Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — gameplay

We spent this past weekend in Dallas - more on that in a future blog-thing - and I got the chance to play two games that I had been very keen to play. One of these was God's Playground, Martin Wallace's 2009 three-hander about the history of Poland, and the other was Cole Wehrle's John Company, released last year by Sierra Madre Games. They had more in common than my desire to play them; both games are very procedural (lots of phases, lots of little steps) and both are fairly intricate, ornate objects with lots of moving parts. Both games...

One of the things I really enjoy about John Theissen's operational ACW games (More Aggressive Attitudes, Objective Shreveport!, and Hood's Last Gamble, for those keeping score) is how difficult it can be to have a proper battle. Whenever you declare combat, your opponent usually has the option of attempting to Retreat Before Combat (RBC), with a 66% chance of success (sometimes more). With a successful roll, the enemy stack slips through your fingers. And, when the shoe is on the other foot, you slip through theirs. Both sides generally want to do battle with the enemy, because winning battles decisively...

Solo games aside, gaming is primarily a social activity, and one of the joys of this particular vocation is that my job is to create a framework and a structure in which people can enjoy one another's company.  That doesn't mean that that framework has to be frivolous or casual; not every game is a cocktail party. Many games seek to provide serious, competitive experiences that reward skill and punish bad play, and so I'd expect someone playing one of those games to approach it on those terms, attempting to play to the best of their ability. That sort of...

The first time I played Ty Bomba's Boom & Zoom, I opened with the equivalent of "1. e4", attempting to contest control of the center of the board: In Ty's notational system for this game, that'd be 1. 3T e1-Z-e4: that is, the three-piece Tower (3T) in e1 zooms (Z) to e4. Since each tower can fire (or "Boom") in eight directions, zooming to e4 would allow it to exert pressure on the maximum number of squares. This greatly restricts where my opponent can safely move, because there's only a handful of squares on their side of the board that...

You nudge your little square division to the front, compare its attack factor of 4 to the enemy's defense factor, and roll the die: ugh, a six, AL, attacker loss. You flip the counter to its reverse side, reducing its attack factor to 2. Half the cardboard men under your command are dead. Only they're not, because as all grognards know, and as many rulebooks are quick to point out, a step loss doesn't represent death, but simply a reduction in effective fighting strength. That's bloodshed and wounds and prisoners, sure, but also general discombobulation and dispersal, exhaustion, morale collapse,...