Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — rules writing

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...

So, when last we saw our plucky, nerdy hero, it was late 2015 and he and his amazing, wonderful, action-hero wife were preparing to start up their own company. With that thought in mind, and with renewed confidence in his abilities honed by a dozen or so subsequent published designs, he turned again to Supply Lines of the American Revolution. There is however another version of this story, which goes:  "Hey, Tom?" "Yes, Mary, oh heart of my heart?"  "You're going to do Supply Lines, right? For our company? Because I really like it."  "Maybe, my lily among the brambles....

Brian posted the following as a comment on our recent piece on historical incentives. We thought that, like David S. Pumpkins, it was its own thing, so we asked Brian's permission to share it as a separate post, and he kindly agreed. “Boneheaded in hindsight” – there’s the money quote. I don’t like idiot rules any more than you do – I’m perfectly capable of doing new stupid things all by myself – but there needs to be some array of mechanisms and incentives to impel players to do things that are foolish now, but were done then for a...

At this point, I've written the rules for over twenty-five published games that I've designed. I've also rewritten, with Mary's help, the rules for about a half-dozen other games by other designers. So, at this point, writing rules is second nature to me; it's easy-peasy. It didn't always used to be that way, of course, but like I said, I've done this something like thirty-plus times, and after the first dozen games or so, I simply had to get better at it. The other thing is that over time I became much more confident in writing the rules my own...