Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Table Battles

ON THE CURIOUS ORIGINS OF TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)

Mary Russell

Tags game design, game publishing, Table Battles

ON THE CURIOUS ORIGINS OF TABLE BATTLES (by Tom Russell)

While Table Battles is a direct descendent of my earlier game Christmas at White Mountain, its existence can be better explained in the context of two apparently unrelated games: Richard Berg's multiplayer game Dynasty, and my two-player politics game Optimates et Populares. When we were publishing Richard Berg's Dynasty, we needed to get quite a lot of wood bits. We needed large cubes for armies and little cubes to demarcate control, black cubes for warlords, and wooden discs for home provinces and the Emperor's winter palace. And on top of all that, we also needed some long gray rectangular wood...