Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

  Table Battles was Richard Berg’s fault. His game Dynasty required some rectangular wooden pieces to represent the great wall and grand canal, and to get a decent price on those pieces from our German supplier, we needed to get an awful lot of them – more than we could ever need for Richard’s game. So we got a few different colors and I tried to come up with a game that could use the excess, and that was Table Battles.   At the time, I figured a handful of folks would enjoy it, maybe I’d get to do an...

One of the most curious things about making weird games on purpose is that there are folks who don't seem to think that it was on purpose. I couldn't really mean for the game to do that; somehow it snuck its way into the design when I wasn't looking. I get this a lot with Table Battles and its mandatory reaction loops. There are folks who feel this is a huge flaw, and they can't believe how obstinate I am in refusing to admit it. But the mandatory reactions aren't just an aspect of the game, they are the game...

One problem that became apparent after the release of Table Battles is that when players made poor decisions or did not properly work toward force preservation, the game would degenerate into an exhausted slugfest, a bunch of piddling little one- or two-stick formations limping along as the morale cubes passed back and forth, neither side achieving a definitive advantage. Over the course of the two expansions, I made the morale splits much more asymmetric and fragile as a way to "protect" the game against bad play. If losing just one formation would lose you the game, you'd be less likely...

My most recent choo-choo game, The Soo Line, was weird and experimental, in that it involved me deliberately breaking "rules" of train game design: it's very front-loaded, there are fewer companies than players and therefore some players will be taking a less active role, and all the companies are rubbish. It was always intended to be a sort of an oddity rather than a crowd-pleaser, and as expected, there were folks who really dug it, and there were folks who found it frustrating and self-indulgent. I did see some comments about how Soo and the equally experimental/divisive For-Ex proved that...

About seven years ago Mary and I drove two hundred miles down to Columbus and paid our admission fee at Origins for the sole purpose of demoing one of my euro-style games for an interested publisher. This was probably the best of my games in that style, an economic engine-builder about private equity firms eating up small companies, building them up, and then selling them for a profit. The development process on this one was lengthy, and it was the first one I was really confident about, the game that I thought would at last break through the wall of...