Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Shields & Swords Ancients

I usually handle the counter layout for our games - I can count the exceptions on one hand - but, NATO symbols aside, it's usually someone else doing the hard stuff, drawing the soldier or the horsey or the cannons. Each of those illustrations naturally increases the art budget and pushes our break-even point further down the line. One of the appeals of doing a series like Shields & Swords II is that we could pay for unit illustrations one time and then reuse them in subsequent volumes. In fact, even though the first release, The Grunwald Swords, only used...

Many of my games are short. Probably the quickest is Northern Pacific, published in 2012 by Winsome and reprinted in 2018 by Rio Grande, a single round of which takes maybe five minutes. Most of my other games top out at about an hour or so, and a key part of the development process is making the thing faster, simpler, and more streamlined. Partially this is a function of the kinds of games I'm interested in making. A lot of my games are comically fragile - one mistake and you're done for. If the game keeps going for another couple...

The Shot & Shell Battle Series originated because I had designed three previous games that had somewhat similar rulesets but at different scales, with different combat procedures and different ZOC rules and different activation mechanisms (an I-go-U-go for this one, chit pull for that one, activation roll for this guy over here). I couldn't really call those three previous games a "series", because for me as a gamer the appeal of a series is that you only need to learn the rules once, then you're off to the races. Having to learn each game separately, and if you happen to...