Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — game development

When a game is part of a series, it can make things easier for both the gamer and the designer. The gamer doesn't need to sit down with a whole new rulebook and read it start to finish every single time she wants to learn a new game in the series; once she's done it the first time, it's just about learning the new rules specific to that scenario or volume. And the designer doesn't need to write a whole new rulebook, and I gotta tell you, the less time I have to spend typing in "Movement Points cannot be...

I've designed a lot of different games for a lot of a different player counts on a lot of different subjects. At first glance, my wargames look nothing like my train games - to the point where at least one person didn't realize that the same guy had done them, and even suspected the Tom Russell who does train games as being some kind of pseudonym. But there are certain features that all my games have in common, such as my usual obsessions with tempo, momentum, the need to weaken your own position in order to advance it, feedback loops,...

During last year's December sale, we included a small freebie game for folks who ordered at least two games. Said small freebie game, Christmas at White Mountain, was pretty well-received (better than most small freebie games, I think), and led eventually to the design and release of Table Battles, which has proven to be very popular. So of course we were going to do another small freebie game for this year's December sale. And, just like last year, I had no idea what I was going to do. Working on the assumption that Table Battles was going to be successful...

It's January of 2012, and I've just found a publisher for what would be my first published game, Blood on the Alma. The publisher is very impressed with the design. He's excited; I'm excited; Mary's excited; everyone's excited, except perhaps our cats, who react with typical indifference. There's one hitch, though: the game has too many counters. Including all the variant scenario counters and status markers, there's 210 of them, and to fit in the magazine, I need to get it down to 120. Many of these are step counters - the way the game works is that each unit...

Many of the games we publish have a "small footprint". Partially this is because my own designs tend toward being compact, the result of working habits I developed over the course of a dozen-or-so games designed for magazines and ziplocks. I try to get as much game as possible out of as few components as possible. The venerable Bruce Geryk once said of The Grunwald Swords that it "punches above its weight", and that's a rather nice bit that I'm eager to use in our advertising copy. So for a long time, I've designed reasonably compact games, though of late...