Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Kingdom of Dyflin

The Clontarf scenario in Kingdom of Dyflin was in some ways a departure for the Shields & Swords II series, as it was significantly bigger than what had come before: more hexes, more units, longer playing time. That was also something like the point of the thing - it's "the big one", in the same way that another scenario might be "the one with the rearguard" or "the one with the ambush". I'm a firm believer in the maxim there is no such thing as an ordinary scenario, and that the worst thing a designer can do is come up...

    hroughout the life of my Shields & Swords II series of medieval battle games, we've experimented with the format, searching for the one that would result in the widest audience. Our first release, The Grunwald Swords, had a single medium-sized battle. House of Normandy was a "quad" game made up of four much smaller scenarios, but it didn't seem to get nearly the same traction either commercially or critically, and so with Battles on the Ice I went with two battles about the same size as Grunwald. While it attracted more attention than Normandy - especially thanks to...