Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Table Battles

Recently someone asked me if I was going to be doing a blog-thing about the design process for the Pharsalus and Inkerman scenarios in Table Battles Second Edition. I said maybe, though I didn't have any immediate plans to do that. Well, it's Thursday afternoon, I need a blog-thing for Friday and haven't written one yet, I'm drawing a blank on what to write about, and so here we are. Let's start with the overall purpose of these two scenarios. From a business perspective, they were added to provide an additional incentive for early adopters to purchase the Second Edition...

As I've written about before, I generally don't revise my games after they've been published. It's not that I think my games are unimpeachable pinnacles of design; it's that I have new games to work on, and would rather spend my time on those. I learn from every game and its reception, and I'd rather apply that knowledge forward than backward.  There were a number of lessons I've taken from the Table Battles base game, and those lessons have been applied forward as the series has continued to evolve. For example, the Bombard action has essentially disappeared from the expansions,...

When it comes to traditional abstract games, Chess is arguably the King (and Queen, and Bishop, and Rook). Only Go rivals it for popularity and fanaticism. Backgammon is older than both of them, and I actually find it more dynamic than Chess, but it hardly has the same following or the same kind of serious attention afforded to it. Only hardcore abstract enthusiasts have time for oddities like Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Geese, and even children get bored with Tic-Tac-Toe pretty rapidly.  And then there's Draughts (or Checkers). Draughts gets a bad rap. At least in the case...

One of the things I'm working on - and if you ask Mary, the only thing I should ever be working on, and why isn't it done yet - is Dinosaur Table Battles, a standalone offshoot of our flagship Table Battles series. This naturally seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world: come up with some dinosaurs, translate their various offensive and defensive abilities into the language of Table Battles, you could do this in a weekend, why isn't it done yet. But as the director said to the cowboy, would that it were so simple. Because...

With any cover design that I do, I try to find the simplest and boldest way to represent the game and its theme. Sometimes I succeed - Supply Lines seems to pull this off rather well, as does the cover for the forthcoming Wars of Marcus Aurelius. But Table Battles isn't about a specific battle, personage, or era. It is, instead, about everything. The base set covers some four hundred years of warfare, bridging between the late Medieval period and the American Revolutionary War, but expansions will go back into the days of Alexander and leap forward into the twentieth...