Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

  When it comes to traditional abstract games, Chess is arguably the King (and Queen, and Bishop, and Rook). Only Go rivals it for popularity and fanaticism. Backgammon is older than both of them, and I actually find it more dynamic than Chess, but it hardly has the same following or the same kind of serious attention afforded to it. Only hardcore abstract enthusiasts have time for oddities like Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Geese, and even children get bored with Tic-Tac-Toe pretty rapidly.  And then there's Draughts (or Checkers). Draughts gets a bad rap. At least in the...

My design process is often largely intuitive rather than analytical. So, for example, while I will certainly take a look at casualty returns when designing a game on an ACW battle, I'm not going to plug those returns into some kind of algorithm, or determine the average losses per battle per brigade over the course of a campaign in order to determine the fighting value of the unit, or the leadership ability of its general.  Rather, I make these decisions with my gut, with what "feels" right. Then I try it out and see if it works. If it doesn't,...

Most of our games are for two players, and like a lot of two-player wargames, there's relatively little to prevent a gamer from playing both sides when he lacks an opponent. One of the weirdest quirks of wargaming is that there's a long and storied tradition of solitaire play, a tradition that looks positively bizarre when viewed from the outside. Heck, when I first got into this side of the hobby, I thought it sounded absolutely bonkers and solipsistic. I soon learned better, and there are times when I even prefer solitaire play, particularly when I'm first learning a game....

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...