Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — players

So, a few folks have asked, in various corners of the internet, why Optimates et Populares is a two-player game, instead of something that sits four or five, as you might typically see in other political games. I never really seriously considered designing it as a multiplayer game, and there are in retrospect a few reasons for that, so I thought I'd dig into 'em a bit here. From the start, the game was about poisonous, hyper-partisan deadlock. You have two well-defined sides in direct conflict with diametrically-opposed and mutually-exclusive goals, unwilling and unable to give an inch. Scoring points...