Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — rules

Part of my job is to answer rules questions. It's not something that I mind doing; I want folks to understand the games and to play them correctly. I also want to know what parts of the rules are easy to grok and which are harder to parse, because that helps me going forward. Rules-writing is, after all, a human endeavor, and since we humans are fallible, so too are the rules to our games, despite our best efforts. And rules-reading is itself also a human endeavor. What is clear to some gamers might not be clear to others. As...

Designer John Theissen has designed several operational-level games for us: More Aggressive Attitudes, Objective Shreveport!, Hood's Last Gamble, Campaign of Nations, and Antony and Cleopatra. In this guest article, he touches on two features of his designs. There are a few rule concepts that find their way into most of the games I’ve designed, and I’d like to talk about two of them here. The purpose of these rules is to provide models reflecting some historical effects while keeping the rules fairly simple. The goal here is to combine the gaming concepts of playability and realism, hopefully in an effective...

Perhaps unique among nineteenth century Germanic composers, Anton Bruckner was by all accounts humble, good-natured, and easy to get along with. No towering mad genius driven by violent passions and ego, he! Our boy Anton was soft-spoken, often naïve, awkward, and he was self-deprecating to the point where he thought that his own music was utterly worthless. He was very solicitous of, and susceptible to, the criticism and input of his friends, which he often implemented, to the point where there are multiple and contradictory versions of all his major works. This has led to what is sometimes known as...

Part of my job is to answer rules questions. It's not something that I mind doing; I want folks to understand the games and to play them correctly. I also want to know what parts of the rules are easy to grok and which are harder to parse, because that helps me going forward. Rules-writing is, after all, a human endeavor, and since we humans are fallible, so too are the rules to our games, despite our best efforts. And rules-reading is itself also a human endeavor. What is clear to some gamers might not be clear to others. As...