looked at several of my old designs to see if there were any I could brush off and, conceivably, sell to the wargamers who we figured would make up the bulk of our customer base. Agricola, Master of Britain was an obvious yes. So was my Crimea-set Blood in the Fog. One of our favorite games to play together was Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777, and with just a little bit of prodding from Mary, I decided to hammer the game into...

I was pleasantly surprised that a number of folks were able to get Table Battles on the table within a few hours or minutes of receiving it, and that it seems to be hitting those tables frequently and enthusiastically. It's not that I think the game shouldn't be hitting tables regularly; I think it’s one of my strongest pieces of design, particularly on a mechanical level. So of course I think people should play it. I think people should play all of my games: that's what they're there for. But even something that's proven to be as popular as, for...

I spent my twenties without very many useful skills, but with an abundance of creative energy that I applied in many different directions, trying (sometimes quite desperately) to find something that worked. Film, novels, comics, video games, even music, despite the fact that I am by all accounts quite tone-deaf. I wasn't necessarily bad at all of these things, though in some cases, in retrospect, it felt like I was working against the format rather than in or with it. But all of my work was idiosyncratic, even aggressively weird, off-putting, and extremely personal - and so it utterly failed...