Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — scenario design

I'm working on this year's Table Battles expansion, The Grand Alliance, which covers battles drawn from the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Among them is the Battle of Fleurus. This is the 1690 Battle of Fleurus, naturally, not the 1622 or 1794 or 1815 - though that does remind me that tucked back in the old noggin is the idea to do a Table Battles expansion called "Battles of X", where every scenario is a different battle from a different time period, but all of them have the same name. Anyway. The cool thing about...

One of the maxims that I would repeat to myself back when I was a tyro designer was this: There is no such thing as a normal scenario. The idea being that when you’re designing a scenario-based game, every scenario should have some kind of gimmick: this is the one where one of the commanders might defect, this is the one with the convoy passing through the gauntlet, this is the one with the exploding wagon. You would think it would be easier to come up with these when you're doing a fictional or hypothetical game, but for me at...

 One of the maxims that I would repeat to myself back when I was a tyro designer was this: There is no such thing as a normal scenario. The idea being that when you’re designing a scenario-based game, every scenario should have some kind of gimmick: this is the one where one of the commanders might defect, this is the one with the convoy passing through the gauntlet, this is the one with the exploding wagon. You would think it would be easier to come up with these when you're doing a fictional or hypothetical game, but for me...

  One of the joys and pains of scenario design in Horse & Musket is creating and learning about obscure battles. Sometimes maps and sources are so few that a scenario has to be abandoned, such as Villmanstrand (part of the Russo-Swedish War 1741-43). On the other end are battles for which maps and books in English are plentiful, such as Fontenoy and Culloden. Kesselsdorf lies between the obscure and the famous.  The first step is to read what I can on the battle. The number of books treating the topic in a super specific way is zero. There are...