Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design
NOTES ON DUAL GAUGE WISCONSIN (by Tom Russell)
Last week I wrote about the Honshu half of the first Dual Gauge expansion: a nasty, sharp, cutthroat little map where money is very tight. As a contrast, I wanted the second map, Wisconsin, to sprawl a little bit: the map is a bit bigger, the game runs a turn or two longer, and money is more plentiful, especially in the endgame. The end is actually where I began. I knew I wanted the last couple ORs to be about running these big routes, ideally from one side of the map to another, ending in a route-doubling destination hex. These...
NOTES ON DUAL GAUGE HONSHU
As I write this, we are in the process of reviewing the maps for the first Dual Gauge expansion pack. This adds two new maps to the base game, Honshu, set on the main island of Japan, and Wisconsin, set in the mythical and fantastical land of Wisconsin. You’re probably wondering, wait a second, what about the base game, which has been out of print since early December? Well, the good news is that we finally got the wood bits we were waiting for, and are also starting the long and tedious process of sorting, counting, and bagging them, with...
SCENARIO GAMES (by Tom Russell)
Designing a new game can be hard, but designing a new scenario for an existing system is relatively easy. Oh, it’s still work, still a matter of research, thoughtfulness, time, effort, and playtesting, but on the whole you already solved the big problems the first time around, and what you’re left with are smaller ones and the peaceful, steady hum of craft and process. And even this gets easier to do over time. We just published the fifth Table Battles expansion, The Grand Alliance, which adds six scenarios, bringing the total number in the series up to forty-five, and I...
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT (by Tom Russell)
Most of my games play in an hour or less. A small handful of games top out at two. And off the top of my pretty little head I can think of exactly two of my designs that take about three hours – Charlemagne, Master of Europe and Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Northern Theater, 1775-1777, and heck, that last one, getting through the title alone takes about ten minutes. The games that eventually followed each of those releases – last year’s Aurelian, Restorer of the World and 2018’s Supply Lines of the American Revolution: The Southern Strategy...
SMALL BUT VITAL MOMENTS (by Tom Russell)
More copies of Irish Gauge have sold than any of my other games. That’s an awful lot of choo-choos sprawled across an awful lot of verdant hexagons. With all those copies came a lot of videos, photos, reviews, customer comments, BGG ratings, rules questions, and variants – of course there are lots of variants, rassum-frassum – or, to put it another way, a lot of attention. This isn’t something I’m necessarily used to. I make weird and sometimes very experimental games, often on obscure topics. These are niche games for a niche audience, produced and sold in an appropriately niche...