Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Table Battles

I was pleasantly surprised that a number of folks were able to get Table Battles on the table within a few hours or minutes of receiving it, and that it seems to be hitting those tables frequently and enthusiastically. It's not that I think the game shouldn't be hitting tables regularly; I think it’s one of my strongest pieces of design, particularly on a mechanical level. So of course I think people should play it. I think people should play all of my games: that's what they're there for. But even something that's proven to be as popular as, for...

Like many of my designs, Table Battles is a fragile game, one in which the game state is prone to sometimes gentle and sometimes severe distortion. A player who obtains an advantage can see that advantage rapidly increase over time, and even become decisive and irreversible. The trick is to stop the other guy from getting one over on you in the first place, and to put him in a position where you can get one over on him. So both players should have this goal in mind, and should be working toward maintaining deadlock until it's to their advantage...

In this play example, we'll be looking at the first few turns of the Marston Moor scenario. THE SITUATION Each player has seven formation cards, with five formations being active at the start of the battle. For both sides, these five formations include two cavalry, two infantry, and an artillery card. The active infantry are roughly similar on both sides: they're limited to placing one die per turn, and when they attack, they do one hit per die while taking a hit themselves for launching the attack. One of the two infantry cards on each side can place only sixes,...

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...

Table Battles doesn't focus on the tactics and technology specific to a given era or conflict in the way that, for example, Shields & Swords is built for European warfare of the middle ages. Instead, the system focuses on broader concepts that are applicable to a wide variety of conflicts throughout human history. The base game was meant to demonstrate this versatility by collecting unrelated battles from across four centuries; the plan is for expansions to have a narrower focus, centered on a particular conflict or theme. 1. White Mountain (1620, Bohemian Revolt/Thirty Years War) You probably know by now...