Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

I used to be very wary of solitaire wargames. Not, mind you, of playing two-player wargames solitaire, but of honest-to-gosh solitaire designs. Partially, my reticence was somewhat aspirational: I might be playing both sides in this WW2 game, but the possibility existed that someday, someone who would dig the game would be sitting on the other side of the table. Whereas if I plunked down some of my hard-earned cash for a solo-only title, that possibility - however rarified and improbable - no longer existed. And, when you're on the sort of budget where you can only buy maybe five...

The scale of my Shields & Swords II titles has always been somewhat fungible. Hexes don't represent a specific, consistent distance from one title to another. The units do not represent a set number of men (especially as, for some battles, nailing this down with any certainty is next to impossible, given the exaggerations common in the source material). And each turn does not represent a given, defined period of time. There are some folks for whom this kind of thing is a supreme abrogation of a wargame designer's solemn duty to ensure the unity of, and historical accuracy within,...

Before I made board games, I made video games. And long before I lived, breathed, and ate board games (and there's less fiber in that diet than you'd expect), I lived, breathed, and ate video games. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games. I was also obsessed with books, and with the Bible, and I'm not sure if all of those obsessions were necessarily healthy. Whenever I wasn't reading a fantasy novel, or reflecting on how I was a sinning sinner who had committed unforgiveable transgressions (I was maybe six or seven), I was playing video...

ears ago, when I had delusions of being a euro-game designer, I designed a game about monks in the dark ages copying the masterworks of antiquity. There was something like nine different actions a player could take, which were all somewhat related to one another. The crux of the game is that each player started with an identical set of action tiles, which they added to as they bought and placed new tiles, increasing the actions that were available to them (and, eventually, to other players). And so the rules for the game began by explaining the components and the...

As any designer or publisher will tell you, game design is a lot of "playtest, playtest, playtest". But when designing wargames especially, it's also a lot of "research, research, research". If designing a wargame is about modeling the historical factors that influenced the course of a battle, campaign, or conflict, then determining those factors is a crucial part of the process. Not to mention, of course, finding the right map and coming up with a reasonably accurate order of battle.  When I first started designing wargames, I had a paralyzing fear of getting something wrong. Someone who really knew their...