Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game design

I began working on this year's holiday freebie game just before last year's sale. I was reasonably pleased with that year's game, The Toledo War, and wanted to do something roughly in the same vein: a short card game about an obscure conflict that was mostly bloodless bluster and posturing. I settled on the Quasi-War as my topic almost immediately, and I already had a wonderful title for it: Obnoxious and Disliked. This of course was how John Adams was described in 1776, a stage musical for which I had a tremendous amount of affection, so much so that I...

In most card-driven wargames/political conflict games, each card has a unique effect that, in theory, is meant to represent the effect in game terms of the historical personage or event that it represents. This is underlined with a few lines of flavor text. Because your cards are hidden from your opponent and vice-versa, players must operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty. The "event" cards in This Guilty Land are, barring a handful of exceptions, not event cards in this traditional sense. Each card within a certain type (Public Opinion, Organization, et cetera) functions in precisely the same way (though some...

I had a problem: I needed a new combat system. The set piece battle sub-system I used in Agricola, Master of Britain and Charlemagne, Master of Europe involved deploying your troops along one side of a staggered square grid opposite randomly drawn enemies. In a series of alternating attack and defense rounds, each of your units would roll against the enemy. Once you had made your initial deployments, your options were limited to a choice of adjacent targets during the attack rounds, and so the battles were basically resolved on a sort of auto-pilot roll-off. Reaction to the system in...

Around the time that Charlemagne came out, I stealth-announced the next game in my series of "cup adjustment" solitaire games, Aurelian, Restorer of the World. A few months later, I started working on the rules, prototype map, and counter-mix, and then I had to set the whole thing aside while I tried (perhaps in vain) to put a dent in the ever-growing submission pile. Mary pointed out that since it says "Lead Game Designer and Chief Bottle-Washer" on my business card, that maybe I should take a break from the submission pile and design something, and also maybe wash some...

Early on during the design of With It Or On It, the first game in our Shields & Swords Ancients line, I decided that this series, unlike its medieval predecessor, would not have a single be-all end-all rulebook. This makes sense of course because the new series would be covering a much longer period of time, and feature more diverse fighting styles and technologies. I wish I could say that in my infinite wargame designer wisdom that I looked at the scope of the thing and that this approach was immediately self-evident. But, no, I only really decided on this...