Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — rules writing

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...

If you're reading this, you probably know how movement factors work. You move the unit from hex to hex (or square to square, or area to area, or whatever to whatever), expending a certain number of movement points for each hex entered. I'm going to assume that if you know that, you also know that a unit cannot exceed its movement factor, unless the rules make some kind of exception (for example, that the unit can always move one hex during a Movement Phase, even if it doesn't actually have sufficient MPs to enter that one hex). So, serious question...

Years and years ago, when I still suffered from the delusion that I was a eurogame designer, one of my games was picked up by a small firm who never quite got around to publishing it. While that experience wasn't entirely a pleasant one, they did have several playtest groups at their disposal, and the feedback from those playtesters was generally useful and constructive, and made for a game that would have appealed to a broader audience than my original design if it had ever made it to market. Every time there was feedback, the publisher amended the ruleset, often...

Years and years ago, when I still suffered from the delusion that I was a eurogame designer, one of my games was picked up by a small firm who never quite got around to publishing it. While that experience wasn't entirely a pleasant one, they did have several playtest groups at their disposal, and the feedback from those playtesters was generally useful and constructive, and made for a game that would have appealed to a broader audience than my original design if it had ever made it to market. Every time there was feedback, the publisher amended the ruleset, often...

My father had started working for Blue Cross around the time I was born, in an entry-level position. It didn't take long for him to advance up the ranks into management. I don't remember a whole lot of conversations with my father before he died, but I remember him telling me that he was always the first one in and the last one out, and that if you put in the time and the energy, if you work hard and seize opportunities, you can make something of yourself.  I got my first job when I still a teenager - I...