Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game development

I remember listening to a commentary track that the director Paul Thomas Anderson did about his film Boogie Nights, in which he explained why a scene was cut from the final film. He was watching a cut of the film, and as one scene was wrapping up, he was giddily anticipating the next scene, which was one of his favorites. But when that first scene had ended, it wasn't followed by the scene he was anticipating - it was followed by another scene that he had seemingly forgot was in the film. And I'm paraphrasing here - it's been maybe...

I have a strong preference - as a player, as a designer, and as one-half of a publisher - for dynamic games, by which I mean games where the balance is highly mutable and prone to distortion based on player actions. One of the ways I try to achieve this in my own work is through the use of feedback loops, in which succeeding makes it easier to succeed, and failing makes it easier to fail. The winners keep winning and the losers keep losing. The balance of the game is in flux, capable of being tilted in one direction...

NATO Air Commander is a love letter to 1980s Cold War Gone Hot games like NATO: The Next War in Europe (VG, 1983), The Third World War series (GDW, 1984), and Red Storm Rising (TSR, 1989). In all of those games, you basically control the progress of a ground war in Central Europe between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. I suppose my attraction to this era and type of game comes from my youth. My earliest memories are of Ronald Reagan. I can remember how much the idea of a big war in Europe seemed like an inevitability rather than...

I had the pleasure over Memorial Day weekend of attending Heavy Con in Denver, where I dedicated quite a bit of time to running playtests of This Guilty Land for twelve persons who had never played the game before. I was more than a little nervous going in. While the dozens of playtests before Heavy Con had all seemed to confirm that I knew what I was doing, it's always a little nerve-wracking pushing something in front of brand new people, particularly when that something is as aggressively odd as my open-hand political CDG.  In particular, the way that cards...

One of the big shifts in the design philosophy behind the Table Battles expansions when compared to the base game is that I've made the morale cube splits more immediately fragile and asymmetric. The base game has a lot of 2-3 splits, and with bad play that lent itself to a lot of situations where I rout one, you rout one, I rout one, you rout one, passing the same cube back and forth until neither side has enough oomph to secure a decisive victory. The expansions are more likely to use a 1-3 or 1-4 split, or to offset...