Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Mark Herman

The most recent issue of C3i magazine contained two Table Battles scenarios that I designed at the request of Rodger MacGowan and Steve Carey. As a result, I got a comp copy of the magazine, including the two pack-in games. One of these is Gettysburg designed by Mark Herman, and I was pretty eager to get it on the table. I think I learned the thing, played it, then sat and thought about it, all in the space of an hour and a half or so. Small map, handful of units, short breezy rules. As the designer says, it's not...

One of the things that drew me to Mark Herman's Ribbit, and made Mary and I so eager to publish it, is that it oddly reminds me quite a bit of backgammon. Backgammon, as regular readers of these blog-things might recall, is my favorite classical abstract. On the surface, there perhaps doesn't appear to be a lot of similarity between the two. Backgammon is after all a game of both luck and skill, while Ribbit is a pure combinatorial abstract. And it isn't as if backgammon has the market cornered on moving, attacking, and blocking, features common to most abstract...