Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — gameplay

So last time I wrote about how a bad first impression with a game can make folks unlikely to try it a second time. There might be great and hidden depths that reveal themselves after x number of plays, but many folks aren't going to ever get to x. Or, as John Brieger put it, "you have a problem if it requires weeks of playing constantly for players to achieve the level of knowledge to make the game balanced." The thing is, I don't know if that really is a problem. I mean, yes, it is a problem, in the...

Years and years ago, I was talking with a fellow - we'll call him Henry - who had seen a film that Mary and I had directed and was, shall we say, underwhelmed. Which was fine, as far as that goes; not every film is for everybody, and that goes double for the weird sorts of comedies we were making. But Henry and I had a rather cordial and pleasant conversation about the film and some of the choices Mary and I had made with it, which he found too subtle for his tastes. I said something to the effect...

Oh no, not another short blog article about elements of classic abstract games! What can I say, guys? I'm on a kick. Zugzwang is a concept in chess theory that refers to a serious disadvantage created by your compulsion to move. That is, because you need to do something on your turn, even when you would really rather not, you may be forced to fatally compromise your position. It's a function, like so many other things, of tempo and leverage. A player who has the tempo dictates the terms of the match; his opponent is stuck reacting to what the...

There is something immensely, elementally appealing about laying out a battlefield map made of hexes, tracing the shape of a ridge from hex to hex with the tip of your finger, contemplating the importance of this city, its nearness to the river, and pondering the effect of this clump of green circles that signify a consortium of trees. Then the edges of the map are populated with cardboard troops, each side forming its line. If they're new to the topic, maybe the players recognize a few of the names on the counters or the places on the map, or if...

I don't like Cards Against Humanity. I think it's fairly rubbish mechanically, it's devoid of the social dynamics that I like in multiplayer games generally and party games in particular, and as for the gross-out humor, as Paul Simon once said about dogs in the moonlight, I don't find this stuff amusing anymore. I don't own Cards Against Humanity, and I don't seek it out. A handful of times - usually when hanging out with people who don't know what a combat factor is or who aren't particularly interested in the difference between full-cap and incremental - that's been the...